From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 08/31/02-02:50:09 PM Z
Jonathon Russell wrote:
>
> Dear List....
>
> Even to Freud, sometimes a cigar was "just" a cigar.
>
> regards,
>
> J Russell
>
> --
>
> Judy Seigel wrote:
>
> >
> >> I don't think you have to be Sigmund Freud to see a bowl as symbol of
> >> womb, container, or holder.
You're absolutely right about that. Not only Sigmund Freud but many
other careless thinkers have this kind of simplistic and meaningless
"insight" all the time. It's an error in reasoning well known to
cognitive psychologists; it's called the representativeness heuristic.
It says that if this thing resembles that thing, then this thing must be
connected in a meaningful way with that thing, and by this heuristic
people make meaningless and often harmful associations between unrelated
things that just happen to resemble each other in shape, skin color, or
other superficial characteristics. It's a lazy kind of thinking and it
gets us into all kinds of trouble. It's the kind of thinking that made
the US put Japanese-Americans in internment camps, for just one example
of thousands: the idea that anyone who looks like the people who bombed
Pearl Harbor must also be potential bombers.
Now can we please have enough of Freud for a while?
kt
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