From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 08/31/02-11:00:21 PM Z
On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, Katharine Thayer wrote:
>
> ... 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
So we are, mercifully, warned about the "careless thinking" of Sigmund
Freud, one of the major figures of modernism -- compensation perhaps for
prohibition of *symbolism* in a company of artists.
I lack words to improve on a spin given my own comments so dizzying it
would make Cinderella into the big bad wolf (tho Monty Python does come to
mind). I'd suggest, however, that whoever finds my messages so profoundly
disturbing (which obviously has its own meaning) should, please, please,
for their own sake, delete before reading.
J.
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