Читать книгу A Guide to the Scientific Career - Группа авторов - Страница 153

Misconceptions about human nature that stem from traditional perspectives that for the most part have outlived their usefulness. Times have changed since Sigmund Freud and his theories about what makes most of us tick. He formulated his theories of personality based on the symptoms his patients reported and the observations he made of certain behaviors they displayed. For the most part, his patients were suffering varying degrees of what he called “neurosis.” At its heart, neurosis is the result of a person's unsuccessful mitigation of the anxiety they experience in their unconscious struggle to curtail their primal urges in accordance with social norms. And in his time, one would expect there to be a whole lot of neurosis. The Victorian era was one of the most sexually and socially repressive times in modern history. If there were a motto or slogan that would best typify the “zeitgeist” or sociocultural milieu of the time, it would be: Don't even think about it! And the patients Freud worked with suffered from all sorts of bizarre maladies that were fueled not by physiological disease but by the anxiety (and inadequate “defenses” against the anxiety) associated with the frustration and stifling of their baser instincts. These folks were literally overly conscientious and deeply repressed “nervous wrecks.” And neurosis, in one degree or another, was the defining psychological phenomenon of the era. Unfortunately Freud generalized his findings to an absurd extreme, thinking he'd discovered universal laws for human psychological functioning.