Check out this Discussion led by Charlie Rose with guests Eric Kandel, Aaron Beck, Steven Roose & Peter Fonagy:

Here are some interesting home videos of the Freud family as well.

Whenever I meet someone new and I tell them I'm studying psychology I inevitably get asked the ever annoying question "Are you analyzing me right now?" which of course always leads to the same response from me, "I'm as qualified to analyze or give therapy as an engineering student." Which is not at all.

I'm thinking of changing that response to "English majors are more qualified to do that than any psychology student." After all, the humanities and other social sciences seem to be paying much more attention to the classic analysis of old, namely psychoanalysis than any self-respecting psychology department.

It's not just the experimental psychologists who are ignoring Freud (I've never even taken a course on therapy or mental disorders. I study cognition and vision, why bother?) it seems that even the clinical psychologists are ignoring him. In a recent article in the New York Times, Patricia Cohen reports that psychoanalysis is dead in psychology departments and mostly only being taught in english, history, and art departments.

...a computer-based analysis of course descriptions at 150 public and private institutions that are highly ranked in U.S. News and World Report's college survey. It found that of the 1,175 courses that referenced psychoanalysis, more than 86 percent were offered outside psychology departments.

I'm completely happy with this statistic and am actually pretty surprised that the rate of classes about psychoanalysis is as high as 14% being taught in psychology departments. At the University of Illinois (one of the best clinical programs in the U.S.) I've been told that psychoanalysis is only covered as a small unit as part of a larger therapy course.

While Freud brought much attention to psychology it isn't clear to me (or anyone since the research is sparse on the positive benefits of psychoanalysis) that anything besides a historical perspective should be taught - in any department. Of course there are many people who disagree with my sentiments, especially the professional schools of psychoanalysis and the confused new aged people that pay money to learn woo at these institutions.

At the end of the NYTimes article there is a pretty silly argument on why psychoanalysis won't die,

Neither the split between the humanities and science, nor the warnings of the demise of psychoanalysis are as serious as they are often made out to be, said Jonathan Lear, a trained psychoanalyst and a philosopher who works on integrating the two fields at the University of Chicago.

Wanting to measure the effectiveness of psychoanalysis is natural, he said, but figuring out how to do so is not simple.

"Some of the most important things in human life are just not measurable," he said, like happiness or genuine religious feeling. Freud, though, is particularly useful for gaining insights into questions of human existence. "There will be the discovery of problems that the standard ways don't address," he said, and then "there will be a swing back to Freud."

Lear is blatantly wrong, I don't think either Martin Seligman (ex president of the APA) or Ed Diener would agree that happiness is not measurable. While Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience have a difficult time answering questions about the human condition I don't think Psychoanalysis offers any more insight to the truth and if anything is a crutch psychology and society have leaned on way too long.

HT: Mind Hacks