I want to bookmark this review of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/12/22/how-dispel-your-illusions/
this comes form reading Michael Lewis' book
The Undoing Project and then looking online for reviews.
It is understandable that Kahneman has no
use for Freud, but it is still regrettable. The insights of Kahneman and
Freud are complementary rather than contradictory. Anyone who strives
for a complete understanding of human nature has much to learn from both
of them. The scope of Kahneman’s psychology is necessarily limited by
his method. His method is to study mental processes that can be observed
and measured under rigorously controlled experimental conditions.
Following this method, he revolutionized psychology. He discovered
mental processes that can be described precisely and demonstrated
reliably. He discarded the poetic fantasies of Freud.
But
together with the poetic fantasies, he discarded much else that was
valuable. Since strong emotions and obsessions cannot be experimentally
controlled, Kahneman’s method did not allow him to study them. The part
of the human personality that Kahneman’s method can handle is the
nonviolent part, concerned with everyday decisions, artificial parlor
games, and gambling for small stakes. The violent and passionate
manifestations of human nature, concerned with matters of life and death
and love and hate and pain and sex, cannot be experimentally controlled
and are beyond Kahneman’s reach. Violence and passion are the territory
of Freud. Freud can penetrate deeper than Kahneman because literature
digs deeper than science into human nature and human destiny.
