Book World: Brain research shows Freud actually got a few things right
Jess Keiser, The Washington Post
March 1, 2021
FacebookTwitterEmail
The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness
By Mark Solms
- - -
In October 1895, the most mysterious mechanisms of the mind suddenly clicked into place for Sigmund Freud. The Viennese psychoanalyst reported his discovery in a breathless letter to his colleague and confidant, Wilhelm Fliess. After an industrious night, he wrote, the barriers suddenly lifted, the veils dropped, and everything became transparent - from the details of the neuroses to the determinants of consciousness. The result of that night was one of Freud s earliest works, the forbiddingly titled Project for a Scientific Psychology.
Book World: The shadowy spirits that helped scientists advance their ideas
Jess Keiser, The Washington Post
Dec. 24, 2020
FacebookTwitterEmail
Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science
By Jimena Canales
- - -
A demon was present at the birth of science.
Writing in the mid-17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes realized that in order to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last, he first needed to lash himself to a single point of certainty in a roiling sea of doubt.
To test the strength of his position, Descartes imagined the workings of an evil entity - a malignum genium, or evil genius - capable of creating an entirely illusory but completely convincing artificial world. Someone ensnared by Descartes malevolent being is bound to question external reality - and even their own body - since, theoretically, the sky s color or the warmth of one s skin could be deceptions devised by this demon.