first off, thanks for the feedback guys, i appreciate it. i'll try to get to the achievement gap soon, but until then, you might like an earlier post i did called "the world gap".
so, i was reading my psych textbook and the author (david g. meyers, not that you were wondering) wrote this about freud: "in the popular mind, he [freud] is to psychology's history what elvis presley is to rock music's history." i thought, "david, you're more right than you know." do you know why david is right? have no fear if you don't, because i'm about to tell you. the big similarity between elvis and freud is that they are famous for making contributions they didn't really make and nobody knows about the admittedly smaller contributions they actually made. let's start off with elvis, shall we?
okay, so what is elvis famous for? being the king of rock 'n' roll, right? so let's just say the requirements of being the king of rock 'n' roll are revolutionizing music by creating rock and writing really original, cool music. well, elvis didn't really do those things. elvis didn't create rock, rock was around way before elvis, invented by black americans who just couldn't become popular with a white audience. he even admitted this himself, saying, "rock 'n' roll has been around for many years. It used to be called rhythm and blues." he also is famous for songs he only covered. elvis is attributed with covering 302 songs and writing only 133. many of the songs he is famous for, including "hound dog", "blue christmas", "mystery train", and "money honey" are covers. but elvis did make some important contributions to music, mainly in the form of the things i just listed. sure, tons of his work is covers of the work of black americans, but no one would have ever heard of these songs if he hadn't covered them. and because elvis took went through a lot of media slandering bringing that music to the public, later black artists were socially acceptable. while he did take perhaps a bit more credit than he was due, it was more by ommission than anything else. from all accounts, he was respectful of african americans and the debt he owed to them for his success. it's not elvis' fault that there was, and to a lesser extent, still is racism in america. but it is good for us to know the whole story.
now we move on to freud, a more controversial figure, mostly because his theories had no scientific evidence and were kinda sexist. here's a basic rundown of freud's theory: everything is related to our unconscious, which handles all of our socially unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. there are three levels of the mind, the id, which runs on sexual and aggressive drives, the superego, the more "rational" part of the mind, and the ego, which mediates between them to make decisions. so, nowadays we know almost all of this was just kind of, dumb. freud's theories have no real scientific basis, and yet he is one of the most famous "psychologists" (in a loose sense of the term) ever. freud also believed all women "acknowledged" their were inferiority to men. (not so much, guys.) so do we just call freud an incredible idiot who somehow managed to dupe tons of people into believing his whacked out theories? no. because without freud, would so many people really have gone into psychology? his notoriousness during the victorian era shocked so many people who thought they were sophisticated because he essentially said "nope. underneath your well composed exterior is a beast that only cares about aggression and sex just dying to break out." that shock is what made him so famous, and is probably the reason at least 100 people went into psychology. kinda good for a guy whose theories were complete b.s, don't you think?
so freud and elvis, two incredibly famous people who absolutely didn't do the thing they were famous for but made some contribution no one knows about. makes you wonder, who are the elvises and freuds of this generation?
No comments:
Post a Comment