Testing

Back to the idea that Freud's theory might not even be scientific at all, let's think about it a little more. As Hobson notes, psychoanalytic institutes have been around for 105 years and have not tested this theory at all. All of a sudden our in class ideas of keeping a notebook next to your bed aren't sounding so great. Are we really the only ones to have this idea in the last century and then some? I doubt it. I might not know enough about the theory or about how to test it, but I do not think it is as easy to test this theory as we thought in class. If a person is involved in a study, they are going to be looking for things in their dreams, they are going to try harder. As a result of this, they are going to remember what they want, no matter how objective they try to be. For whatever reason we want to believe in neurobiology, we forgot much of our dreams and we do so frequently. Therefore it won't be so easy to remember them and if we try to put the pieces together to make a complete story, I am sure that there will be personal add-ins that were not in the dream. Because we are looking for testable material, we are going to produce it whether or not it is original and authentic data from our memory. I think it is simply too hard to do. For this reason, at this point in time I do believe that we cannot see Freud's theory as legitimately scientific. If there is some kind of technology that evolves that allows us to view or remember dreams, it is possible that we can test this theory, but until something reliable and consistent emerges I do not think that we can call Freud's theory scientific.