A review by jessicaleza
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolpert
4.0
".... Reliable scientific beliefs have no intrinsic ethical or moral content: they refer to how the world is. There are no ethics in Newton's Laws, nor in the genetic code, nor in the fact that genes can affect our mental health." (p. 202)
"Non-medical causes of illness offered by psychiatric patients in a university hospital in the USA included 'God's Will' and the hex or evil eye. Psychoanalysis and Freudian views of the unconscious present us with a related set of beliefs that I think fit most comfortably with paranormal beliefs... While the aim of Freud was to make psychoanalysis part of natural science, it has not turned out that way, and Freudian explanations seem to be much closer to beliefs related to witchcraft in the way they try to deal with mental illness. Yet the concepts of repression, libido, and the Oedipus complex are repeatedly used by many people in the West as causal explanations for people's behavior, both normal and abnormal. Is it not strange, and close to the paranormal, to believe that there are three mental processes in the brain that are almost like separate individuals - the ego, the superego, and the id - which interact with one another?"
"Non-medical causes of illness offered by psychiatric patients in a university hospital in the USA included 'God's Will' and the hex or evil eye. Psychoanalysis and Freudian views of the unconscious present us with a related set of beliefs that I think fit most comfortably with paranormal beliefs... While the aim of Freud was to make psychoanalysis part of natural science, it has not turned out that way, and Freudian explanations seem to be much closer to beliefs related to witchcraft in the way they try to deal with mental illness. Yet the concepts of repression, libido, and the Oedipus complex are repeatedly used by many people in the West as causal explanations for people's behavior, both normal and abnormal. Is it not strange, and close to the paranormal, to believe that there are three mental processes in the brain that are almost like separate individuals - the ego, the superego, and the id - which interact with one another?"