I hate movies that use this as a technique for explaining a character's adult traits or motivations.

I know he cheated on me because of his childhood abuse, but I shot him because of mine.

Yeah I know what you're saying. I was just recently pontificating that we've swung a little TOO far towards the "it was all our parent's fault" side of the nature/nurture interaction. I don't think it was all Freud but he had a big hand in it.

I think this all depends on the nature of the behavior and the age that behavior first manifests.

Yeah. I'm not saying I dislike the idea that your past moulds your present; of course it does, and your life as a kid definitely shapes your personality, and so on.

But I think it's unpredictable, what affects you in which way. I just disdain the complete shots in the dark which happen to be convenient narratives (like this one about nuns & math that I just saw in the opening pages of "when genius failed").

Now that I think about it, it's strangely similar to how celebrity magazine interviewers like to create whole narratives based on one or two "spinnable" phrases a person says off-hand. The narrative trumps attempts at accuracy in pop psychology.

What I meant about behavior vs. mentality is.. I'm not sure I can articulate this well but sometimes we look at a person and say e.g. she has daddy issues. Alright? But the split-second decision she made between doing or saying something you're reacting to and not doing it is so spontaneous and arbitrary. And if she didn't make that random decision, you wouldn't say she has daddy issues. So does she have daddy isses or not? Does this make sense?

The reason I bring up Freud is that I'm beginning to realize how much he or his ways of thinking changed the way we think about human beings, including the highly sexualized lens we bring to analyzing many things. Maybe it's always easy to overstate this sorta thing though. I came across a line from Oscar Wilde the other day where he says, referring to Hamlet, "The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy". And I'm like, give me a break, Shakespeare didn't invent angst.

Well, Firas, I actually have three years of lying-on-the-couch, twice-a-week, Freudian-derived therapy under my belt, and one thing that my therapist was fond of repeating, whenever I myself would try to reduce a behavior or a feeling to just one motivation or unconscious factor was this:

"Jason, things are overdetermined."

by which she meant: there are many different motivations, needs, etc. that go into a thought or action. There might be an unconscious motivation from your childhood motivating you to become a volunteer, to improve the lives of the disadvantaged. That might be a factor. And at the same time, there are other motivations at play as well:

*Helping others makes you feel good about yourself.

*You have adopted political or religious beliefs that motivate you to go out and do this.

*Charitable work brings you into contact with more people, people who share your values and might make good friends.

So, maybe in 1949, a Freudian analyst might exclaim "AHA! We have unearthed THE ONE unconscious trauma that's made you go out and do volunteer work and that's all that your volunteer work amounts to."

I don't think that's how therapists working in Freudian-derived, psychodynamic traditions think today.

Well, there's an abundance of writing like that from the 18th century Enlightenment, so I'd say no. Before that, I'm not well enough read.

* Though I think you could argue that developmental arguments about character were made in the works of Shakespeare and in some of the Greek classics. I think the argument is as old as humanity; authors writing in a religious vein (Milton, Dante, Donne) often took the view that character was determined (for some of them, predetermined) by degree of sinful nature in a person, grace or lack of grace, and/or whether salvation had been offered and gained, while more humanistic authors have argued the earthly-influence side.

Motivation is not as important as actions. I mean, it's nice to know why you do something, but it's more important to do what your think is right.