Quote of the Month... May 2003

... Theorizing at this stage is like skating on thin ice--keep moving, or drown. Ego, Id, and Superego are conceptions that help one to see and state the important facts of behavior, but they are also dangerously easy to treat as ghostly realities: as anthropomorphic agents that want this or disapprove of that, overcoming one another by force or guile, and punishing or being punished. ... When theory becomes static, it is apt to become dogma; and psychological theory has the further danger, as long as so many of its problems are unresolved, of inviting a relapse into the vitalism and indeterminism of traditional thought.

--D. O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, Introduction

Referring to psychological theories of Freud and Pavlov, and also science in general. Seems particularly germane to modern biology?