I suppose I'm somewhat using the Freud discussion to satisfy a personal curiosity, but it does clearly relate, so who cares. In history, one thing we're expected to become familiar with is the history of the discipline, since that affects everything we still do today. I can't think of a well-known purely Middle Eastern example, but let's consider Edward Gibbon's the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. No one uses that today as anything better than a monumental achievement of 18th-century literature and scholarship. Yet it still comes up in seminars precisely because it was so important. I believe Edward Said referred to it in orientalism. The whole "decline and fall" concept is still somewhat imprinted onto historical scholarship, and at least one of my professors traces that to Gibbon's influence, even though as an undergrad I remember learning how scholars no longer used that phrase in thinking of the late empire. Is this a peculiarity of historians simply attaching importance to their own history as well as what they study, or do other disciplines do this, too? In science, out-dated models of the atom obviously can't be taken into account in discussing how atoms work, but don't they help illustrate how we got to the point we're at now, and where we might go in the future? Similarly, has Freud had any impact on the things psychologists study, the concepts they use, and so on? Was he the first to conceive of the subconscious, for example, and is that still used? And isn't someone that influential worthy of a question? Brian
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