Talk:Frank Knopfelmacher

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This article is grossly opinionated and needs to be thoroughly rewritten. Adam 09:03, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

" Freud remained another hero of his, even after the researches of Frederick Crews, Hans Eysenck, E. Fuller Torrey, and allied scholars had discredited Freudianism within the intellectual mainstream." This statement as written is false. I took an honours major in Psychology at Melbourne Uni 1979-81, and did several units with Frank including "Theory in Psycholgy A & B (over two years)" and "The Psychology of Politics". In the former we went through all the major personality theories. Frank wasn't very impressed by any of them, but was scathing about Freud. I still remember: "What is good in Freud isn't original, and what's original in Freud isn't any good." For one class he brought in a feminist academic (well known at the time, but I can't recall her name) to demolish Freud's views about women. Maybe he was keen on Freud in earlier years and changed his mind, but I think a lot of people could say that. I got to know Frank quite well, and I must say that the wiki article doesn't reflect my impression of the man. Teaching psychology, he didn't bring his own politics into the class, even teaching "The Psychology of Politics", and if I hadn't known from elsewhere that he was a "leading conservative", I'm not sure I would have guessed. I'd also be very surprised if the assertion that Marx was a life-long hero were true. I don't recall him ever saying anything positive about Marx. Frank could be very difficult - you had to keep your wits about you because he was ferociously intelligent, and he didn't suffer fools. He was by far the best teacher I ever had at university. Bodysurfer1 06:51, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
 * How convincing this seems! I'm amazed, on viewing the scanty history of this (originally anonymous) article, that so little critical attention has been given to it over six years. I spent some time in Melbourne during the '60s and can confirm that "Knucklefucker" was indeed a serious polemicist as well as a figure of fun to the leftish libertarian-anarchist writers and students I associated with. I would urge surviving cognoscenti to get with it and see that a reasonable NPOV article develops out of this lopsided monograph. Cheers, Bjenks (talk) 06:56, 25 May 2013 (UTC)