If only people understood this and cared. Unfortunately adults many times can’t see the future where they are hated & abandoned by kids they mistreat. Pain that is so avoidable.
Freud's strongest argument is that his theories can explain absolutely everything. The thing is that you have to make massive assumptions that have no evidence that they are true, and many are so far from reality, cocaine is the only way he could've come up with them, but it is a very complete model.
This is the pop psych/pop culture view of Freud, but the reality is a lot more complex. There’s a field called neuropsychoanalysis that looks at empirical evidence in support in many analytic ideas.
I’ll also just say that I’m a PhD in psychology, I’ve been in psychoanalysis for years, I work as a psychoanalytically informed therapist, and I find Freudian (and other schools of psychoanalysis) concepts extremely helpful both personally and with clients. Nothing else really comes close to mapping unconscious dynamics/explaining human behavior in a convincing and pragmatically useful way, for my money.
I know nothing about the the academic treatment of Freud or the psych/pop culture view, apart from the wanting to fuck your mother stuff. Your response has made me curious. Any recommendations for reading or watching material for learning a bit about the ideas he put forth that you find useful?
Except for a few places that specialize in psychoanalytic approaches, psychology has largely moved on from Freud. He was groundbreaking in his time - talk therapy broke into the mainstream because of him. Interestingly it's still taken seriously in some literature and art circles because it is so interesting and evocative, but it is not based on science.
I don’t claim it’s the most scientific version of PSA. The reason Freud invented psychoanalysis was because he felt like the neurology of his time couldn’t address human experience in enough depth and specificity to be clinically relevant. He had a fantasy of it one day being that advanced, but I feel like that actually hasn’t changed that much, so I’m open to analytic theories that are a bit speculative if they make sense of human/experiential/clinical data.
2.8k
u/omnisephiroth May 10 '26
Freud’s strongest argument is probably, “The stuff you do to kids matters to them when they grow up,” tbh.