I mean, he can be the most important founding father of modern psychology and also have been wrong about everything he said. Let’s be real. Modern psychology is still very, very wrong about a lot of things. It’s a science in its infancy. Alchemists were wrong about everything, but their work made chemistry possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants doesn’t always mean those giants were right.
The content of his studies was mostly false, but the concept of it was influential and groundbreaking. He initiated the process of moving the questions of the mind from the field of philosophy to the field of science and medicine… But he didn’t achieve that process himself. His psychoanalysis wasn’t science yet, but philosophy on its way to become science.
That wasn’t really Freud’s achievement though. There are many early psychologists who deserve credit for this much more than him, such as William James, Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus, or (later) B. F. Skinner.
Freud’s work was mostly in the medical tradition, developed independently from the emerging psychological science of that time, and that’s where his theories still have the largest impact.
MFW they invent an Elektra complex to make it gender equal
She didn’t even do that! She was trying to avenge her father! Why not name it after one of those girls from the old testament that drugged and raped their dad to get prego? Sounds a lot more like what a woman with a dangerous sexual fixation would do too.
That’s what I never understood. Oedipus only fucked his mum because he didn’t know who she really was. So, technically a motherfucker but it makes absolutely no sense as a psychology template (in my layman’s eyes st least).
Freud is seriously the biggest hack in any field I can think of that went on to get such undeserved renowned.
well, while his specific ideas are generally discredited, he did invent psychoanalysis…
But people still love cocaine!
