Reply #33: Freud, While A Pioneer In The Field Of Psychoanalysis [View All]

made it up as he went along.

He could never prove the existence of the id, ego, superego; or even of the unconscious mind.

Yet he maintained that God was a projection of our desires.

And he maintained that dreams were wish fulfillment.

A lot has been learned since Freud.

I wouldn't hold him out to be the authority on modern psychology, or even modern psychoanalytic theory.

Don't get me wrong, I like Freud to some extent. I like Bruno Bettleheim's "Freud and Man's Soul" in which Bettleheim argues that a lot of Freud's writings were inproperly translated and that Freud was wrongly criticized for his Oedipus/Electra theories. That he originally started from the supposition that women (Since that was who he was working with) who described sexual memories from childhood were actually describing sexual abuse. He puts forth the idea that Freud later recanted from these stories being real memories, to their being "fantasies and developed the Oedipus/Electra theories to cover for this. If this happened this way then he did it because of political pressures to keep sexual abuse hidden. (In Victorian times this is not unimaginable due to the repressive nature of that era)