6 ms·

Excuse my ignorance, but why does everyone seem to hate on Freud, considering he has had a tremendous influence on modern psychology? Honest question.

• makmanalp 10y ago
  Probably because he was wrong so often, and his ideas got popular. Being wrong in a medical field is Not Good - it leads to real harm. I've heard it phrased as "he had the wrong answers, but the right questions".
• toasterlovin 10y ago
  The problem with Freud is that his ideas have been taken seriously for way too long. His theories of human psychology are on par with phrenology in their ability to provide a framework that explains human behavior. It's rank pseudo-science. And now, finally, evolutionary psychology is gaining widespread acceptance.
• TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Because most of his theories are nonsense. He got the idea of the unconscious right and understood transference eventually, but the rest of his theories are mostly bunk. Worse, some are harmful bunk. He denied the existence of child sex abuse and invented a set of complex rationalisations which blamed the victims and shamed them for inventing fantasies. We know now that at least some of their stories were correct, and not fantasies and delusions at all. Pure Freudian psychoanalysis is incredibly expensive and time consuming and never scores well when tested objectively. It's not an exaggeration to say that in terms of value for time and money it's more of a scam than astrology and homeopathy are, but it never seems to get the same attention from debunkers. Modern approaches that score much better (e.g. ACT and other MBTs) have almost no baggage imported from Freudian beliefs.
• edblarney 10y ago
  "but why does everyone seem to hate on Freud, considering he has had a tremendous influence on modern psychology?" Because his theories were not necessarily scientific, and it was unjust perhaps that he had such influence.
• openasocket 10y ago
  I think it's a lot because many of his ideas that were revolutionary for the time are considered obvious in hindsight. Mental illness at the time was often considered to be the result of some moral failing, and those with it are degenerates and beyond help. Freud and other founding members of psychology presented a radical idea that mental illness is a disease, its sufferers should be treated with kindness and compassion, and it can be treated by talking.
• tboyd47 10y ago
  I think the hate is justified, to an extent. Freud's influence is not due to his theories, but his invention of the "talking cure." His original theory of deep-seated psychosis was more in line with the modern view: that it usually springs from traumatic sexual violence experienced in infancy or childhood. But this put him between a rock and a hard place: either go forward with his research and lose his academic career, or join the rest of society in blaming the victims. Freud chose the latter, and put such a convincing intellectual spin on it that he even earned a reputation as a scientific genius.
• bbctol 10y ago
  Freud's impact on psychology is sort of like Aristotle's impact on science. He laid the foundations of the field, had indisputably profound insights into the mind and without him, psychology would hardly exist in its current form. However, basically all of his specific conclusions are... wrong. They reflect a lot of personal biases and are pretty off-base; worse, they were taken as fact by a lot of early researchers, which bogged down the field for a long time. Depending on who you ask, Freud is either absurdly underrated or overrated; he's such a fundamental figure in the field that it's really hard to look at his impact "objectively," or even understand what that means.
• hx87 10y ago
  It's not just that a lot of his theories were wrong (something he had in common with Galileo and Newton), but that his wrong theories were taken far too seriously for far too long by certain sectors of the humanities (cough critical theory cough) as well as writers of film and television whose sole exposure to psychology was Freud in History of Psychology 101.