Opinion of Sigmund Freud

[Miles]

I'm just curious. I'm studying some of his stuff in my anthropology of religion class.

[Antonio the Sixth]

He certainly had his flaws, but his contributions to humanity's knowledge are invaluable. I've always found the trichotomy of ego, id and superego extremely useful to the comprehension of human history and political processes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Leszek Kołakowski once described him as Sigmund Fraud. I'm apt to agree.

For Lucian Freud, on the other hand, there are no words of praise too effusive.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Perhaps the most intellectually successful charlatan ever.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Bit of a huckster. A talented one, and one who paid his dues intellectually speaking, but even so...

[Joe Republic]

Imagine if in the 21st century, a bearded, bespectacled intellectual were to claim that children are innately obsessed with sex, particularly with their own parents.  He'd probably be lynched, figuratively speaking.

[traininthedistance]

An imaginative fiction writer who was pretty good at fashioning a post-religious myth system for the "modernist" age.  In that capacity, his influence endures (especially in certain humanities corners of the academy), and is only somewhat undeserved.

Obviously, his claims have less than zero empirical value, and are at best the psychological profession's equivalent of phlogiston.

[opebo]

Wonderful man.

[Beet]

The only form of science that I've never really understood from a methodological standpoint.

[DC Al Fine]

Seems like most of his stuff was the equivalent of evolutionary psychology today. "I observe something after the fact, therefore my biases are correct."

[King]

He would just be a forgotten internet commentator on the Atlas forum today.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

He did a lot to advance psychology, but was also a drug addict and had some really crazy ideas.  I vote HP overall.

[traininthedistance]

The only form of science that I've never really understood from a methodological standpoint.

There are many words you could use to describe Freud's work, but "science" is not one of them.

[Beet]

The only form of science that I've never really understood from a methodological standpoint.

There are many words you could use to describe Freud's work, but "science" is not one of them.

And yet open any book published in the 1960s or 1970s, nay even a contemporary psychology textbook, and his word is treated as gospel, or at least Important. One does not become Freud simply by making some random assertions, however fascinating they may be. There must have been something in there to cause so many to give him such a high place.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The only form of science that I've never really understood from a methodological standpoint.

There are many words you could use to describe Freud's work, but "science" is not one of them.

And yet open any book published in the 1960s or 1970s, nay even a contemporary psychology textbook, and his word is treated as gospel, or at least Important. One does not become Freud simply by making some random assertions, however fascinating they may be. There must have been something in there to cause so many to give him such a high place.

Well, like traininthedistance said, it's an in many ways fascinating and compelling modernist myth system.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

The only form of science that I've never really understood from a methodological standpoint.

There are many words you could use to describe Freud's work, but "science" is not one of them.

And yet open any book published in the 1960s or 1970s, nay even a contemporary psychology textbook, and his word is treated as gospel, or at least Important. One does not become Freud simply by making some random assertions, however fascinating they may be. There must have been something in there to cause so many to give him such a high place.

None of those things you've just said are remotely true... the 60s and 70s were when Freud intellectually collapsed.

I agree that there was something in his ideas, they fitted into all sort of early 20th Century intuitions about (at the very least) sex, family and the struggle to be 'moral'. When those intuitions disappeared, little of substance was found in Freud.

[pbrower2a]

Imagine if in the 21st century, a bearded, bespectacled intellectual were to claim that children are innately obsessed with sex, particularly with their own parents.  He'd probably be lynched, figuratively speaking.

Freud established that children from about second grade until puberty are asexual, and that any attempt to have sex with children in latency is abuse. The preceding Oedipal stage is something to grow out of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_stage

[LastVoter]

An imaginative fiction writer who was pretty good at fashioning a post-religious myth system for the "modernist" age.  In that capacity, his influence endures (especially in certain humanities corners of the academy), and is only somewhat undeserved.

Obviously, his claims have less than zero empirical value, and are at best the psychological profession's equivalent of phlogiston.

Much superior to "postmodernist" age. At least a a myth is grounded in something unlike the bullsh**t we have to deal with today where words change their definitions & ideas mean different things depending on the speaker & time they are spoken.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

An imaginative fiction writer who was pretty good at fashioning a post-religious myth system for the "modernist" age.  In that capacity, his influence endures (especially in certain humanities corners of the academy), and is only somewhat undeserved.

Obviously, his claims have less than zero empirical value, and are at best the psychological profession's equivalent of phlogiston.

Much superior to "postmodernist" age. At least a a myth is grounded in something unlike the bullsh**t we have to deal with today where words change their definitions & ideas mean different things depending on the speaker & time they are spoken.

That's how language has always worked. It just wasn't weaponized as openly before.