Thread by @DonJRobertson

Freud held back scientific progress in psychotherapy by roughly half a century.

Freud's notion of the unconscious mind was "...the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and for turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies." - William James

People think "Oh back in the day there wasn't any research." That's wrong. The Soviets were doing research on psychotherapy at the start of the 20th century and so were American behavioural psychologists. Freud and his followers nixed all that because... pseudoscience! :/

When psychotherapy research was getting off the ground, Freud created a sort of personality cult based on the interpretation of his own dreams, and throughout the rest of his life he never conducted a single piece of research to test his theories or the outcome of his techniques.

When I was studying psychoanalysis, we used to say it was just a load of pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo and people would say "That's a bit harsh!" Couple of decades later, though, and most people can now agree with that appraisal! ;) Phew!

I'm going to get a load of replies now from people falsely attributing ideas to Freud and sanitizing them by removing all the original references he actually did introduce to castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex. What's good in Freud isn't new and what's new isn't good.

Freud himself said that the Oedipus Complex was his main theoretical innovation. He recognized that the other stuff about the unconscious was largely derivative of earlier thinkers. But that psychosexual stuff is what everyone now rejects.

I didn't mean to re-ignite the "psychotherapy wars" just think that when his name comes up, periodically, people should remind everyone how serious the flaws are with Freudianism and why it was increasingly debunked by psychologists from the 1950s onwards.