eli5: Why is Freud concidered to be “the father of modern psychology” but at the same time, every psychologist hates freudian analysis?
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Imagine that its caveman times and you’re the first person to invent a wheel. Except your wheel isn’t round, its an octagon. When you invent the octagon its a vast improvement over everything that had come before since no one else had ever thought of moving something along the ground by rotating it.
Humanity spent 3,000 years pushing squares through the mud. But your idea that you can move by rotating something is so revolutionary that now, a mere 150 years later, people have refined your octagon to a fully functional circular wheel. People with access to a circular wheel would look back and say “wow, why the hell would we ever use octagons?” But that doesn’t mean that the octagon didn’t revolutionize the field of pushing stuff.
Freud is the octagon of psychology. Prior to Freud no one believed that mental health disorders even existed – people believed that mental health problems were the result of demonic possession and that had remained unchanged for thousands of years.
150 years later we now know that most of what Freud believed in terms of the cause of mental health disorders is completely wrong, including his ideas on how to treat them. But the fact is that Freud’s view that mental health disorders were actual diseases that could be treated by means other than exorcism was revolutionary.
His popularization of that outlook is what allowed modern psychology to evolve to the point that currently is.
So yes, Freud was wrong. But without him the standard treatment for mental health disorders would continue to be shoving garlic cloves up the person’s ass while sprinkling holy water on them and praying.
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