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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Lots of psychologists practice psychotherapy (“talk therapy”) that looks very similar to Freud’s methods. Since then, behaviorism has risen in popularity due to the fact that it relies more on empirical tests rather than unobservable constructs to explain behaviors. Most of the “hatred” comes from people who insist on using these constructs to explain concepts instead of testable hypotheses. But for the most part people don’t “hate” Freud so much as they recognize that a lot of things that he said were later proven wrong, which is to be expected as the field progresses. People also tend to dislike popularizers, and many armchair psychologists are only exposed to Freudian concepts leading to mass misinformation, which would be frustrating to experts in any field.
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