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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We still credit Darwin for popularizing evolution. Even though many of his specific ideas are now outdated and proven wrong, he established the methodologies through which further advancement and study was possible.
Freud is in much the same boat.
The Ford model T is considered to be the grandfather of modern automobiles. Very few people today would want to own and drive an unaltered one, though.
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.
He was the founder of psychoanalysis, which in itself is very controversial, but included having people talk about their problems. You’ll notice the “talk about it” thing from pretty much every modern therapist etc., who may have you sit down and talk about things so they can understand you better and hopefully help you. Freud was instrumental in getting that sort of treatment off the ground, and for this he is recognized. But he also had a lot of strange theories, some hotly contested or proven false, such as an obsession with the Oedipus Complex.
It’s like we can recognise prehistoric examples of trepanation and say they were founders of the idea of surgery for health, while also being against trepanning because there’s much better ways to do things these days.
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.
His theory on Conscious and Unconscious mind was innovative. He also was a founding father of “Talk Therapy” (Freud and Breuer; Studies on Hysteria)
Don’t get me wrong, I disagree with 90 percent of what he says but I still think he paved a route.
Also more psychologists wanted to prove him wrong so a lot more theories were created to bash his studies.
Being first doesn’t mean that you got it right, after many years people have been able to study in depth everything that Freud thought was correct and take it apart. Newton was the father of gravity, but his views on gravity are now dated.
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