Freud Got It Wrong

Just because he’s famous, doesn’t mean he was always right.

It will be hard to find anyone who will not name Sigmund Freud first when asked to name a famous psychologist. Popular as his name is today, so was he during his lifetime. His influence on twentieth-century thinking is only rivaled by Charles Darwin or Karl Marx. And this was much to the chagrin of earlier experimental psychologists like Wilhelm Wundt and his followers. Unlike their meticulous scientific approach, Freud and famous disciples like Carl-Gustav Jung, wielded a very different instrument to pry the mind.

Freud was the inventor of psychoanalysis, a form of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Basically, he talked to his “patients” and encouraged them to talk about their dreams and to engage in free association, which entails sharing thoughts freely without reservation and much concentration, basically blurting out whatever comes to mind when confronted with a word given by the therapist.

The goal of psychoanalysis was to bring unconscious, or what Freud called repressed, thoughts and feelings to the forefront so that the patient is relieved from suffering from harmful emotions.

Over the years, Freud developed numerous theories. Many of us are familiar with his focus on the meaning of dreams, sexually repressed memories, the Oedipus…