Freud is truly in a class of his own. Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say. But, luckily for him, academics have been \u2014 and still are \u2014 infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors, even as lay readers grow increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess. <\/p>\n
So what can we see today that we didn’t see during the last century? We now know that Freud compulsively fudged the historical record. This tendency is evident in Freud’s backsliding statements on his advocacy of cocaine, his opportunism concerning the case of Anna O., his flip-flops on the seduction theory, and in almost every instance where he mentions a patient. <\/p>\n
Just ask the “Wolf Man,” Sergius Pankejeff, whom Freud supposedly cured but who was, in truth, consigned to psychoanalysis for an additional 60 years. Not surprising, Pankejeff considered Freud’s effect on his life a “catastrophe.” <\/p>\n
We also know that Freud never seriously dealt with the problem of “suggestion,” which totally compromised his clinical findings and, by extension, his theories. Already, by the 1890s, few believed in Freud’s convenient claim that suggestion \u2014 the undue influence of the psychoanalyst over the patient \u2014 was possible only in the biologically predisposed and was thus of no consequence to his findings. Amazingly, these critical insights were buried under Freud’s rhetoric of denial and by his growing fame. Now we’ve come full circle. Today we know better than to trust in memories, or in free associations, that supposedly issue from the “therapeutic alliance” between analyst and patient. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…so how does that make you feel? A piece in the LATimes Freud is truly in a class of his own. Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say. But, luckily for him, academics have been \u2014 and still are \u2014 infinitely creative…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}