lpetrich

Also, check out Michael Shermer's comparison of Darwin and Freud in The Borderlands of Science.

An interesting comparison is what they've done with their notebooks and papers. Darwin's have been published, and there has been a minor industry dedicated to studying the evolution of his thought. Freud, however, had burned some of his and his estate continues to sit on many of the others.

Also, Freud had tried to create the image of himself as having gone on some hero's journey in order to make his discoveries about psychology. By comparison, in Darwin's case, it was many of his biographers who have supplied the hero's-journey interpretation of his Beagle voyage.

And Darwin's work has held up remarkably well -- much better than Freud's, it must be said.

ps418

Basically, Freud got it completely wrong when it came to the origins of psychopathology. Many of the disorders he explained in terms of family psychodynamics are now known to be have moderate to high heritability, and can be effectively treated pharmacologically (versus years of costly therapy that produces little or no therapeutic result). More generally, the idea that early experiences (with breast-feeding, toilet-training, intra-family sexual conflicts and so on) play a large or even dominant role in shaping personalities is bunk (e.g. Rowe, 1994; Cohen, 1999; Bouchard and MCGue, 2003). I also think that dream analysis is no better or worse than tarot reading for aquiring useful therapeutic information.


I never read a whole lot of Freud's work, but I did read a whole lot of Jung's work, which jived better with my religious beliefs (archetypes, the collective unconscious and all that). Jung was much more interesting, but just as useless. I now think that was just a big waste of time, a psychological snipe hunt.

A quick story, whose source I forgot: two twins, reared apart, see a psychoanalyst for obsessive-compulsive disorder. The analyst aks twin 1 "Why do you think you perform these behaviors?" The twin responds: "Because my mother was an absolute slob!" The analyst later sees twin 2, and ask the same question. Twin 2 responds: "Because my mother was was extremely neat and would not stand for any lapse of hygiene, therefore I just cant stand to be 'dirty'!" I may have botched the story, but it illustrates the genuine flexibility of psychoanalytic explanations of psychopathology.


Some links:
The Unknown Freud
Confessions of a Freud Basher
Freudian Flame Wars
The Bewildered Visionary