"In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century." Sophie Freud Sophie Freud: Psychoanalysis Not Useful There was a time when psychoanalysis was very popular, but today it seems to have more detractors than supporters, especially in the scientific community. As it turns out, even Sigmund Freud's granddaughter Sophie doesn't think very highly of it anymore - according to her, his ideas are simply "outdated." Judy Gerstel reports for The Toronto Star: [Sophie Freud] dismisses most of her grandfather's theories as "outdated" and says that another psychiatrist, Irving Goffman, "had a much better grasp on human motivation than Freud." She also faults her grandfather for "being very angry about any critique and viewing people who criticized him, or thought otherwise, as villains." Freud and Hitler didn't just share a neighbourhood in Vienna, she says in the film. "They also shared the ambition to convince other men of the one and only truth that they had come upon." "Never could he be wrong," she says. "That lasted for 50 years after his death, until a few people started to dare to say, "Yes, but ..." "The bad thing was that psychoanalysis kept itself apart from the scientific advances of time, stuck in a 19th-century way of thinking." Freud's status started to take a tumble in the 1960s when authority and established ideas were overturned, in particular those that he represented: institutionalized medicine, psychiatric treatment, patriarchy. "It started with his view of women," Sophie Freud says, explaining her disillusionment with her grandfather's thinking. "If you didn't have a vaginal orgasm, you were not a mature woman, and the clitoris didn't count. Stuff like that, penis envy, it was amazing. Women believed the great man more than their own bodily experiences." Not everything about psychoanalysis awful - it did, for example, emphasize the idea of sitting down and listening to what patients had to say. By and large, however, our understanding of the physical processes in the brain have led to a large number of medical treatments which far outstrip psychoanalysis in terms of effectiveness. Just about al of Freud's theories about the unconscious and mental illness were, quite simply, wrong. http://atheism.about.com/b/a/043482.htm
The fact that all of his studies were done on institutionalized patients proves that they are not applicable to all psychological disorders. It has been accounted that he also sexually abused all of his patients and his condoning of incest is sickening. He's not only outdated he's a sick fucker.
I have heard this before. I studied Freud in college, and it made me think and it really seemed he was pretty accurate. I am not ready to abandon Freud. His protoge Jung makes a lot of sense also. I guess modern psychology has to find a way to intergrate the old ideas of Freud and Jung with new discoveries.
