Score one for the good guys

"Freud in Freefall: Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute, writes in National Catholic Reporter that the scholarly opinion of Sigmund Freud is falling faster than sales of Britney Spears Perfume."  Full story from DallasNews Religion.

Down with the other two Masters of Suspicion as well!

Comments

[PeterTerp]

Freud, like Marx, is another example of someone who did a much better job of interpreting fiction than interpreting people. The fact that he could name complexes after dramatic characters should attest to that.
Freud is still useful to us in the field of literary criticism because, like Marxism, psychoanalysis flourishes in the controlled universe of fiction. All fictional characters really do have a "subconscious"...it's called the author. Whatever a particular character might appear to mean, there is, in fact, another, invisible, deeper mind choosing the words that the character says. What the author means by those words is often not what the character (if they were a real person, which they aren't) would consciously mean. Obviously, this kind of reading predates Freudian psychoanalysis, but the man did give us a handy terminology to use when laying out a character's desires and conflicts.
Again, I'm not defending Freud here anymore than I intended to defend Marx in my last post. I'm just trying to equip our readers with defenses should they ever encounter one of these ideologies in a class. It would be a mistake to wholly embrace Freudian or Marxist worldviews, but it would also be a mistake to refuse to touch them because they could poison our worldview.
Remember, Christ says his followers "will pick up serpents (with their hands), and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them" (Mark 16:18).

[Al T]

Wow.

"Freud was sexually obsessive, anxious, phobic. He often read patients’ cases through his own psychopathology and neglected many facts about the reality in which they lived. Indeed, he engaged in sheer bullying. Women traumatized by unwanted sexual advances were told they had secretly invited it. Men were warned they were latent homosexuals and should “cure” themselves by marrying women selected for them by Freud, which ended up in suicides and other disasters. Freud justified this highhandedness by claiming that clinical study -- which we now know involved few patients and did not result in cures -- proved the scientific truth of whatever he said."

Remember this when a scientist tries to bully you.

[Neil]

I was taught Freud wasn't particularly scientific in my psychology class at UMD, but it was taught by a faithful Catholic.