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Makes sense. I can see how that might be the result of wishful thinking... "the world can't really be this awful, can it?" I've heard that burnout is a real problem for psychiatrists, since they have to listen to so many awful emotional problems all day every day.
Freud was wrong on a lot of things, but he really was a trailblazer in setting the course of psychotherapy. Late 19th century Vienna was a hothouse society, over-heated and over-stuffed and neurotic and about due to burst at the seams, and the kinds of patients he was getting would be those wealthy enough to be able to afford a private specialist for a long course of treatment. They would also be the most disturbed, so he was also getting the worst cases (that were not already in asylums), the result being that he would get the nasty, dirty scandal cases. And naturally he couldn't accept that this was really all true, plus the fear that if he went at all public with this in the medical world he would be finished and on top of that open to anti-Semitic accusations that he was a dirty Jew trying to throw muck at the good Catholic Austro-Hungarian empire. On top of that he was working out his own theories of sexuality which involved the acceptance of early childhood sexuality being present, that children are not a blank slate who only experience erotic impulses when puberty switches it all on. So he had several reasons to change from "this is real" to "this is the seduction theory".
Tons of people are influential in their day, but that doesnt mean we have to keep worshipping them forever. Rasputin, for example.
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I don't mean to keep belaboring the point here. If you're just not interested in Freud's ideas then that's fine. But you are psychoanalyzing Freud and you're doing exactly what you accuse psychoanalysis of doing. You're attributing unacknowledged ulterior motivations to him, in spite of his explicit protests to the contrary (he certainly claimed to be simply following the evidence where it lead him - if you told him that psychoanalysis was just based on wishful thinking, he absolutely would have disagreed. So would you still persist in your claim that you know his motivations better than he did?)
Im not really talking about freud at all, im talking about the people who continue to cite him and use him into the current day, despite him being widely discredited by his own field. And its the same people who are still unreformed Marxists.
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