Most psychologists don’t care about Freud’s work outside of a historical sense and kinda hate him as a person. His work was quite literally used as an example of pseudoscience by Karl Popper.
And yet for some reason philosophers have an obsession with integrating his views into their work and artists keep using his views as inspiration and analyze existing works via the lens of psychoanalysis.
Why?
Freud actually did do something very very important for modern psychology. He popularized the idea of the subconscious: that humans have thought processes they are not aware of and mostly can’t control (actually the more I learn about it the more I feel like a marionette on my gut bacteria’s strings but that’s besides the point). I’ve also heard he did actually nail down the cause of many mental illnesses: child sexual abuse, but that there was some (formal?/ informal?) political pressure to not list that as the actual cause so he caved and said the patients must have made it up. I’m struggling to remember where I heard that but unfortunately given my personal and professional experience with the mental health system (the personal was more than I liked; the professional is getting there), this sounds depressingly familiar.
The fact that he caved and jeopardized data cause of public opinion makes me hate him even more