[hexxiiiz]

Psychology has set itself back 50 years. After disavowing all of Freud's ideas, psychology has spent decades constructing a piecemeal web of unreproducible experiments only to conclude on a lot of ideas that Freud had already developed: that the mind is driven by unconscious processes, that trauma has a enduring impact on these processes that lead to pathologies, etc... Today a lot of neuroscientists are picking up where Freud left off: Solms, Friston, Carhart-Harris, ...

Research in this area was initiated in some ways by an extensive paper by nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel outlining the ways in which many of Freud's ideas could be reaserched from a modern neuroscientific perspective. In this paper https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/ajp.156.4.... Kandel asserts that psychoanalysis today still offers the most intellectually satisfying model of the mind and builds on this contention to suggest the various frontiers upon which it can be investigated with neuroscientific tools.

I think Freud has gained a tremendously distorted image among a public that eschews actually reading his ideas directly, instead accepting out of hand a strewn-together strawman erected from third hand accounts of them. I would suggest at least reading Freud's 1915 essay "the Unconscious".

[pmichaud]

Thank you for this. Freud has a bad reputation among people who know nothing, but he was flawed genius who gave us the basis for what we do know about the mind. He’s only remembered for the goofy parts because the rest is just “how things obviously work”—-obvious, of course, only after his work.