[pyrois]

People really like to trash Freud, but you have to put him into context. Before Freud, we had a few branches of psychology: philosophical psychology in England arguing about empiricism vs. nativism, Wundtian psychology in Germany sitting around asking very specific questions that they answered using introspection, and in the States we had the very first blossoming of the behaviorism that would dominate psychology in the States until the '60s[0]. Some of these approaches had a concept of the subconscious, but they all viewed it as a static warehouse for previous experience, and very few people thought about it in a serious way.

Freud's major contribution to psychology was that we actually have a dynamic subconscious that profoundly affects how we live our lives. This aspect of his theory has become so ingrained in our culture that it's hard to imagine the world before Freud. Also, that aspect of his theory has held up over the years.

Also, he got a number of things correct: many of his coping mechanisms have strong empirical support, for instance.

Freud was wrong in detail, but his overarching approach changed psychology for the better.

[0] Yes, I know this "history" is a vast oversimplification.

[mafribe]

The concept of subconscious is much older than Freud, it was a staple of the romantics. Freud proposed a specific structure theory of the subconscious centred around the Oedipus complex. That specific theory is indefensible.