Talk:Sigmund Freud

Did freud actually observe tribal societies, or just read about them? Given the substantive cricisim of Freud from all sorts of angles this is probably an important issue.

Even if he did observe them, which I don't believe he did, who is to say that he was 'objective' in doing so? Is such a thing even possible? (Michael W. Clark, Ph.D.)

Not much of a mention of the controversies around Freud's theories. Even someone who's a fan of Freud ought to know about a few of them. GregLindahl

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This is better than it used to be, but: 'Freud dealt mankind the most severe narcissistic injury of all...' is still adulatory in tone rather than explanatory.

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Freud's psychological theories are hotly disputed today and many leading academic and research psychiatrists regard him as a charlatan. Although Freud was long regarded as a genius and the founder of psychology, today psychiatry has been recast as a scientific discipline and psychiatric disorders as diseases of the brain whose etiology is principally genetic. This is largely due to the repudiation of Freud's theories and the adoption of many of the basic scientific principles of Freud's principal opponent in the field of psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin. In his book "The Freudian Fraud", research psychiatrist E. Fuller-Torrey provides an account of the political and social forces which combined to raise Freud to the status of a divinity to those who needed a theoretical foundation for their political and social views. Many of the diseases which used to be treated with Freudian and related forms of therapy (such as schizophrenia) have been unequivocally demonstrated to be impervious to such treatments. Freud's notion that the child's relationship to the parent is responsible for everything from psychiatric diseases to criminal behavior has also been thoroughly discredited and the influence of such theories is today regarded as a relic of a permissive age in which "blame-the-parent" was the accepted dogma. For many decades genetic and biological causes of psychiatric disorders were dismissed without scientific investigation in favor of environmental (parental and social) influences. Today even the most extreme Freudian environmentalists would not deny the great influence of genetic and biological factors. The American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual" (the latest edition of which is the DSM-IV), the official standard for diagnosing psychological disorders in the USA, reflects the universal adoption of the neo-Kraepelinian scientific-biological approach to psychiatric disorders, with its emphasis on diagnostic precision and the search for biological and genetic etiologies--largely ignored during the earlier Freud-dominated decades of the twentieth century.

That paragraph is pretty egregiously biased; see neutral point of view. Freudians still do certainly exist in the psychiatric profession, and Freud is still taken seriously by many others as well. I'm not saying that we shouldn't include plenty of information and background on the rejection of Freud today; I'm saying that we should write this so that it isn't Wikipedia's official view that Freud was a charlatan. Among other things, what would be necessary is a reply to this from Freudians, and statements representing the number of Freudians still active today. --LMS