The closer your age of maturity is to the 21st century your feelings on Freud are apt to be that he was screwed up, misogynistic, a charlatan and the world would have been significantly better off without his contributions to human psychology. We might think to ourselves "This is a common dynamic for people who were so enormously popular they can be said to have defined a culture and several generations views of the world, at some point the limitations become clear." and that view would definitely explain how Alexander Pope's poetry fell out of fashion but it isn't really adequate to explain the distaste Freud can inspire.
The dismissal of Freud by the more recent generations is so total that it can be disconcerting to come across modern media where people from older generations still discuss his importance, as I recently did. I've noticed that the people who still believe in the importance of Freud often like to discuss his contributions to literature. Funny enough, that's the part I dislike most of all.
But to talk about that we need to first do a quick step through arguments against the Freudian subconscious. Arguments against the subconscious The common arguments against the subconscious are I suppose familiar by now, Freud makes an unnecessarily complicated and untestable solution to explain how the brain works when not engaged in conscious thought. A quick overview of these arguments from within the world of psychotherapy can be found in the following article A pertinent quote But even if science has little to say about the unconscious mind, we can still ask whether the concept is logical.
The unconscious is one version of what philosophers refer to as a "homunculus," Latin for "little man." The basic idea is that we have a little person inside of us. We're not actually doing the thinking; the little person is.
The problem with explanations that involve a homunculus, is that they don't actually explain anything. They just beg the question: If our..
. Illuminati Ganga Agent 86.
