Why psychoanalysis is wrong

Children with problems or problem children? That is the question often asked by parents and teachers alike. This is a theory which dates back well over a hundred years , with strong roots in focusing on childhood problems influencing adult behaviour. This inevitably labels children as a problem rather than recognising the problems that affect wider society. According to Freud, a person has instinctive drives within the unconscious that influences their behaviour — unconscious material can be found in dreams and unintentional behaviour.

Psychoanalysts believe that therapeutic interventions can bring the effects of this unconscious material into consciousness with the aim of resolving these issues. And it would be difficult to say who would be qualified to make assumptions about this when nobody really knows what the unconscious mind is. For children, this means teachers, social workers, nurses, psychiatrists and other professionals make assumptions about them based only on their present behaviour — and without considering any wider social issues.

Which is nonsense. Again, nonsense. Indeed, as feminist Lili Hsieh points out, he had some very strange ideas about gender and sexuality:. Much of the critique of psychoanalysis as phallocentric or heterosexist is tied to the unfortunate conflation of femininity and sexuality; therefore, it is important to review the slippage in Freud's theory between femininity as the repertoire of sexed life and that as the logical complementarity to the universal sexuality.

Freud's view of femininity leans predominantly toward the latter, as he decides in his early theorization that there is only one kind of libido, i. By masculinity of the libido, Freud means mainly activity, hence he equates femininity with passivity. Both are thus substitutes for the penis. But he also nailed a few things. For example, Freud was startlingly correct in his assertion that we are not masters of our own mind. He showed that human experience, thought, and deeds are determined not by our conscious rationality, but by irrational forces outside our conscious awareness and control — forces that could be understood and controlled by an extensive therapeutic process he called psychoanalysis.

That distinction goes to French psychiatrist Pierre Janet. Freud was also influenced by his professor Jean Martin Charcot, a famed neurologist who dabbled in hypnosis.

Today, very few would argue against the idea of the unconscious mind. The brain performs a myriad number of tasks in the background, particularly in managing our autonomous bodily processes, the way it affects our conscious, cognitive functioning, and how we interpret our surroundings. And I think that this is really the fundamental orientation of Freud. Another astounding revelation offered by Freud is the idea that the brain can be compartmentalized. Brain function, both in terms of its biology and the emergent mind, can be broken down into individual parts.

His take on this, of course, was incredibly primitive. But his larger idea has gone to influence such thinkers as the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, who talks about the society of mind , and philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett, who argues on behalf of the idea that there are multiple models of consciousness working in parallel.

People retain memories of events not as they happened, but rather in the way they are active when memories are being reformed. And Freud's take on defense mechanisms still holds relevance. Sigmund Freud is one of the most famous doctors to delve into the human subconscious. But is anything he said rooted in science? After all, one of his most memorable ideas suggested that we're all repressing our true desires to have sex with our parents.

But Freud didn't use science to arrive at this idea. He started out with a theory and then worked backward, seeking out tidbits to reinforce his beliefs and then aggressively dismissing anything else that challenged those ideas.

He was very sensitive to objections and would simply laugh at an objection and claim the person making it was psychologically ill," Crews told Live Science. Related: Why can't we remember our dreams?

But when you ask these questions, then you eventually just lose hope. As damning an assessment as that is, it wasn't always like this for the founding father of psychoanalysis, who wrote that mental health problems could be cured by bringing unconscious thoughts back into the conscious realm.

In his own time, Freud enjoyed celebrity status as a leading intellectual of the 20th century. Chief among Freud's overflow of opinions was the "Oedipus complex," the hypothesis that every young boy wants to have sex with his mother and so wants to murder his father, whom he sees as a rival. But there's a catch. The boy also has the foresight to realize that his father is simultaneously his protector. Presented with this challenging scenario, the child is forced to repress his homicidal cravings.

When people asked about young girls, Freud hastily came up with another idea, the Electra complex. Suddenly, the little girl wants to have sex with her father," Crews said. At the core of both these theories is the notion of repressed emotions. That very concept empowered Freud to dismiss his detractors.