Does Sigmund Freud Still Matter?

Though he was the father of psychoanalysis, Freud and his theories don't hold up so well today. Learn about his famous Oedipus complex concept and what modern psychiatrists and psychologists think in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren bogebam here. History has not been kind
to Sigmund Freud. Were once believed to be among the
greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. But if Old Sigmund
were somehow around today, it's unlikely he died. Everyone in
the room would probably be trying to act as if

(00:23):
he wasn't there, treating him like that crazy old uncle,
rolling their eyes at his embarrassingly politically incorrect insistences. Sigmund Freud,
the father of psychoanalysis, the man who introduced us to
the id, the ego, and the super ego, and who
offered up ideas like repression and defense mechanisms and penis
envy and the Oedipus complex, is not the towering figure

(00:44):
he once was. Still, as much as some might try,
we can't seem to shake entirely clear of him or
his ideas. Let's start with the Oedipus Complex, one of
Freud's most well known theories. Remember the story of Oedipus
from Greek mythology. Abandoned at birth, Oedipus fulfilled a prophecy
by unknowingly killing his real father, a king and marrying

(01:06):
the king's widow, Oedipus's mother. Oedipus then fathered four children
with her. After finding out what was what, Mom hung herself.
Oedipus gouged his eyes out, and it was a legit
Greek tragedy. Freud's Edible complex plays off of that. His
theory goes that there's a totally normal stage of development
between the ages of three and six years, during which

(01:28):
children experience unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the
opposite sex and simultaneous jealousy for and rivalry with their
parents of the same sex, along with couches in a
doctor's office. These symbolism that lies in dreams and the
power of the unconscious. The Oedipus complex is one of
Freud's main contributions to the field, the theory that little

(01:50):
boys want their mothers and hate their fathers, and that
little girls desire their dads and despise their moms. It's
a theory with all sorts of psycho sexual correlates that
is widely discounted these days because simply it has no
scientific basis. In fact, Freud was in effect just theorizing,
throwing things out there, and today that's not nearly enough.

(02:13):
We spoke with psychiatrist Joel Paris, a professor at McGill
University in Montreal and a research associate in the Department
of Psychiatry at Jewish General Hospital there. He said, I
just think that people quietly buried it and stopped talking
about it. If you speak to an intelligent psychoanalyst, they'd
say that isn't really the main thing. We don't believe
that anymore as fields like neuroscience have grown in importance,

(02:37):
as scientists have concocted ways to look more closely at
the brain and how it works, the Oedipus complex and
many of Freud's other theories just haven't held up. Paris said,
I wrote a short book looking at what the evidence
actually shows, both in theory and in practice. There are
some things that should be kept and that are supported
by evidence, but there's a lot that shouldn't be. In particular,

(02:58):
psychoanalysis as a therapy doesn't have the support except in
a very brief form where you see people maybe for
a few months, and that's called brief psychodynamic therapy that
has scientific evidence for it. Early in twenty nineteen, the
book pairs mentioned and evidence based critique of contemporary psychoanalysis research, theory,
and clinical practice was published. In it, he calls for

(03:22):
psychoanalysis to tie itself more closely to a scientific and
clinical base. The field's very existence, he argues, depends upon it.
He wrote in a paper on the subject, quote, psychoanalysis
claimed to be a science, but did not function like one.
It failed to operationalize its hypotheses, to test them with
empirical methods, or to remove constructs that failed to gain

(03:45):
scientific support. The field may only survive if it's prepared
to dismantle its structure as a separate discipline and rejoin
academia and clinical science. And this isn't a new point
of view. Frederick Cruz, one of the world's foremost freud critics,
wrote more than twenty years ago, independent studies have begun

(04:05):
to converge toward a verdict that was once considered a
sign of extremism or even neurosis, that there is literally
nothing to be said scientifically or therapeutically to the advantage
of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas.
Hoof analyze that another of Freud's ideas was that every
memory we have is stored in our minds, but that

(04:27):
some are repressed because of childhood trauma or other reasons.
Those repressed memories, he said, could only be mined through psychoanalysis.
That premise has also taken a beating as science has
discovered more about the intricacies and capabilities of the brain. Still,
even time can't take away the fact that Freud was
inarguably one of the most famous thinkers of his era

(04:50):
and has remained somewhat influential far beyond it even today.
A few of Freud's ideas survive, and in some instances
may be better than what's offered by modern science. Paris said,
a lot of people in my profession today just write prescriptions.
That's all they do all day, and I think they
do patients a great disservice because they don't know how

(05:10):
to listen to them or understand their life stories. I
think the problem with Freud was he had been trained
as a neuroscientist in the late nineteenth century, but there
were no tools to apply scientific methods to what he
was doing, so he just speculated. He actually thought that
you could sort of X ray people's minds by having
them lie on a couch and free associate. It's not true,

(05:32):
but I think that the whole idea of understanding people's
life story is something we should not get rid of.
We need to listen to people. Let's not take all
of the psychology out of psychiatry, but let's try to
stick to theories where the science is really good. Today's
episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler clayg.

(05:54):
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