His whole weird theory about penis envy and children being sexually attracted to their parents and secret desires and all that shit actually came straight out of an attempt to ally himself with wealthy and influential rapists and was a direct form of victim blaming.
He had started the research looking into “hysteria” which at the time was really usually referring to women’s symptoms of PTSD. It turned out that the reason so many woman had these symptoms is because so many of them had experienced sexual violence– especially CSA and incest at the hands of their fathers.
At first he was making real progress, and it was through working with these women that he discovered that talk therapy could be used to treat trauma. The symptoms of PTSD were lessened when women were able to safely speak about their experiences out loud and be believed.
But it wasn’t the women who paid for the therapy. It was their fathers, husbands, the same men who were perpetuating the violence in the first place. And Freud didn’t want to validate his patients (the women) if it meant making his clients (the men) unhappy.
So he came up with a new idea. These symptoms weren’t from trauma. The memories weren’t real. These women were just sexual beings as children and had penis envy and it made them lust for their fathers and fantasize about the rape that they had reported to him. That’s where the shittiest parts of Freud’s theories emerged.
Another part of it besides just the monetary aspect, though, was that there was a feminist movement on the fringes starting up at the time and by publishing work about women’s CSA he would be aligning himself with it and therefore losing support, respect, funding, prestige from his male peers and from the psychological community at large. He literally made that gross victim blaming shit up to keep his own reputation with these fucks and to make sure he still got publication and fame.
By coming up with fake theory about little girls fantasizing about incest he not only fucked over generations of women, the feminist movement that was arising, and the entire psychology field for years to come, but he also completely swept away any progress made in understanding trauma and so we didn’t have any clue why men coming back from war had “hysteria” like women during WWI.
And our research on PTSD and trauma is still lacking to this day, especially because of the stigma that maybe traumatized people deserved it or wanted it or imagined it. People don’t want to believe it’s real. Perpetrators of traumatic violence want everyone to forget about it, not acknowledge it, or trivialize it.
And they have Freud’s cultural legacy to help them.
Can you provide academic citations for this? This is really neat.
If you want some more, just google, “Sigmund Freud Seduction Theory Problematic.” There’s lots of academic and non-academic discussion on the topic, but TLDR Sigmund Freud is basically disregarded in almost all aspects of psychology by anyone who actually cares about their patients, so fuck that guy for holding psychology back.
Words cannot express how much I hate Freud. His theories have been entirely disproven by current psychological research, but using him to interpret literary texts is still a widely accepted technique in the field of literary study today.
English departments across the country will not bat an eye at tenured professors bringing Freud into lectures and citing him in scholarly articles and books. Doing a “Freudian reading” of a literary character or theme is regarded as a valid means of understanding and drawing meaning from works by authors as diverse as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and C.S. Lewis. And it is based entirely on this guy’s unbelievably sexist, flat-out fraudulent, and thoroughly disproven research. It’s insane.
Just so everyone on my dash is aware that Freud’s theories are pseudoscience.
I too hate Freud and everything he stands for. I just wish people knew why I hate him so much.
Oh wow I had no idea.
Psychology only likes Freud as far as he made psychology and psychotherapy popular enough to get funding and be properly developed as a science and not just an offshoot of philosophy.
This post is so funny to me because in Central European academia he’s still very much enshrined
As a female Psychology professor of the past 15 years, I hate Freud with my entire being. But - I promise you, none of us hate him nearly as much as Karen Horney did.
She was a student of Psychoanalysis, but she challenged his theories as condescending and incorrect on the regular. She desexualized Freud’s Oedipus complex ideology and took his disgusting idea of penis envy and publicly (in the middle of the NY Psychoanalytic Institute) challenged his ideas and declared that men have womb envy and thus is a primary reason they keep women in the home. She then was ousted from the space by the outraged followers of Freud, said “screw you” and went on to found and run the American Institute for Psychoanalysis (a one up on the men who had just ousted her). She developed and championed the study of Psychology and Women’s Studies and was the first person to ever present at a conference on the topic. She was an absolute badass.
Crazy how misandry “causes incels” who go on to rape and kill women and commit domestic terrorism when thousands of years of misogyny have not resulted in women slaughtering men en masse 🤔
