Modern Psychotherapies: One Is Either Freudian or Anti-Freudian

Why do people still discuss the relevance of Sigmund Freud’s discoveries and their impact on the 21st century? The short answer is that like Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin, Freud described a method of studying what was unknown before.

Einstein turned the world of physics upside down—that there were physical forces that were not plainly observable.

Darwin communicated that the human species and the other species on the planet have many similarities and that the special place of humans was not as special as we humans wished them to be.

Freud discovered that we all have irrational forces within us, of which we are not fully conscious and that we cannot always consciously control.

This idea, that we are not always conscious of our wishes and desires, has led to controversy ever since Freud’s initial description of unconscious mental activity. Almost routinely, since Freud's death in 1939, the question has been asked: Is Freud (and by implication, psychoanalysis) relevant? Or, as it often is phrased, "Is Freud dead?"

While some of Freud's theories about human development have been refocused, altered, or even discarded, his two most important discoveries have been empirically proven:

• That an individual's actions, thoughts, and feelings are influenced by factors outside his or her awareness (the unconscious).
• That an individual's childhood experiences have a profound influence on development and personality.

These remain undisputed.

What's more, much of the language of Freud—the unconscious, repression, talking cure, slip of the tongue, free association—has become the common parlance in modern life; in fact, leading to the idea that we are all Freudians now. It is important to understand that the scientific study of the mind is very difficult and that many say that no superior theory of the functioning of the mind has been able to replace psychoanalytic theory.

Since Freud’s times, the number of talking therapies has increased by many hundreds—I have heard the number as being like 400. We have to remember that whichever form of therapy an individual chooses, Freud is behind it—either as an elaboration and expansion of what psychoanalysis wrote about or issues that he overlooked. One can say that psychoanalysis has given a frame of reference for talk therapy in general, enabling therapists to better understand human motivation.

Over the next period of time, I will discuss some of the central ideas that are relevant today.