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Standard objections
Sigmund Freud was a brilliant and dangerous fraud, or so many cognitive scientists believe. The Berkeley psychologist John Kihlstrom sums up current scientific sentiment when he writes:
[S]o far as we can tell Freud was wrong in every respect … [he] has been a dead weight on 20th century psychology … [Freud] is better studied as a writer, in departments of language and literature, than as a scientist, in departments of psychology. Psychologists can get along without him.
(Kihlstrom 2000: 48)Freud is thought to be dangerous because his work, while strongly appealing at an emotional level, lacks reliable scientific evidence. Even worse, as Kihlstrom observes, Freud actively discounted, ignored and attacked, ad hominem, those who used science to fault his doctrines:
[R]ecent historical analyses show that Freud's construal of his case material was systematically distorted and biased by his theories of unconscious conflict and infantile sexuality, and that he misinterpreted and misrepresented the scientific evidence available to him. Freud's theories were not just a product of his time: they were misleading and incorrect even when he published them.
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