The Psychology of your 20s - 441. The Freud Episode

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

Sigmund Freud is one of the most famous and contested names in psychology. Often reduced to couches, cigars, dreams, sex, and blaming everything on your mother, Freud’s real story is much more complicated. In this bonus episode, we take a look at who Freud actually was - his medical background, the development of his method, and why his views are so context specific. We explore:• The development of free association • The role of dreams and transference• Defence mechanisms and the unconscious• The structural model of the human psyche• Challenges to his theory• Freud's legacy: Anna and modern-day psychoanalysis Watch on Netflix: HERE Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [e-mail]  Our favourite sources:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559106/ https://www.cureus.com/articles/303246-matters-of-the-mind-a-look-into-the-life-of-sigmund-freud#!/ https://www.freud.org.uk/2020/04/07/freud-at-home-sigmund-and-annas-studies/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15293843/ The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is Sweet 305. Here, oversharing is encouraged. Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody. I'm Gemma Spike and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast and welcome to another bonus episode of the psychology of your 20s. This is a special mini-series. We're running within the podcast where we break down psychology concepts, theories and figures which have become vastly popular beyond the psychology space, especially online. And we essentially, give you the real facts and we myth bust some of the bogus information and ideas we have about these things or which are kind of promoted in online spaces. We've done dopamine. We've done

Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We have myth busted the legend that our frontal lobe develops at 25. We've done personality tests. But today we have the big cahuna of all episodes when it comes to psychology law. We are going to talk about none other than the infamous, the notorious, the famous, the well-known Sigmund Freud, the figure that I think has come to define modern psychology more than any other figure, maybe more than any other concept, and has also prompted a lot of misconceptions about psychology and the field of therapy in general. I'm not going to waste any time because we have a lot to talk about. This man, the man, the myth, the legend, got up to so many things during his life and his legacy is almost as big as what he actually

did. And I'm just going to tell you, this episode takes turns that you will never believe. Cocaine is mentioned. Feminism. Weird sexual beliefs he had. There is a lot to discuss. So let's get into it. So let's start. with the basics, who was Sigmund Freud. If you had never heard of him before, what would you need to know? So Sigmund Freud is, as I alluded to, just like the grandfather of modern psychology. He created an entire new perspective on the human mind, human emotions, human souls, and it's called psychoanalysis. More on that later, before he became the creator of psychoanalysis and

the famous name and figure of today. He was born in 1856 in what was then the Austrian Empire. At the time, Austria was very much the center of psychological thought and research. It was where so many major figures were teaching, learning, being born. His family later moved to Vienna. That's where he spent most of his life and his career. I was literally in Vienna last week. and I was, I didn't go to the Freud Museum and I knew it was there and I was just kicking myself. I just didn't have time. I went cycling and I went on a wine tour instead. So definitely a lot of fun but yeah, I didn't go and apparently it's amazing and apparently

it's literally his offices with his original couch, with his original carpeting, furnishing. If you look up a photo of Freud's office, it's very distinct. But just a reason to go back to Vienna, I guess. But he lived there. He lived in Austria. He lived in Vienna. with his family, with his daughter, up until his death, more on her later. But he, he didn't start out doing psychology as we know it today. He didn't start out thinking the things that he went on

to think, obviously. He actually trained as a medical doctor. And he began his professional life in neurology. He was medically trained. He was very interested in the nervous system, in the brain. He wanted to help people with things like epilepsy, with forgetfulness, coordination issues. But he became very interested in patients who's, they had physical symptoms, but they didn't have a physical explanation. So they had things like paralysis, like pain, fainting, distress, compulsion, speech difficulties, all these other things. And physicians of the time couldn't account for them medically.

they couldn't account for them really, they didn't think about them as emotional either. And so at the time he was working in specifically in neurology, but back then, psychiatry, neurology, psychology, they weren't really divided up in the way they are today. It was just kind of one big pot of things to do with the body and the brain and the mind. And many of the symptoms that they were observing, which were physical but also emotional in nature, they just got grouped together and they were given a specific diagnosis of hysteria or hysteria, depending on how you pronounce it. This is a term that we would not use today, right?

We wouldn't say that somebody has hysteria. It's very loaded with gendered assumptions about women's bodies, women's emotions, credibility. In fact, about 80% of the people who were diagnosed with hysteria were women. And even the symptoms, the way that it was described, was agended. So it included things like wanting to have too much sex as a woman, but equally not wanting to have any sex at all, relationship dissatisfaction, sadness in the home, but then also enthusiasm, being too passionate. That was another criteria. So not the nicest or the most accurate

or the most helpful of diagnosis that you could get at the time, but Freud saw this and he wanted to understand this label and the suffering beneath it in a way that was just a bit more articulate and structured and organized and went deeper than that current level. For his time, the way he went about this was really scientific. I think that's a very crucial part. You know, when we look at his work and some of the things that he does, which we'll talk about in a second, we often look at it through the lens of the time period that we are in now, where we're kind of like, that's probably not okay. That's probably not scientific. But we need to. We need. to understand where he was at. You know, he was operating before there was any kind of brain

imagery, before there was any kind of, you know, modern trauma science. It was pre-randomized control groups, pre-developmental psychology, pre-ethics bodies. And it was born out of the context of Victorian era assumptions about sex, gender, class, family, respect, rules. We're talking here about somebody who was very rapid. for his period of time, he was also deeply limited by it. But the thing is, is that we couldn't have gotten to where we were without him. Like, he really pushed the needle. He really tried things. He really attempted to construct what we now call a method or a hypothesis or a sample size or an intervention. So what was he actually doing? What was he actually trying out that was so

quote unquote radical? So early on, he was influenced by this one case. And this was really really what kind of pushed him into doing more scientific things. It was the case of Bertha Pappenheim. She's also known as Anna O. So that was her pseudonym that he wrote about her as Anna O. And she was experiencing like really distressing symptoms. She was experiencing paralysis, hallucinations, visual disturbances, confusion. And at the time, she was also looking after her dying father. Freud was very close to this case. He was a medical student at the time. He was a medical student at the time, he was watching it. He wrote so much about it because it suggested that physical seeing symptoms might be connected to emotional experiences. And he kind of put that forward.

He goes, you know, we're trying to find a parasite. We're trying to find something that's wrong with her brain. We're trying to explain this through all these different avenues. Did anybody just think to ask her about how she's coping with her dad? Did anybody just think to go into her childhood and her early memories with her father and how they might be making this particularly distressing. And this really shaped what became psychoanalysis, the talking cure. Essentially what Freud said was that human pain is like, kind of like a parasite in the body that needs to be extracted. Talking through emotionally charged memories, revealing emotionally charged moments, being honest about your feelings and about your past,

you know, digging below the surface of human desire and human thought, that is what allows that extraction. That is what helps ease physical symptoms. I also want to say side note, Anna O, back to her. She, yes, in Freud's work was written under a pseudonym, but Bertha, the woman who was Anna O, she actually went on to become a very famous writer. She was a very, very well-known social worker. She was a very well-known feminist. She was a major figure in German-Jewish women's welfare and did a lot of activism. So a little bit of a side note for the history of this. She was also pretty incredible. So then Freud moved on. He went to Paris and he studied under a very famous neurologist called Jean-Martin-Sharkot. I always butcher the French. I'm sorry. If you're French,

oh, you speak French. I know what that sounds. That's probably know how it said. But look, up John Martin Jockot in Paris and this is when he started learning about things like hypnosis and interrogation and suggestion to help patients access memories or feelings that were buried very deep in the unconscious mind. Over time though, he kind of moved away from that. He, this was his first kind of step towards modern practices. He moved away from hypnosis in particular because he realized you know, it just didn't work for everybody. It also wasn't entirely accurate and he wanted something that felt a little bit less stressful. And so he developed a now very famous method called free association. This is a very important term. One of the terms most associated with Freud, free association. It was a method where he essentially found ways to get patients to say whatever came to mind, whatever memories they were thinking, even if it was embarrassing, irrelevant, repetitive, strange. He wasn't. He wasn't. He was, he was wanted it to just come out. He just wanted them to just spill their guts, basically. He also did dream analysis. So he really felt that our memories and our pain and our trauma and what was

bothering us was revealed through dreams, because that was when the subconscious mind is most relaxed. But at its simplest form, all of these are methods of psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysis was this theory that underneath our conscious thoughts, our conscious patterns, our conscious behaviors are these wishes and these fears and these conflicts and these memories and defenses that we don't fully recognize that are seeping through. And once you discover those influences, once you tear apart those conditions, I guess, that is when you can help somebody with their conscious problems, with their everyday issues. Today, like the idea that talking about your feelings might help you or thinking about your past might help you or thinking about your

unconscious motivations might help you is pretty obvious. But back then it wasn't. And Freud helped move Western mental health care towards this idea that, again, physical or behavioral symptoms have a psychological emotional meaning. And if you were to listen carefully to somebody's inner world, you could help them. And that's where, like, that's where what he did was very, very powerful. Should also be said, he did some other things. He tried in order to access the unconscious mind, or the pre-conscious mind, he experimented with a lot of ways of doing this. Cocaine was the other one. He, Freud, in the early days of his career, loved cocaine.

He loved using it. He loved prescribing it. He loved giving it away. He thought it not only lowered inhibitions, so allowing for greater free association, but he also called it the miracle drug for depression and other mood disorders. And he wrote this massive, massive, massive. paper called Uber drug, because of course he spoke German, about it. And it was like it like went the equivalent of like viral like back in the day. A lot of people were reading this. And then he went

back on that. Later in his life, he was like, I think cocaine is awful. I would not prescribe it. I do not use it. The reason why he accidentally, well accidentally, I don't think he intended this to happen, which is why it was an accident. But he did, he got one of the. of his best friends addicted to cocaine. Like seriously dependent and he saw this man suffering with addiction and he saw him like his life just like be derailed and he was like, okay, so maybe that's not the solution. Let's talk about some of his other famous ideas and other famous things associated with Freud, one of them being him and his couch. I think it is the typical image of Freud to have him in a chair, his patient laying on their back on a couch, reciting their dreams, being asked about their

mother and their father whilst he takes notes, being shown inklots and asking them, you know, what do you see here? Is that accurate? Yeah, there is actually a big grain of truth to this idea. Freud did use a couch, as was apparently in the museum that I didn't see, but apparently the couch is there. He did ask patients to speak freely. He did interpret. dreams, slips of the tongue, known as Freudian slips, childhood memories. But it wasn't as freestyles as we think. So he wasn't just like, come in and just chat about it. He had a very strict set of questions. He had certain criteria. He had theories. He had structures. He also had this method of sitting out, like directly out of the line of sight of the patient because he

believed it helped them speak more freely. He believed it was important. He believed it was important. to not feel like there was somebody analyzing you, even if that is what was happening. He kept very diligent case notes. And the other part about Freud's method was that he was really aware of the role of something called transference. This is the idea that feelings from early relationships, parents, siblings, even early romantic relationships can be replayed in the therapy relationship. So for example, a patient might experience a therapist as rejecting or critical or comforting or

maybe authoritative, not because of what the therapist is doing in the room, not because they are rejecting them or judging them, not because they are critical, but because of old relational patterns that are being activated or reactivated through the interaction. A therapist can feel like a parent or a teacher at times, which is not what we're what we want them to feel like. And Freud was very aware of that. This was one of his biggest contributions that I don't think many people talk about in which he doesn't get much credit for.

He recognized that therapy is not just confined to a discussion about the patient's life outside of the therapy room. What is happening in the therapy room, how they see the therapist, the relationship between the person trying to help and the person needing help, and all the baggage that they come in with as individuals becomes a huge part of that work and and becomes a huge part of whether somebody's therapy or treatment is successful. So that's how he went about treatment. Beyond that, what were his actual core theories? Something interesting that is still very common for psychologists these days to do. Less so then it was very common was that they would practice and they would help people

and then they would also research and they would contribute ideas. So they'd spend kind of 50-50 of the time, seeing clients, seeing patients, having that exposure to real people, and then the other amount of the time hypothesizing, writing articles. They weren't doing experiments on the grand scale that we would now expect in psychology. They were just kind of theorizing based on what they saw. This is what Freud's core theories are. Firstly, we have briefly mentioned the idea of conscious, pre-conscious, and the unconscious mind and how psychoanalysis is really concerned with the unconscious mind and what's going on in that

kind of labyrinth. This is often explained and you would have seen it using the iceberg metaphor. So if you've ever seen when you were in high school or in uni or just literally your workplace or like in a therapist office, an iceberg that says, you know, the conscious mind is the top and then all that's below is the pre-conscious unconscious. That was Freud's idea. And he again believed that there was this large amount of what influenced our behavior and our attitudes and our personality and who we were that we could not touch or even feel or kind of see. Now there are certain aspects of this that aren't accepted in modern psychology, but the broader idea that mental processes happen outside of our conscious awareness is pretty widely accepted.

Cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, trauma therapy, like all those things. They all recognize this as an important thing and something that does occur. Tickster Freud, he was the one who kind of started that. Another major contribution is Freud's structural model of the mind. He believed that the mind wasn't just made up of conscious, pre-conscious, unconscious, or subconscious. It was made up of the id, the ego, and the super ego. We have spoken about this at length on the podcast before. But essentially, the term ego, the way that we use the word ego is not as Freud initially

thought of it as. You know, it has been misunderstood. For him, well, we'll start with the id first. So the id, the ego, the super ego, the id is the instinctual, impulsive part of your mind. It is the part of you that wants immediate satisfaction. It's associated with pleasure, aggression, hunger, sexuality, desire, doesn't care about consequences. It doesn't care about what is socially acceptable. It just wants, it craves. The super ego is the opposite. It represents internalized rules, morality, guilt, ideals, expectations.

It's the part of you that is critical, that is overly cautious. And the ego sits between them. Ego doesn't mean arrogance. For him, ego meant self-awareness, balancing. It meant the brain's in the part of our brain that negotiates between desire and morality, reality and consequences. So if the id wants something immediately and this super ego shames you for wanting that, the ego is the part that's trying to manage the conflict in a way that allows us, the person, to function. And I think that captures something very recognizable in us as humans. We often experience a conflict between what we want, what we think we should want, and what reality allows for or what is deemed acceptable.

Another key contribution beyond the id, the super ego, the ego and the unconscious, oh my God, so many unconscious, preconduous, subconscious, he had a lot of terms, is his idea of psychosexual development. Now, this is one of Freud's most famous and most controversial ideas, and you have definitely heard of it before. Definitely. There are too many pop culture references to count at this stage. Freud proposed that, this is the part you may not have heard of, I will say.

Freud proposed that children move through different stages of development. There is the oral, the anal, the phallic, latency, and genital stages graphic. But he believed that unresolved conflicts at each of these stages shapes our personalities as adults. For example, he argued that if a child experienced frustration or, overindulgence during the oral stage, which centers on feeding and sucking, they might become overly dependent on habits like smoking or overeating or nail biting later in life, because that is how they learned to suit themselves. During the anal stage, which focuses on toilet training, so it's not all sexual, it's just intimate.

Overly strict parenting in the anal stage might produce somebody who is very orderly, who is a perfectionist, very controlling. And lacks parenting during the stage means that somebody becomes messy or impulsive. And he believed that these kind of unresolved tensions, which he called fixations, would leave a lasting imprint on how people think, how people behave, how they relate to others as adults.

This is also where the famous Oedipus complex comes in. In Freud's theory, during the phallic stage, A young child, it gets a bit weird from here, just a heads up, a young child he believed develops unconscious feelings of desire for the opposite sex parent and therefore a sense of rivalry with the same sex parent to win the opposite sex parents' attention. Now, he focused specifically on boys. He argued that boys unconsciously desire their mother and see their fathers as rivals and fear punishment from him. He also believed that this process was important for the development of the

super ego. Then that essentially resolving this is what allows us to understand what is right. And that incest is not okay. There's also the female version of this, which is the Electra complex. I think it goes without saying it's not entirely accurate, if not accurate at all. It's very heteronormative. Freud was known to make a lot of things unnecessarily about sex, including child development, which is obviously a little bit odd. Not a little bit, it's quite odd that he was very fixated on this. But yeah, he made a lot of things about sex that didn't need to be about sex, like parental conflict or, you know, growing up or being a teenager or being a messy person, you know, has nothing to do with sex and all these things, but he really made it so. And this is an example of that. The last

famous theory of his we're going to talk about today is the idea of defense mechanisms. Let's have a palate cleanser from talking about oral, phallic, anal, all that stuff. And talk about something else. Defense mechanisms were in part his. He started this idea. They were further developed by his daughter. Defense mechanisms, if you know this term, you've probably heard it before, there are ways that the protects itself from anxiety, conflict, shame, or emotional pain by using methods of denial, projection, rationalization, repression, and displacement to kind of shield us, to kind of put a buffer or a barrier between us and the raw feeling. Essentially, it's just the ways that each of us tries to deal with discomfort in a unique way to ourselves and our history. A simple explanation is

that maybe you feel hurt, but instead of admitting that someone has hurt you, you become rude and dismissive towards somebody else in order to regain a sense of power. That's displacement. Sometimes someone who has been repeatedly romantically rejected will claim that they hate relationships. They just don't see the point. You know, love is lame. Monogamy is unnatural. You know, people who are in relationships are cringe. This is another defense mechanism. It's called reaction formation, where somebody responds with the radical opposite of what they are really feeling and what they really want in order to conceal their true desires. Another example, you fail a job interview. You fail a job interview. You really wanted it. And then you find

all the reasons to believe that the job would have sucked anyways instead of just feeling unhappy about it. You start convincing yourself, you know, I would have been miserable. I didn't like that guy who interviewed me. You know, I actually didn't really want that job. That's rationalization, creating a more acceptable explanation to protect yourself from disappointment, rejection, or vulnerability. Defense mechanisms are not automatically bad and they can really protect us from the emotional intensity of certain scenarios. The problem with defense mechanisms comes from when they become rigid and they stop us from seeing reality clearly, this is when they become maladaptive, maladaptive being something that is at the end of the day, unhelpful for your

functioning in your survival. Now, like I said, Freud had this initial idea, but it was his daughter, Anna Freud, who developed this more systematically and who gave words to what he was trying to describe. Anna is a really important part of this episode, because because she became a very well-known psychoanalyst in her own right. She is especially associated with child psychoanalysis, with ego psychology, with ways of human coping, with child development, and this still shapes how clinicians think about psychology to this day. Now, her relationship with her father was really complicated by modern standards.

She was insanely devoted to him. She worshipped him. She worked very closely with him. She cared for him during his illness. She also underwent analysis with him. He formed some of his ideas based on his relationship with his daughter. Now, this is the guy who created the Oedipus and the Electro Complex, so you can see why that's a little bit weird that his daughter was also not just a patient,

but a case study for him. He provided her with, yeah, with treatment and interventions and took notes on her own behavior. that's pretty unethical today. Actually, it was probably very unethical back then. And it was, when you think about Freud's work, a lot of what he talked about may have come from his relationship with his own daughter, which is a little bit weird. But Anna did, like, went on and was very, very successful.

And she built really incredible institutions. She worked with children affected by war. She helped basically establish childhood trauma, or the treatment of children with trauma and PTSD. as its own kind of clinical thing. She was very interested in children. She was very interested in their emotional lives. So her relationship with her father aside, the influence that she's had is positive and is remarkable and is an important part of this discussion of like Freud's legacy. Obviously she acted of her own accord. She was her own person. But there is a legacy to this that I think

does continue to be quite positive. And Anna's work going on from her father's is a big contribution. Okay, let's take a short break here. And when we return, let's talk a little bit more about his legacy and what psychologists think of him these days. So stay with us. I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Encore. Check out our brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak. Heated rivalry. Join me as I go behind the songs that brought Shane and Elia together. I'll tell you the stories of Fice, My Moon, My Man, wolf parades, I'll believe in anything,

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My first guest is Paris Hocin, Shakira, Luke and Ierian, Samira and Gracie. I'm so excited. On the bouncy bed. You have surprises? Many surprises. Welcome to Sweet 305 where the group chat comes to life. What a f***. It's like a way of saying like,

oh, my God, hello, my friend, hello, hermina. What a fuck. Look, never I've ever been able to talk to. Except with my kids. My kids, if you know. Yes. I'm my amante. Oof.

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I'd like to collaborate with this person. This is Sweet 305. Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Culture Podcast Network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Chelsea handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse.

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So join Yamanika each episode as she answers one question. Who's the problem? I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So Freud's influence is enormous, but so are the problems with his work. Now, his theories weren't evidence-based in the way that we would want today. You know, he didn't use random samples.

He didn't do control trials. He didn't do a intervention and no intervention condition. He developed many of his ideas through, as we said, case studies in clinic observations, theoretical reasoning. This doesn't automatically mean that his theories are worthless. They're not because we still use a lot of the ideas today. But it does mean that they weren't tested using the kinds of methods that we would expect now. His theories were also because of this, and in addition to this, very difficult to falsify. This basically means that they were hard to prove wrong. Now,

this sounds like a really good thing, but in the field of psychology, falsifiability is one of the most essential principles that separate science from pseudoscience. Basically, you have to present a hypothesis or an idea that if there was proof to the contrary, is in, you could, find it and you could make an argument for it. This is to ensure that, you know, research isn't just being created based on a closed belief system. I'm going to explain this a little bit better. Let's give the example of the Oedipus complex. If somebody doesn't seem to have an Oedipus complex, that might be seen as proof that the Oedipus complex doesn't exist because here are all these people who aren't romantically attracted to their own fathers.

But Freud's theories would say that is not true. They do. It's just that their desire is buried even deeper than expected in their unconscious. It's that they just don't admit it. It's not that the idea is false. It's that this person is just concealing that desire. So you can see how a lot of his ideas of the unconscious make it very easy to disprove what he's saying. because he can always just say, well, their coping mechanisms are shielding them from accessing

this. Their memory or their feelings are repressed more than, more than you can imagine, and nothing that I can do can get them up, but those feelings are definitely still there. The other thing is, you know, if a patient agreed with Freud's interpretation of their problems, that's evidence that his interpretations are correct. But if a patient rejected his ideas, If a patient said, hey, I actually don't think that I have an issue with my parents. I actually don't think I had an issue in childhood. I really had a happy childhood. Like, I really disagree with you.

He would say, well, that's because you have resistance. That's because of our therapeutic relationship. It's because you don't trust me. My theory is correct. Your memories are the ones that are incorrect. Your resistance to therapy is what's making you not believe. So as a result of this, a lot of people, have suggested that psychoanalysis is a bit of a pseudoscience. That's part of a much broader

debate, but it's important to say a lot of people don't agree with psychoanalysis. They don't think that every single problem has this weird unconscious origin. Sometimes the explanation is just a little bit more clear. That's for another time. I'm not going to touch that anymore because I know people have opinions. Another thing to note about how applicable his theories are, Freud developed most of his theories, as I said, from a small group of patients, but these patients weren't an accurate sample of people living across the world. They weren't even an accurate sample of people living in Europe or in Vienna. The majority of his patients were middle-class women of high-income. the majority across his entire career.

So that makes our ability to generalize what he was saying difficult. His theories probably don't reflect every single individual in the world. They don't reflect different cultures. They don't reflect how different societies operate. They reflect the world around him when he was writing, which was very patriarchal, which was Victorian, European, deeply classed and deeply shaped by restrictive ideas about sexuality, gender, and race, even religion. You know, his ideas about women in particular, you know, they haven't aged very well.

One in particular is another theory that I didn't mention before, but is important, which is seduction theory. early in his career Freud argued that some of his patients' symptoms, especially what was then called hysteria, could be traced back to childhood sexual abuse or unwanted sexual experiences.

He was like, these women are crazy because at some stage in their past somebody did something to them that they didn't want to happen. Now that is an incredibly layered statement. That is, there is a lot of stuff that is wrong, some stuff that is, you know, most of it's wrong, actually, saying that, oh, this woman is hysterical because of trauma. A, kind of belittles the trauma and makes it

seem like, well, she's disturbing everybody else and that's the problem rather than what's happened to her. B, doesn't necessarily help them with that trauma. It just gives them a label without exploring how to move past what they've experienced. The biggest issue, C, was that a lot of these women were like, that didn't happen to me. Like, that you're trying to dismiss me by saying this thing happened to me, and I'm saying that it didn't. And so you can't just dismiss me and say,

oh, well, she's a victim of this, and that's why she's behaving that way. When I'm telling you that didn't happen. And he'd be like, well, it's just because you don't remember it. And that is a really, really messed up situation to put somebody in. And he, I don't really have words to describe, like, how, I'm sure you understand the layers of inaccuracy and the layers of complexity and the layers of just ridiculousness that is associated with that in many ways.

You know, it's interesting because you see where he's getting at, and I hate to even say that, but he was like, you know, emotional drama creates physical reactions, and creates real pain later in life. And I'm seeing that in certain patience. And hopefully we can get them some help with that. But he, he wasn't, he didn't have that delicate gentleness towards it, that you should have. And again, he also tried to falsify people's memories and say, you know, this is what's happening. He later actually kind of moved away from that. He had, all these other ideas about like, oh, women who have sexual desire, it's because of, again, because somebody sexually assaulted them and all these weird feelings. And I don't think Freud came

close to recognizing like the impact that that had. And the impact that comes from talking about that and comes from just kind of experimenting with ideas and theories around that with real people. Like that is deeply harmful. It's very complex. The main issue, I think, with a lot of his theories, and it keeps coming back to this, is that they were incredibly speculative. They were also incredibly high stakes. They speculate over very serious, very impactful issues with people's lives. Sometimes he gets it right, but sometimes he doesn't. And getting it wrong was very, very harmful. And it's important that when we hear Freud's theories today, especially sometimes sometimes he doesn't. And of his theories around sex and around false memories and around the pre-conscious and the unconscious and around all these things, we take it at face value and understand, you know, how much we've developed psychology and how much we've developed our understanding of the mind and trauma from where he was acting in the late 1800s, early kind of 1900s. So beyond his theories, what was he actually like as a person? Freud was. Freud was.

famously very ambitious, very ambitious. He was very stubborn. He was very bold and he was apparently very aware of his own importance. He inspired a lot of deep loyalty in some people, a cultish following and strong opposition in others. His professional relationships in particular were very dramatic, like very gossip girl-esque, very, very dramatic. Partly because psychoanalysis, partly because psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis as a field became a movement during that time. It was like a cult. He also, as the founder of that movement, was very protective. He guarded membership very, very closely, and he did not respond well when others disagreed, which is funny because he wrote all about how the way we behave is representative of our,

about it and our ego and our super ego and our impulses and our desires. And yet he really couldn't get his under control. For example, he had some very public, pretty major disagreements with people like Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, who we mention all the time on the podcast. Adler, who was very famous at the time and still is for his ideas of the inferiority complex, birth order theory, if you've ever heard about the eldest daughter syndrome. Alfred Adler is who you have to thank for that one. He talked a lot about personality, psychology as well. They had a massive falling out. And I love the drama of this. I love the drama that these

two like psychological figures were like gossiping about each other and writing hit pieces and like little snarks in their papers. And he broke away from Freud. He was a psychoanalyst, partly because he thought Freud placed too much emphasis on sexuality and unconscious desire. He was a lot more Adler was a lot more interested in striving and social belonging and positive psychology and helping people overcome things and overcome insecurity. You know, where Freud really wanted to look backwards and to uncover hidden childhood conflicts, Adler was like, I'm focused on the future. I'm interested in goals. I'm interested in social context. I'm interested in meaning and how people find their place in the world. Even after he died, Alfred Adler, even after he died, Freud made

really awful public comments about him. So here's this guy who's like the grandfather of psychology and psychology is meant to help people and he was messy. He got into some trouble. He also had a big fight with, with Jung. He had a big fight. He fought with everybody. Again, a lot of the time the criticism was like, you make things too sexual, dude. Like, you're, you make things weird. A lot of these men were like, we, you're not actually that focused on helping. people, you just want to dig into their, into their past. And each professional split, each argument fragmented psychoanalyst into, like, different disciplines and into different versions of what it meant. Freud was also very influenced by his own experiences, as we all are. But I think

a lot of people like to think of him as this impartial genius who is making statements about the human condition that were universal, but he experienced a lot of social and political upheaval during his time, you know, the decline of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, he lived through the First World War, through economic instability, rising anti-Semitism in Europe, and this really shaped the intellectual climate in which he worked in. And his real emphasis on aggression and desire and conflict and irrationality and the animalistic nature of the human soul was probably because he was witnessing a lot of violence and a lot of destruction. And he was Jewish as well.

He was Jewish. He was living in Europe during a period of growing anti-Semitism. He was acutely aware of the impact of prejudice and exclusion and political instability. The Nazis literally burned. his books, like he was like on their hit list. And so it's important to see him as part of that as well and to not try and, like he was this human. He was human.

He was just one guy who had a lot of ideas that were really informed by his own experiences and his own hurts and his own trauma. And he wasn't the god that I think a lot of people think he was. He was very, very complex. And so I think that's where I stand personally with his legacy. He pushed psychology forward. There is no doubt. Like, any time you go into a therapist's office,

something they do, some part of their practice, something they have learnt was because of Freud and because of how he saw the therapeutic relationship between client and therapist. He also really expanded. how we think about trauma. I know I said he did so controversially, but really a lot of people weren't talking about it until he did, even if he spoke about it in a way that wasn't particularly delicate. Again, it was of the time. And he really encouraged the exploration about hidden

emotional lives. He really was like, he really wanted, he was a get curious. He wanted people to be curious about people's emotions and he really wanted to get to know people as complex individuals, which was very different from how psychology operated. So we're going to give him big, big ticks for that. He was also very flawed. He had a lot of blind spots, many blind spots. And that is the duality of Freud. And it's funny that the very thing he was trying to point to for his entire career,

which is like humans are these complex things. There's a battle between good and evil. There's a battle between unconscious and conscious between id and super ego between reality, your current moment and your past. Like, can you see where I'm getting? Like, he represented that as a person in probably one of the greatest ways. So it's almost a little bit poetic, isn't it? It's almost a little bit poetic who he was as a person, that he was, he represented his

work so deeply that he was his own attitude and his own way of operating and his personality was like the caricature of the theories and the ideas that he was. exploring. Oh my God. Guys, that would be such an interesting essay, right? I don't know. Am I going off on a tangent here? Yeah, I am. Okay. Back to the thing. I just think that would be so interesting. Freud's personal life as a manifestation, as a representation, as a representation of his work would be such an interesting PhD topic. God, I wish I could do that. If you want to use that, go ahead, please do, and send me the paper when you're done in like three years with that. But that is all we have on Freud.

I said it was a bonus shorter episode. I'm like, have been speaking for like an hour. So thank you. If you have made it this far, I hope you have learnt something about this mystical man. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Oh, I'll also say he has a great, great granddaughter. Freud's great granddaughter has a podcast. Yeah.

And it's called Fashion Neurosis. and she literally had like Charlie X-E-X on. So another interesting part of his legacy, his daughter is a podcaster. No, not his daughter. His great-great-granddaughter is a podcaster. So there you go. Maybe we should have her on.

Maybe I'll reach out to her actually and just be like, she probably doesn't want to talk about her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. But very interesting tidbit. Thank you to our researcher Libby for helping us with this episode. Also, everybody say congrats. I know I was just speaking about P.A. but Libby just finished up three months in Australia doing PhD research and she's coming to the tail end and we're very, very proud of her and she is a hidden force behind this podcast. So everybody say

congratulations to Libby in the comments below. If you learned something new about Freud, also leave that if you're listening to Spotify in a comment below. Make sure that you are following us on Instagram at That Psychology Podcast. You can also watch episodes. Not this one though, because this is a bonus episode, but all our other episodes on Netflix. And you can follow us on Substack for our study of the week group. It is a series where I break down one academic article into a five-minute read for you once a week. But God, until next time, this has been a big episode and I really enjoyed it. We will talk very, very soon. Thank you for listening. Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. Yeah, talk later.

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