[aridiculous]

From my understanding he was starting a radical new thread of ideas that ran counter to the hard empiricism at the time that was going nowhere, or at least too slowly to help a significant portion of people (which remains the case today in my opinion). You can read the late 19th century state of neuroscience which sounds eerily close to today's views -- and the distaste for Freudianism espoused in your comment.

I have read a lot of Freud and still remain skeptical of some of the overall thrusts. But reading it and get the full context makes you realize that the modern interpretations of his thought are wildly reductionistic.

About his behavior with those in his following: It is true that he had many moments of harshness/weakness, but he was also surprisingly modern in his liberalism and self-scrutiny. I've read that he was extremely concerned about being taken seriously in the face of the large amount of reaction from society to uncomfortable ideas. So his method was to be hyper organized and disciplined.

One thing I really like about Freud is his openness to changing his ideas in the face of new evidence and his commitment to making sure there were people working on treatment/solutions to suffering that was currently happening. He was open to the idea of biological interventions in the future replacing his own interventions, but he wanted to do something that would help people now in the meantime. I don't think we've adequately established that more modern therapies and interventions work better in all types of cases and think his work is still very relevant, especially in certain types of cases. Not to mention that most of the modern therapeutic practices are based on his work in a way you can't easily tease out and cast out as irrelevant.

It seems much more likely to me that the fate of Freud's ideas were not as much discounted as integrated. Most bits of discounting was more because of other developments in society, industry, and academia. One easy example is that it's quite difficult to perform Freudian therapy at multiple times a week given modern billing and scheduling.

Again, I remain cautious about the utility of many of the ideas, but I'd recommending reading a serious book like Revolution in Mind (Makari) to ground you in the actual history of psychoanalysis. Almost everything I've read on internet blogs, articles, and some otherwise-serious writers are missing woefully important context.

[bowsamic]

The harsh empiricism was really only a thing in the anglosphere. Freud was continuing in the continental tradition he was surrounded by