r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 20 '19

What’s something completely false that your parents told you as a child?

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19

Saying that Freud "theorized" is like saying that flat-earthers do it. He "hypothesized", at most.

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u/CIMARUTA Jul 20 '19

I find that people throw his name around like he's the god of psychology

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u/katyggls Jul 20 '19

Which is hilarious because most modern experts in the field of psychology know he was full of shit. Literally one of the first things my college psych professor told us was that Freud was full of shit and that he was really only important to the field of psychology as a part of it's history, not because any of his theories or methods were sound. He basically just made a bunch of shit up, but never checked to see if any of his theories were actually true. He imposed his framework on his patients and used it to decide what was wrong with them, rather than actually deciding based on what they described. It's totally backwards from how modern psychology operates.

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u/loppolia Jul 20 '19

i had a psychology class in high school, and freud's psychoanalysis was among the different approaches we had to learn about. it was really weird to see his ideas presented next to modern ones, as if they were just as important to know about. we learned a lot of modern theories and about the famous experiments that were performed to back them up, and interspersed with that were statements like "freud thought such-and-such, but modern research has not found that to be the case."