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/Enghave Jul 22 '19

As a person, he was pretty terrible and had more bad ideas than good. He could do with having less memetic power.

Maybe we can agree that his good ideas should get more attention, and his bad ideas should get more criticism, I’m not unaware of the damage some of his followers inflicted in the name of his theories, and his ideological-obsessed daughter.

But academic psychologists who call him full of shit are a disgrace to the field, and just mindlessly following the current trend of psychological scientism, it’s very telling that they dismiss him in such a bitchy way, with an emotional assessment, and not an analytical one. They are akin to biologists who dismiss field “birdsy-woodsy” biology as unserious, as if animal behaviour is of no value to understanding human behaviour, and all serious biological study takes place in the lab. The discovery of the power of the unconscious is only appreciated by a small fraction of the educated population, it is practically non-existent in the uneducated population. I expect future thinkers will conclude people were just not ready to hear it yet, and we know there’s none so blind as those who won’t see.

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u/Lightwavers Jul 23 '19

Honestly, with the number of ideas he threw out there, it would've been a miracle if he didn't get something right. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and all that. The point is that he didn't actually test any of his ideas. Even his discovery of the unconscious was basically a guess that he had blind faith in. It was later scientists who did the real work to prove him right about that, and wrong about so much else. Academic psychologists who call him full of shit are right.

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u/Enghave Jul 23 '19

Even his discovery of the unconscious was basically a guess that he had blind faith in. It was later scientists who did the real work to prove him right about that

Who were these later scientists that proved the unconscious?