Psychoanalysis Is Dead ... So How Does That Make You Feel?

As seen in an article published in the LA Times

We now know that Freud compulsively fudged the historical record. This tendency is evident in Freud's backsliding statements on his advocacy of cocaine, his opportunism concerning the case of Anna O., his flip-flops on the seduction theory, and in almost every instance where he mentions a patient.

Just ask the "Wolf Man," Sergius Pankejeff, whom Freud supposedly cured but who was, in truth, consigned to psychoanalysis for an additional 60 years. Not surprising, Pankejeff considered Freud's effect on his life a "catastrophe."

We also know that Freud never seriously dealt with the problem of "suggestion," which totally compromised his clinical findings and, by extension, his theories. Already, by the 1890s, few believed in Freud's convenient claim that suggestion — the undue influence of the psychoanalyst over the patient — was possible only in the biologically predisposed and was thus of no consequence to his findings. Amazingly, these critical insights were buried under Freud's rhetoric of denial and by his growing fame. Now we've come full circle.