Freud and other psychodynamic theorists were basically the beginning of the idea within medicine and neurobehavioral sciences that people don't always have insight into their behavior.
Too much has been made of them on the basis of caricature and stereotype.
Maybe in the humanities it's still dominant but I don't get that sense.
It's always struck me as odd that people are fine idolizing and giving Nobel prizes to vague two-system theories of decision making ("fast and slow") but then turn around and act like Freud was the worst form of charlatan, when the former is just an empirically articulated form of the latter. Important difference but fundamentally not all that different in another way.
I feel silly defending Freud but sometimes I feel like the weird vitriol and animosity toward Freud is strange. As someone pointed out, it's like the general public getting angry with physicists for ever positing luminous ether, or getting angry with biologists for entertaining Lamarckian inheritance.
You shouldn't feel silly. The animosity towards Freud is completely understandable, and I think, pernicious. What people want to challenge is not Freud's crankery, but the destabilizing and widely accepted idea of a human subconscious. I see it most common in a certain kind of "rationalist" that doesn't want rational methods to extend to analyzing their own behavior.
