What Use is Freud?

Abstract

More than a hundred years into our field’s development, examining Freud’s place in psychoanalytic education is timely. What authority does he hold for psychoanalysts in 2021? Is he still the architect, or overseer, of psychoanalysis? Freud has been a metonym for psychoanalysis, yet the history of Freud’s identification with the totality of psychoanalysis has had important unfortunate consequences. Negative aspects of this identification subtly linger, interfering in our collective appreciation of post-Freudian theoretical innovations. Too much of psychoanalysis has been “bought at the company store” of Freud’s ideas. Though part of this problem is created by idealizations of Freud, much of it stems from Freud’s precocious emphasis on psychoanalytic findings within his tripartite definition of psychoanalysis. As a result, many of his theoretical accounts were taken prematurely as definitive building blocks for a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory, when in fact they were only provisional formulations. Presently, portions of Freud’s theories are silently withering on the psychoanalytic vine. Data from the PEP-Web archive reveal the declining use of a set of once important, closely linked conceptions—Freud’s psychosexual theory and his characterology—and illustrate the kinds of Freudian ideas that have lost their usefulness. The indispensable and enduring elements in his work are identified.