What was wrong with Freud?
We like to pick on Sigmund Freud. He thought and he wrote so much that is strange.
Sometimes it feels as if he has become like a mix of “The Father” in his own imaginative theories, which are challenged and killed (and devoured ) by his sons – and by Särimmer in Norse mythology. He’s constantly re-emerging so you can beat him up again 🙂
But sometimes people manage to remind themselves that, okay, he actually lived a hundred years ago. How much else crazy and limited didn’t happen then! Diverse cultural personalities who were petty-Nazi, racist, misogynistic, etc. And at the same time recognized talented, artistic, profound, wise and sensitive individuals.
And then you can normally calm down a little, get your pulse down. It’s like you still have some basic understanding of what’s called “mentality history”, which can then be activated. Collective development has taken place on certain levels.
But, and this is where I was going to come!, I wonder if we who have taken deep impressions of new age/esoteric ideas can even be extra inclined to judge Freud? And have a hard time agreeing with his flaws? That our thought apparatus may even have become a little loose or underdeveloped in some respects because of those spiritual conceptions? How come?
Well (speculative), for being dazzled, intoxicated by the idea of “eternal, timeless wisdom”, “enlightened people” (and even the company of such individuals), etc., which have existed in all times & as have seen the world o their fellow men much as we ourselves can do, to the point, that Freud can then be dismissed as mediocre or a parenthesis.
When, in fact, he was so much ahead of his time that many of his discoveries has not yet had time to sink in… His thoughts still offer resistance, they are challenging. (Although a lot has also become part of the usual vocabulary, of course, and of the usual way we are looking at ourselves and each other.)
And he was a man of his time, as well.