rationalskepticism.org

katja z wrote: You're spot on. My background is literary studies and Lacan is an important reference there, mostly because his writings were very important in the elaboration of poststructuralist thought. Other scholars, such as Harold Bloom in his influential account of "the anxiety of (literary) influence", have drawn directly on Freud (more embarrassingly, so have numerous "interpretations" of writers/fictional characters such as Hamlet - Freud started this himself with his analysis of Oedipus the King). Lacan also remains an important reference in philosophy.

My problem is, what is the value of theories based on Freudian approaches if those aren't really valid? They can't somehow acquire validity just because they cross over to another discipline. They can generate interesting new ways of looking at things, and that is all to the good, but appeals to their authority bother me.

You're quite right. That the ideas prove useful has little bearing on whether they are actually valid or correct.

To be clear where I am coming from, I'm a psychiatrist and also a psychoanalyst, with most of my latter training being in a classical Freudian approach. Nonetheless, I am in agreement with many of the comments in this thread that most of Freud's specific ideas don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. As you suggest, his chief importance is as the originator of a method of hermeneutics and, more specifically, the application of this hermeneutic method as a therpeutic intervention.

So to my mind, his most enduring contribution is the idea of interpretation as a therapeutic technique. IOW, the idea that a person's thoughts, emotions and actions can be interpreted and understood in the same way a work of art such as a play or novel can be, and that communicating this understanding to the person is therapeutically effective. This is a hypothesis that can, and has been, tested scientifically and found to have considerable evidence to support it. The confirmation of this hypothesis, however, says nothing about the validity of the interpretations themselves, nor of the philosophy underlying them. And in this regard, it is interesting to note that no one, to my knowledge, has been able to demonstrate any difference in results based on various different psychoanalytic schools of thought, despite the fact that these schools can vary greatly and even contradict each other.