Yet Freud is wrong.
Why do we know? Because it doesn’t work. Freud’s theory, on its own terms, necessarily interfaces with reality. Yet when it does so, it fails. Knowing that Freud is wrong is fundamentally a matter of learning from experience. It is a thing that happens in time. It is not an argument.
Freud fails because he claimed the ability to help people. Individual people who could be checked up on to see if they got better.
But what if Freud had no interface with reality? What if Freud created a fantasy world full populated by egos, superegos, and ids but only purported to explain, not to heal?
Then you would have Durkheim.
What if Freudian theory interfaces with reality but had
A. a well developed, complex, theoretical literature purporting to prove that everyone who disagreed was crazy, under a spell of “false consciousness” and
B. an enormous corpus of contradictory gospels such that every possible objection has at least one quotation specifically refuting it?
Then you’d have Marx.
And what if this article is true????