What Is Freudian Psychology?

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Freud built a secret inner circle to guard his theory from scrutiny and protect its “purity”.

In 1897, Freud reversed his findings that child sexual abuse was real, calling it fantasy, instead.

Freud expelled those who disagreed with him from his inner circle, forming a cult of personality.

Early psychoanalysis was marked by high information, thought, and emotion control.

You already speak the Freudian language. Words you use without thinking come from one man, and so does the talking cure, the foundation of nearly every psychotherapy practiced today. Many of his insights still help us, and his status as one of the “fathers of psychology” is perhaps well earned. So why would someone who has spent fifty years studying cults and undue influence look at Sigmund Freud at all?

Frankly, as someone who studies cults and treats cult survivors, I recognize cult patterns in the movement Freud built around himself. When one studies the early Freudians, what emerges is not that of an open scientific community.

It would be an improper accusation to call Freud a fraud, and I am not calling psychoanalysis a cult. However, using a metric of influence I have constructed called the Influence Continuum, which runs from healthy influence at one end to authoritarian control at the other, the early psychoanalytic movement does not sit at the healthy end.

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