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Azathoth123 comments on Open thread, 25-31 August 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Freud's theory was supposed to be a theory of the human mind, thus it should apply to humans in every human society. So why are you focusing on one society in particular (specifically one that was heavily shaped by people who believed Freud's theories) as your demonstration that Freud was correct?
Edit: Could you state the controversial theory of Freud's that you claim has been demonstrated. Surely you don't mean his entire theory of psychosexual development.
No. That theory is a textbook example of burdensome details. (Also, typical family fallacy.) I can imagine that having a problem at age X -- which in given culture is associated with doing Y -- could visibly increase the probability of having a psychological symptom Z in adult age. But that theory just gives too much details for something that at best would be a wide probabilistic distribution of outcomes.
Mind composed of multiple agents; people often motivated by sex even when they deny it; human mind not well adapted to civilization; religion as institutionalized neurosis.
They don't seem controversial anymore. (Okay, the last one does to many people.)
So Freud was correct if you ignore the details of what he said and steelman the hell out of what he "meant".
The idea of the mind being composed of multiple components has been around for all of recorded history. Granted it wasn't phrased as multiple "agents", but Freud didn't phrase it that way either.
Yes, people sometimes deny their true motivations. However, the specific claim that these secret motivation is almost always sexual is still not clear today, and probably false.
If this is meant to refer to his theory of psychological repression. It's become clear that he's way of stating that wasn't a good idea. Certainly worse that the traditional way of stating that, namely that children need to be taught to like good things and dislike bad things.
Well, the attempts at creating states without this neurosis created even more neurotic states, but I suppose you already knew that.
I dispute that. There is evidence that some cultures had concepts of multiple souls; the Ancient Egyptians and Inuit come to mind. But Greek and post-Greek philosophy and the Abrahamic religions firmly established the idea that humans have a single indivisible ("monadic") soul in all the cultures they pervaded, and that very much includes 19th century Vienna.
So you might say components models of the mind existed, but they certainly weren't "around". Freud might have heard of the Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul but it certainly wasn't something a mainstream scientist could have referred to to credibilitize his theory.
Which is why one of the mot commonly read Platonic dialogues, The Republic had a famous treatment of the psyche as being three parts with not a little resemblance to the id/ego/superego, and his student Aristotle has a hierarchy of faculties?
BTW, FWIW IIRC Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy claimed that the soul was indivisible and pointed to inattentional blindness as evidence for that.