Was Freud Right?

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Was Freud Right?
A century has passed since Freud started publishing the works that established his reputation as a scientist, healer, and sage. Although his standing as a clinical scientist and biologist of the mind has always been precarious among those capable of judging scientific competence, his admirers were by no means confined to the laity. According to one esteemed professor, “in 1938 the secretaries of the Royal Society brought Freud their official charter to sign, thereby joining his signature with Newton’s and Darwin’s” (Tallis). For better or for worse the unconscious will survive the attacks of doubters who would prefer to believe that only what can be scrutinized by the scientific method is real. In 1896 Freud found the key to his own system of analyzing human behavior; undoubtedly, replacing hypnosis with free association, otherwise known as Dream Analysis. Freud, along with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity revolutionized modern western thinking. Like wise, Freud was on the leading edge of psychoanalysis; however, Freud’s attempts to simplify human behavior must be questioned.
One way Freud attempts to simplify extremely complex behavior is through dream analysis. Sigmund Freud revolutionized the study of dreams with his work ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. “Freud believed that the motivating force of a dream is wish fulfillment. Additionally, dreams were a way to gratify oral fixations not fully met during the oral stage of personality formation; also, issues of power and control or struggles with love would manifest in dreams as well as libidinal repressed thoughts. Freud believed that every imagery and symbol that appears in a dream have sexual connotations: Freud lived in a sexually repressed Victorian era; as a result, his preoccupation with sexual imagery may have been a product of the times” (Dream Theories 1 – 3). However, as one autho...