I first read a little Freud when I was an undergrad. I had a friend who was fairly obsessed with him and thought he was brilliant. Honestly, he gave me the heebie-jeebies in his obsession with sexualizing everything and the incest theme. Also, when you have been close to people who have deeply suffered because of incestuous childhood sexual abuse, it is difficult to read about memories of childhood sexual abuse being “fantasies” without wanting to throw the book across the room.
I will eventually get around to reading some more Freud, because I don’t feel like I can say anything intelligent about his ideas without doing so.
However, I keep reading other stuff about the origin and development of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories and Freud continues to come off as a narrow-minded, sexually obsessed, insecure control freak. It seems he was continually having dramatic “friend/colleague breakups” because the other person got an idea that Freud disagreed with or felt threatened by.
Perhaps everyone was always having these fall outs with everyone else back in the day, but Freud was the most famous so his always get mentioned? At any rate, I know he was important for establishing a method of studying and working with the unconscious, but each time I read about one of Freud’s puerile freakouts, I think someone else leaps in front of him on my reading list. Now Sandor Ferenczi (who eventually had a big break with Freud) has been added to the list… ahead of Freud.