Freud II – The Revenge

Freud is back in the news, and the comeback is overdue. For decades the Freud most people have met, in psychology courses, self-development books and more recently podcasts, has been a caricature: a theorist of childhood determinism whose unconscious is a rough draft of what neuroscience now measures. Federico Malatesta, author of They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion, argues that this caricature costs us something practical. If the mind is divided, if we repeat what hurts us, and if change happens through a relationship over time, then techniques built for a transparent, self-correcting mind will keep failing. The essay traces how Freud was pushed out of American and British curricula by culture, money and method. It also weighs the evidence on psychodynamic therapy, and sets out the pushback from neuroscience, psychology and philosophy.

Freud is back

A century after the publication of some of his most brilliant work, Freud is having his second moment. In the last few years newspapers and magazines in the United States and Britain have been writing about a Freud comeback. This year the neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms published The Only Cure, a book-length case that Freud’s theory of the mind and his method of treatment are supported by modern neuroscience, and in September The Atlantic reviewed it under the title “What if Freud Was Right?”

I will argue here that this return was needed, because the Freud most people meet, in podcasts, self-help books and even psychology courses, is a caricature of the real one. This should matter to each of us: if we misunderstand how the mind works, we end up trying to improve our lives with techniques built for a mind we do not have. And when these techniques fail the only option that remains is the purchase of another book, another course. Which is, of course, what the self-development industry is counting on. I will also argue that this revival is long overdue: for several decades, psychology departments have taught Freud as a historical curiosity, and the public has learned him from people who never read him.

A Jungian, a Podcast and a Caricature

A few months ago, I listened to an episode of a popular podcast. The guest was an experienced psychotherapist who described himself as a “Jungian.” Freudian, Jungian and Lacanian psychotherapists are rare on the podcast circuit, which is frequented mostly by self-anointed gurus. A Jungian one this time, I was surprised and intrigued; let’s hear his story. I said to myself, “Federico, see what happens to your prejudices about self-help!”

Alas, it did not go well. Right at the beginning of the episode the host asked the guest to set out Jung’s outlook for listeners who did not know it. He began with Freud, as people usually do when they want to explain Jung, and said that “a lot of Freudian theory was really interested in the determinism of early life.” Children adapt to their environment, the environment “becomes fixed,” and according to “Freudian theory” we then carry those early agreements for the rest of our lives and are “beholden to those burdens.” Jung, he went on, said this was “not quite the full story”: there is “something mysterious working on all of us,” working for our “initiation, expansion, and growth.” I started to get that cringe feeling that surfaces when a movie that seemed decent enough starts verging on Hallmark pastiche. Please don’t! But it was too late. The host then summed up what he had heard. “Whereas Freud was looking at this through the lens of inherited dispositions like our genetic blueprint,” he said, “Jung is introducing this new vector, which is you know the ineffable, the thing that like science can’t get its head around.” Then the conversation moved on and I thought to myself: my prejudices about the industry: damned right!

The rest of the episode, more than two hours of it, followed the same pattern. The host offered that it is “very Jungian” to see the obstacles in a life as “opportunities for growth,” against a Western culture in which “suffering is a pathology.” The guest called the psyche “a self-healing organism.” Later he explained Jung’s complexes as “our history manifest in the present moment,” talked about an ego that “likes to grasp and hold what it can know” and clings to the familiar, and closed one answer with Eckhart Tolle’s “pain body.”

How did we reach this point?

Even considering my low expectations, I was wondering how a “Jungian therapist” could butcher Jung, and especially Freud, so much. It is of course almost impossible to summarize the differences between the two in one paragraph, and probably not advisable. But if one were to do it, one would say that it was actually Jung, with his archetypes and collective unconscious, who placed a shared, inherited structure at the bottom of the mind. Freud, instead, gave inherited disposition a more limited role in his writings. He spent his career mostly examining what happens to a particular person, born in a particular family, shaped by particular circumstances, and what that person can do with these events once they are defined in language.

The other talking points in the episode did not fare better. Freud’s theory was never an immovable block of early-life determinism; it changed and developed over forty years. And Freud did not promise to remove suffering as such; he told his patients that the aim of treatment was to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness (so much for the “science of happiness” people keep bringing up in every circumstance). Jung’s individuation does not play any consolatory role here; indeed, it suggests that individuals should face the parts of themselves they have either refused or abandoned on the sidelines. This can be a rather painful and lengthy process and Jung never played down how much it costs the individual. Also, it is true that Jung called the psyche a self-regulating system, but that is only part of the story. He added that in modern man the psyche no longer regulates itself and can run on “to the point of self-injury.” Finally, in Freud’s account, the psyche is not a “self-healing organism” (a symptom is the compromise it reaches between a wish and the prohibition against it) and the repetition compulsion is not an ego clinging to the familiar (it is instead the drive to go back, against one’s own interest, to what hurts, and it was this observation that led Freud to revise his theory in 1920).

To conclude, the host’s “ineffable” has the history upside down. Freud’s achievement, as some of his best readers point out, was to take the unconscious away from the private and irrational world of the ineffable, where the Romantics had left it, and to show that it follows rules of its own. It was Jung who turned it back, to a certain extent, into a reservoir of archetypal symbols. And some of Jung’s most serious readers do not describe him as the man who made room for mystery: what he found in every person was a kind of madness that each of us has to contain, and he read the gods as a mythological picture of it. In other words, pretty much everything they said was wrong. And someone who quotes Eckhart Tolle in the same breath as Freud and Jung should be subjected to waterboarding. I will come back later to where this therapist was trained and how this explains a lot.

Three Settings, One Freud

This mistreatment of psychoanalysis, and of Freud in particular, is not limited to podcasts but rather common across the self-help industry. In a milder form it also reaches popular science and the academic worlds of positive psychology and neuroscience, as I found while writing my latest book, They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion.¹ Mark Manson’s Ego Guide, the companion to his Solved podcast, opens with Freud’s iceberg and puts the ego fully in “the tiny portion above water, the part you’re conscious of.” That is the opposite of what Freud argued in one of his most famous works, The Ego and the Id, where much of the ego is itself unconscious, including the defenses it uses without our knowledge. The iceberg image, which proliferates on social media and in countless LinkedIn infographics, is adapted from a Simply Psychology explainer, not from Freud, but why bother to check? On the podcast itself Manson describes the superego as a “conscious awareness” of things larger than oneself, turns the ego into a story we construct about ourselves, and says that cognitive behavioral therapy “has nothing to do with Freudian psychoanalysis at all.” Not really. In Freud, large parts of the superego are unconscious, which is why we experience it as a sense of guilt we cannot explain; and the ego is not a story but an agency: the organization of mental processes that perceives, defends and mediates between our drives, our conscience and the world. And, Aaron Beck, who founded cognitive therapy, trained as a psychoanalyst.

The second case involves instead people who should know better. Both Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink, and the neuroscientist David Eagleman, in Incognito, describe Freud’s unconscious as a rough draft, a good intuition, but they don’t seem to realize that his unconscious is rather different from what they have in mind. Their “cognitive unconscious,” today prevalent in neuroscience, covers what never needed awareness, such as the forearm of a tennis player that finds the ball before the player has registered its angle. The unconscious Freud cared most about covers instead what is kept from awareness because it is difficult, unwelcome. It shows itself in repetition, patterns, symptoms, in slips. To treat the latter as a rough sketch of the former flattens a difference in kind, even with some overlap, into a difference in degree. This confusion has survived even into Freud’s revival. Reviewing Mark Solms’s new book in The Atlantic this September, Scott Stossel wrote that “it has become hard to deny that, at least in basic outline, Freud was right about the unconscious,” and then proceeded to give as evidence brain scans of people shown frightening faces too fast to see them, which is instead the cognitive unconscious again.

Why Freud Matters

The real Freud matters for a number of reasons, too many to set out here. We will focus on three, all concerning the unconscious, which remain critical today to any process of self-development. The first is that Freud made the divided subject the starting point of any account of the mind: the conscious, deliberating “I” is a small part of a larger system it did not author and cannot fully command; the ego “is not master in its own house.” The second is that he showed that people do not simply want their own good. Instead, against their better judgment, against their conscious analysis of their environment, their circumstances, they repeat what hurts them, they hold on to symptoms that are painful, that are emotionally expensive, and they often resist the cure they themselves ask for. There is something in us, Freud said, that works against our own pleasure and interest. The third is that Freud found a way of working with this, through speech and a relationship over time, slowly, reading symptoms for their meaning before anyone tries to erase them.

Now, a self-improvement strategy is only as good as the model of the mind it assumes. Most self-help methods assume three separate things, all of them flawed: we can fully know ourselves by simply looking inward; once we know what is good for us we will want it; we can bring about change on our own. Freud’s work, fully understood, contradicts all three. If the mind is divided, introspection will reach only the part that is already conscious, leaving our unconscious, which shapes many of our decisions, untouched. If people repeat what hurts them, it follows that knowing what is good might be necessary but it is not sufficient to make them want it. And if symptoms carry meaning, removing them as soon as they appear without trying to understand them may leave the cause of the issue in place. Strategies built on the flawed self-help assumptions keep failing, and lack of discipline does not explain why. They are based on a category error: they apply a technique to a problem that is not technical and that requires instead judgment and wisdom.

The clearest example is the word that has replaced Freud’s terminology in the modern self-development arena. Freud had used “subconscious” for a time, then dropped it: “If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically, to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness, or qualitatively, to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it.” In popular culture the term subconscious has been repurposed into a device that can be reprogrammed with affirmations and morning routines. Along the same lines, self-help kept Freud’s vocabulary of childhood, wounds and the hidden self, and dropped his central claim, that part of the unconscious resists what we decide.

None of this makes Freud infallible. Au contraire, he made many assumptions that turned out to be wrong, especially in medicine. In the 1880s he recommended cocaine, for example as a treatment for morphine addiction. In the 1890s he went along with his friend Wilhelm Fliess’s theory that nervous complaints could be traced to the nose, with serious consequences for at least one patient, Emma Eckstein, who nearly died after Fliess operated on her. He also overstated his early cures and liberally rewrote the least flattering parts of his own history. None of this settles whether his account of the unconscious is right, any more than Aristotle’s belief that the heart is the seat of sensation and thought, and that the brain serves to cool the blood, settles the value of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Serious criticism of an idea starts from knowing it, understanding it in its finest details, and then building upon it. The “shoulders of giants” approach. When Einstein replaced Newton’s mechanics with his theory of relativity, he did not discard Newton. He showed that at ordinary speeds, far below the speed of light, his new equations give the same results as Newton’s. In other words, Newton’s mechanics became a special case of his own theory. In his autobiographical notes he wrote, “Newton, forgive me.” John Bowlby trained as a psychoanalyst, and over time he came to the conclusion that Freud was wrong about how early attachment works, and so he developed a better theory for it. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan read Freud closely in order to go beyond him. All three knew the work they were departing from. A critique of Freud built on a summary read on Reddit is not in the same category.

You might argue that all of this seems rather obvious, that this is how science works. But why then is Freud so badly understood? There are three parts to the answer. The first is cultural, the second financial, and the third methodological. They are interlinked and they reinforce each other.

How This Happened

In the United States, and to a large extent in Britain, the institutions that train psychologists and therapists largely stopped teaching Freud decades ago. General culture kept his vocabulary, but over time it lost what it meant, and new meanings were built on the old words. Continental Europe and Latin America did not go the same way.

The intellectual story began with Freud himself. His only visit to the United States, in 1909, was a success, and he helped it along by presenting psychoanalysis as practical and optimistic. Ironically, he is therefore partly to blame for the simplification of his work. After the war, American psychoanalysis became a medical specialty that dominated psychiatry for two decades, and it grew dogmatic and closed; its training stayed in private institutes, cut off from university research, so when research became the measure of the field, psychoanalysis had little to show. The universities were quick to fill the gap with experimental psychology and, later, with “the science of” this or that: protocols, manuals of eight or twelve sessions, positive psychology.

The routes into practice also differ. A counseling license in the US now requires a master’s degree whose standards do not mention psychoanalysis at all, followed by about two years of supervised work. The change is visible in what students are taught. A 2008 study found that in leading American universities Freud was taught mostly outside psychology departments, in history, literature and philosophy. Where psychology students meet him, it is usually in an introductory textbook, in a version that, as the psychologist Jonathan Shedler puts it, is “Freud, circa 1905, and they’ll get even that wrong.” Freud’s share of citations fell in psychology papers and almost disappeared from psychiatry, and clinical psychology faculties moved decisively to cognitive-behavioral approaches. The neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms says you can now get a degree in psychology “and learn nothing about Freud.”

When I told the story of the podcast, and recited a few sound bites, to an Italian psychoanalyst who has studied both Freud and Jung seriously, he was not surprised. After commenting that a psychology undergraduate in Italy would be kicked out of school for answers like that “and threatened for his life if he attempted returning,” he suggested I check where the guest had studied: “Fede, that will explain a lot.” So I checked.

The public profiles of the guest pointed to a license as a Professional Counselor, which rested on a master’s in clinical psychology. I looked at the curriculum available online. The program describes itself as providing training “with emphasis on behavioral and cognitive approaches.” None of its fifteen required courses, in the list currently published, names Freud or Jung. His Jungian studies came later, through a doctorate taught largely online, with monthly seminars at a Jungian community center whose own description of itself is “a nonprofit forum for dynamic conversations on a diverse range of psychological, artistic, and spiritual topics.” This makes a free online course look like a Harvard MBA. A Jungian analyst in the American societies, outside of the standard university frameworks, trains by comparison for four to seven years after a clinical degree; in Italy, the Jungian schools are state-recognized four-year postgraduate programs open to graduates in medicine or psychology, that end in a license to practice. Both would entail starting as a patient with an experienced psychotherapist. Several of the best-known Italian analysts first studied philosophy, where both Freud and Jung are also taught. The situation in the rest of continental Europe and in South American countries is not dissimilar. In Buenos Aires, for example, psychology students still read Freud and Lacan more than anyone else. My confusion was dissipating.

Follow the Money

The second part of the answer is financial. As often happens in health care, what is taught and practiced followed what is paid for.

In the United States the turning point came around 1980. Researchers wanted diagnoses that clinicians could agree on, and by one widely cited estimate, before 1980 psychiatrists asked to diagnose the same patient agreed only about a third of the time, which is not particularly unusual in health care. Consider what happens when one visits two different medical specialists for a minor health issue, say a skin condition, and receives two very different diagnoses and treatment plans. Insurers wanted the same thing for a different reason: they would not pay for conditions they could not define. Drug companies needed clearly defined disorders to run the controlled trials the Food and Drug Administration required. The third edition of the diagnostic manual, published in 1980, met these needs and removed almost all psychoanalytic language. Prozac arrived in 1987. In the 1990s managed care capped both the number of sessions and the hospital stays; the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who spent years inside American psychiatric training, concluded that “the real crisis for psychodynamic psychiatry has been not the new psychiatric science but managed care.” Research money moved the same way. The National Institute of Mental Health and the drug companies funded biological research, and psychotherapy research favored short treatments, executed with precise rules determined by a manual, which can be tested in a few months. The reality and the language of techne had colonized therapy too. By the account of the man who ran the institute, the money bought little for patients. Thomas Insel, its director from 2002 to 2015, looked back in 2017 on the twenty billion dollars spent on rooting mental-health care in brain science and genetics: “I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”

Britain reached the same place by a different road. In 2006 a group led by the economist Richard Layard argued that a national program of short psychological therapy would pay for itself, because people treated for depression and anxiety would return to work and stop drawing incapacity benefits. The government adopted the plan, and NHS Talking Therapies in England, launched in 2008, trained more than ten thousand new therapists, almost all in short, evidence-based treatments of the CBT type. The program now gives its patients an average of about eight sessions, a few miles from 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where Freud spent the last year of his life after the Nazis took Vienna. On this question Britain and the United States belong together.

On the continent and in Latin America the incentives are different, and so are the results. In Germany, statutory health insurance will pay for up to three hundred hours of psychoanalytic therapy for an adult, against eighty for behavior therapy. Rather a different financial environment for analysis, isn’t it?

“Psychoanalysis Doesn’t Work”

The third part of the answer is methodological, and it is the one usually given to justify the other two. In American psychology, and later in British health policy, the standard of evidence became, in most cases, the randomized trial of a short treatment delivered from a manual, with a symptom scale and a number at the end. A treatment built on a lengthy process, a developing relationship and language fits that standard very poorly. And it was convenient, also financially, to read this as failure. Once psychoanalysis was said not to work, dropping it from the curriculum and from the insurance tables needed no further argument.

The larger problem is that the comparison is not like for like. CBT was designed for a named disorder and a target symptom, and it is good at that. People who go into analysis usually come with something which is much harder to name: not feeling loved, a life that has stopped meaning, despair, a desire they cannot give up or cannot admit to, a generalized feeling of nothingness, insignificance. In addition, many individuals choose analysis after the shorter-term routes have been exhausted and proved ineffective. The trials that shaped policy mostly measured a symptom score after a few months, in patients selected for a single diagnosis. Longer trials with broader outcomes exist, and some found benefits that appeared only years later. And, as Solms points out, the standards for those trials were set in the terms of cognitive-behavioral therapy at a time when the analysts refused to take part. For chronic and complex conditions, longer psychodynamic treatment has often done better than short treatment. The short treatments that score well on this yardstick are also the ones the insurers chose to pay for and the universities chose to teach.

My claim is not that certain modalities of therapy are necessarily better than others in every circumstance. Obviously not. What I am asserting is that the yardstick can be too narrow for the job. Some therapies are inherently more difficult to measure, especially if the very standard of measure has been built on different modalities. We also tend to measure easy things more often and more precisely, and things that seem to be aligned with our financial interests. Not quite a revolutionary idea, is it?

The Pushback

We opened this essay by noting that, finally, the argument over Freud has started to turn, and by this year newspapers and magazines in the United States and Britain were writing about a Freud comeback. The pushback has come from neuroscience, from American psychology and from philosophy. In neuroscience, Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate, faulted psychoanalysis for not developing objective methods to test its ideas but still called it “the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind,” and Mark Solms, notably, argues that neuroscience has arrived, without meaning to, at a model “astonishingly like the one Freud sketched out.”

Inside American psychology, Drew Westen argued as early as 1998 that mainstream research had confirmed several of Freud’s central claims under other names: that much of our mental life, including feelings and motives, is unconscious, that we can hold conflicting feelings and motives at the same time, and that patterns formed in childhood shape how we relate to others as adults. In 2010 Jonathan Shedler showed that the effects of psychodynamic therapy in trials are as large as those of the therapies promoted as empirically supported, and in 2023 a group of clinical psychologists argued that psychodynamic theory should return to the standard curriculum of American doctoral programs.

Philosophers have reached a similar conclusion by another route. Jonathan Lear, at the University of Chicago, has long argued that the familiar criticisms of psychoanalysis come from misunderstanding what it is, and that psychoanalysis is well placed to supply the moral psychology that Plato and Aristotle could only sketch. Béatrice Longuenesse, at New York University, reads Freud alongside Kant and argues that what remains unique to him is the complexity of his concept of the unconscious, which concerns the desires, beliefs and feelings of a particular person. And the philosopher and psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook points out that Freud’s attackers and his defenders often share one assumption: that exposing the less creditable sides of Freud’s life would discredit psychoanalysis.

Stossel, the Atlantic’s national editor, came to Solms’s book from what he calls his “firmly materialist leanings.” He found Solms “highly selective” in the studies he cites, and still concluded that his more important accomplishment may be “to have restored to psychiatry its humanity.”

The psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati argues that cognitive-behavioral therapy treats people as if they had no unconscious, as subjects to be retrained to function efficiently again in the shortest possible time. He also argues that psychic distress comes from an ego that is too strong and too attached to itself. The philosopher and analyst Umberto Galimberti is more doubtful about the future: he suggests that neuroscience may one day explain what Freud described in literary terms.

A Better Question

I am not sure Freud would agree with every use I make of him. But he would certainly recoil from the caricature portrayed by the self-help industry: books, seminars, podcasts, you name it. So whether we end up agreeing with his structure of the mind or not, we should first try to understand him better, in the light of what we are learning about ourselves from medicine, neuroscience, neurobiology and so on. It is, however, fair to argue that we do understand today that the unconscious is not a hard drive, that change is not a matter of better code: affirmations, protocols, a morning routine.

By definition, a divided subject cannot see its own blind spots from inside. It needs other people who can contest the story it tells about itself: a partner, a trusted friend, a colleague, sometimes an analyst, a therapist, a coach, a mentor. The question many of my clients bring, “Why do I keep doing what I decided not to do, what I know I should not be doing?” has no answer in a model of the mind that assumes we are transparent to ourselves, that we are in full control of our faculties. This is also the question Freud spent his working life on.

FAQ

Is this essay saying Freud was right about everything?

No. Freud was wrong about cocaine and about Fliess’s nasal theory, and he overstated his early cures. The argument is about his account of the unconscious, which has to be judged on its own terms, as Aristotle’s Ethics is judged apart from his biology.

Isn’t the unconscious already proven by neuroscience?

Neuroscience has shown that much of what the brain does happens outside awareness. That is the cognitive unconscious. The unconscious Freud cared most about is what we keep from awareness and it shows itself over our lifetime in different ways, including repetition, symptoms and slips. The two overlap, but treating one as a rough draft of the other misses what Freud described.

Does psychoanalysis work better than CBT?

The trials that compare them on the same scales find them roughly equal for the conditions they measure. Most of those trials look at short-term symptom change in patients with a single diagnosis; longer trials with broader outcomes are fewer, and some have found benefits that appeared only years later. Neither result settles what most people bring to analysis.

Note

1. Federico Malatesta, They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion (The Artha Press, 2026), ch. 5. ↩