Were Freud’s Theories Scientific?

When people speak about Psychology as a field, many picture a man sitting in a chair, smoking a cigar with a patient outstretched on a lounge speaking about their past experiences as a child (McLeod, 2018). For better or worse, this image that has been interwoven with general view of the field has lasted for the better part of a century due to the sometimes controversial work of Sigmund Freud. While he was arguably a pioneer of his time and laid the groundwork for a great deal of what was to come after him in terms of psychoanalysis, his theories and methodology have been scrutinized and questioned since their inception.

Are Freud’s theories scientific?

To answer this question we need to first define what a scientific theory is, by making use of the scientific method. The real question then becomes whether or not we can apply the scientific method to Freud’s theories themselves. In order to apply his theories to the scientific method, the theories need to not just explain behavior, but also be able to predict it reliably (McLeod, 2018). One of the most obvious reasons why Freud’s theories have been debunked by many researchers over the years is that there has been such a large passage of time that researchers have found that Freud may have been the victim of bias in his own research by choosing only to pay attention to information that supported his already expressed views as the reasoning behind human behaviors but not the information that would have contradicted his theories (McLeod, 2018).

Many of Freud’s theories related to the unseen structure or areas of the brain that are not observable, such as the id, ego and superego, are concepts that we cannot measure, identify, test, visualize, etc in a laboratory experiment. For the sake of scientific research, these areas remain theorized to exist only to the degree that we can theorize that people have a soul or spirit, in a very unscientific manner. These theories are unfalsifiable as they cannot be tested or observed by researchers, which creates the biggest problem in trying to equate them with actual science. Science must be falsifiable.

However, while Freud’s theories may not be considered scientific, they still are important both inside and outside of the field of Psychology. A more recent study that is causing a great degree of discomfort in those who would wish to completely debunk all of Freud’s work relates to a newer field known as Neuropsychoanalysis, which seeks to combine the tenets of neuroscience with that of psychology. The work being done by these researchers is actually lending more credence to one of Freud’s biggest theories on the conscious, unconscious and subconscious mind. There has been a great deal of debate within the field on whether the research being done is proving or disproving Freud’s theories and what the current implications of validating these theories would mean for the significance of Freud’s body of work (Hustvedt, 2010).

Freud aside, in order for a psychological theory to be scientific, it must both explain and predict human behavior. Freud’s theories may explain human behavior but they fall short at being able to produce reliable predictions (McLeod, 2018). The value of Freud’s work is not something that we should just toss out as discredited material, but the work of a pioneer who laid a lot of the groundwork for psychoanalysis.

References:

Hustvedt. S. (2010). Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Freud?

Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/reading-minds-method-or-muddle/201003/who-s-afraid-sigmund-freud

McLeod, S. (2018). What are the most interesting ideas of Sigmund Freud?

Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/Sigmund-Freud.html