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[Dark Jaguar]

Indeed... Aristotle was a major pillar at one time in physics, and we now understand that he never actually did research when it came to his understanding of physics. He tried to explain phenomenon without actually experimenting to see if that phenomenon existed to begin with. It took someone saying "wait, DO things fall faster if they have more mass?" to eventually dethrone those old theories.

Freud is in a similar position. He came up with a lot of ideas behind psychology, but many of them were baseless and without study. Hypnosis, psychoanalysis, and hidden states of conciousness were all things he simply came up with and did no good studies to show their existance. By the way, the argument "it works!" is not sufficient when the debate is IF it works. Much like medicine, an anecdotal story that someone got better after the treatment is not evidence as they may very well have gotten better without the treatment. A double blind study where the right treatment is given to some patients and none is given to others, where neither the patient nor the doctor knows who is getting what (though someone who is not involved with applying the test would have a master list to check it all after the test), is the only real way to get some evidence.

Anyway, I wouldn't just be saying all this except that I've read a lot of things regarding a lot of fields in science just because it interests me. Of course psychiatry is not my field of study, but that doesn't make it above me questioning it. It just means someone who knows more should be able to provide evidence that shuts me up.

I shouold also make it clear that I'm only rejecting Freud's notion of an unconcious mind, the id and super ego world of repressed memories. I will also say that Freud played a major part in getting us to look into subconcious thought. If he didn't look into it, we may not realize today that our brain actually does a lot of things without our knowledge, such as the regulation of heartbeat or tuning out (not storing as repressed data) sensory information our concious mind just can't handle at the time.

But more to the point, just saying all this is not sufficient. While I could go into details on how Aristotle was definitely not a scientist in a lot of what he did, I'll need to actually look up some stuff on Freud and post some links here as that is certainly not "fresh" in my memory.

And as always, you are the one who took classes in this. I may be sadly mistaken. You yourself have stated there are many case studies showing the validity of Freud's methods. If you provide them this can be put to rest.

I can only provide these links. Perhaps I have been misled?

http://skepdic.com/psychoan.html

http://skepdic.com/unconscious.html