15. Freud’s Psychology Does Not Hold Up to the Scientific Method
In a lot of ways, Freud’s ideas tell us more about how he saw the world than about how human personality was believed to function at the turn of the twentieth century. He developed “theories” that were not falsifiable; in other words, everything that he looked at could be seen as evidence for his theories. His theory of “p-e-n-i-s envy” was constructed in such a way that every single problem that girls face ultimately had to do with jealousy over the male sexual organ. The scientific method requires that you be able to prove your hypothesis wrong. Since Freud could not (really had no interest in) finding means to prove his ideas wrong, they are relegated to “pseudoscience.”
