Thing I saw just now and have witnessed plenty irl too, is the following move made in lefty circles: <discredited theory - in the case that sparked this Freudian theory> is only discredited because bourgeois positivist scientists don’t want you to know the truth! Some thoughts...

...it’s not impossible that some shared ideological bias could lead to people dismissing a theory they ought not. So I don’t think the move is per se bad. But in the case I just saw and, sorry to say, typically, I think it’s often done badly. Two main problems...

...(and I’ll just set aside the fact that “positivist” is always used by people just to mean “science flavoured view that I, a person with a humanities degree, don’t like”)...

...first, people mistakenly act like this relieves you of the burden of having to engage with the substantial critiques of the idea. But evidently not. It’s perfectly possible for there to be ideological convenience in bad people’s rejection of an idea that happens to be false...

...e.g. it’d be inconvenient for fascists if nobody could be made to be emotionally invested in race and nation, but it’s also (alas) false that nobody can be made to be emotionally invested in race and nation, and fascists can accurately point to counter examples...

...second, the arguments for ideological alignment are often bad. E.g. claim was that bourgeois positivist psychologists disagree with Freud re the nature of subjectivity and what it means to be psychologically healthy. And, like, in since they reject Freudianism that’s true...

...but that freudianism contains rejected claims is just to say it’s not accepted. You need to show that if those claims were accepted then it would be bad for the status quo, drawing out the causal consequences of this in a psychologically and sociologically plausible manner...

...so: doing ideology critique well requires the same level of scientific rigour as bourgeois science and extra counterfactual work too. It’s harder, not easier; demands more, not less. Don’t accept the shoddy and lacklustre alternatives propagated in the contemporary humanities.