Freud held back scientific progress in psychotherapy by roughly half a century.

Freud& #39;s notion of the unconscious mind was "...the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and for turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies." - William James

I& #39;m going to get a load of replies now from people falsely attributing ideas to Freud and sanitizing them by removing all the original references he actually did introduce to castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex. What& #39;s good in Freud isn& #39;t new and what& #39;s new isn& #39;t good.

Freud himself said that the Oedipus Complex was his main theoretical innovation. He recognized that the other stuff about the unconscious was largely derivative of earlier thinkers. But that psychosexual stuff is what everyone now rejects.