FREUD’S UNSCIENTIFIC SCIENCE: What the Founder of Psychoanalysis Is Still Not Forgiven For
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis / verywellmind.com
It’s hard to find someone who has never heard of Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939). The history of his psychoanalytic method spans more than 120 years. And yet, surprisingly, debates still rage on: can psychoanalysis truly be considered a science? Without claiming to offer the final word, let’s try to explore this question.
SCIENCE WARS
On the one hand, it’s clear to many that psychoanalysis is a popular and effective method for addressing various psychological issues. On the other hand, many scientists still hesitate to call it a science.
Yet no one disputes that Freud’s teachings had a tremendous impact on 20th-century science and culture — and continue to influence them today. So let’s look to the history of ideas to explore whether Freud’s psychoanalytic method can truly be called a science.
The fact is Freud developed his theory at the crossroads of two eras: modernity and postmodernity. The former is associated with the Age of Enlightenment, positivist science, the cult of reason, social progress, and human dominance over the dark forces of nature. The philosophy of modernity holds that knowledge, moral values, and aesthetic norms are universal and objective, freed from mythical and religious irrationality.
However, in the second half of the 19th century, this worldview increasingly came under scrutiny, giving rise to a new cultural paradigm — postmodernism. The forerunners of this shift were Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
It’s no coincidence, then, that Freud found himself at the center of the fierce philosophical debate between realists and postmodernists. The intensity of these arguments in the 1990s even led to a special term for them: the «science wars».
KARL POPPER: ACCUSATIONS OF NON-SCIENTIFIC THINKING
It could be said that the first to launch a major crusade against Freudianism was Karl Popper — one of the most prominent philosophers of science in the 20th century. The future author of the theory of critical rationalism was the son of Simon Popper, a wealthy Jew who had converted to Lutheranism.
Simon was a successful lawyer, a professor at the University of Vienna, a master of a Masonic lodge, and a friend and business partner of the mayor of the Austrian capital. He owned an enormous library, wrote respectable poetry, and translated Greek and Latin verse into German.
Karl’s mother, Jenny (née Schiff), was a gifted pianist who grew up in the heart of Vienna’s artistic life. Her family owned its own concert hall and founded the Society of Friends of Music.
From an early age, Karl developed a taste for classical philosophy and classical aesthetics. Remarkably, despite being born into a refined cultural elite, Karl Popper would grow up to despise ostentatious luxury more than anything.
JEW AGAINST JEW
Compared to the Poppers, the Freud family was large, perpetually in need, and, as the saying goes, from the very bottom. Worse yet — from the bottom of Jewish society. When Freud, already a global celebrity, sat down to write his autobiography, it was no accident that he insisted his ancestors came from the banks of the Rhine rather than the little river Bovdurka. Why?
The reason lies in a shameful fact of European history that is well known: anti-Semitism. But few realize that within the Jewish community itself, there existed rigid hierarchies and notions of «inferiority». Ostjuden — Eastern European Jews from Poland, the Czech lands, Russia, and Ukraine — were considered far less civilized than their Western European counterparts. And Jews from the backwaters of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria were seen as a truly inferior caste.
And it was from there — from the town of Brody near Lviv — that Freud’s mother, Amalia (Malka) Nathanson, originally came. Though she spent her childhood in Odesa with her grandparents, this did little to change how she was perceived.
When the barely literate and nearly destitute Amalia married Jacob Freud, a wool merchant from the equally provincial Czech town of Příbor (or Freiberg in German), it was considered a decent match.
Yet even today, the Freud Museum and the street bearing his name remain among the only notable landmarks in that little town, which young Sigmund left forever at the age of three.
AN ALMOST GOSPEL-LIKE STORY
As Soviet propaganda might have once said, the Freuds and the Poppers were «two worlds, two ways of life». But when Freud himself became a prominent figure in Europe’s cultural elite, he found it important to craft a myth of his «respectable» Western European origins. This was likely a kind of «Nathanael complex».
In the Gospel, if you recall, Nathanael asks his brother Philip about Christ: «Can anything good come out of Nazareth?» (John 1:46). Nathanael, who came from the small village of Cana, was probably expressing the typical skepticism of locals toward the messianic claims of a neighboring backwater.
For Freud, admitting to his «lowly» origins meant diminishing psychoanalysis. And that was something he would not tolerate — even from close friends, who quickly became former friends. Nevertheless, the great prophet of psychoanalysis, born in the remote provinces to a poor émigrée and a modest cloth merchant, made his way to the very center of the rational, modernist world order — and blew it up from within.
But perhaps this is no surprise. Since the most archaic conceptions of the world, chaos dwelling on the periphery has always threatened to break into the ordered center. According to contemporary thought, a vacuum is not emptiness but structure; similarly, chaos is not some mystical void but one of the natural states of matter.
CONTROLLED CHAOS
When physics began developing chaos theory in the second half of the 20th century, it came to embrace nonequilibrium states, nonlinear processes, non-integrable equations, and divergent series. It turned out that beyond classical models, chaos could in fact be calculated and influenced — provided one used «special» scientific methods.
The fundamental disequilibrium of the human inner world appears to be both a reflection and a specific instance of the outer world’s instability. It cannot be eliminated — but it can be controlled, moderated, and understood. And that is precisely what psychoanalysis set out to do.
Of course, science rooted in the modernist paradigm sees Freud’s teachings as a rejection of objective scientific knowledge, methodology, and experimentation.
Falsifiability and weak verifiability remain the main critiques of psychoanalysis since Karl Popper’s time. To be fair, Freud himself did not claim his doctrine was a strictly scientific discipline — he preferred to call it metapsychology, deliberately distinguishing it from psychology, which at the time was recognized as a rigorously scientific field.
HOW SCIENTIFIC INTERVENTIONS HAPPEN
Still, Freud believed that one-day psychoanalysis would be recognized as a science. In practice, he was asserting an entirely new perspective on the development of humanity and personality — one shaped not only by rational and conscious forces but also by irrational and unconscious ones.
Here, the positivist and rationalist approach clearly faltered. The refusal to acknowledge psychoanalysis as a science stems less from its lack of scientific merit and more from the nature of the so-called «science wars» themselves. By the early 20th century, it had already become clear that no such thing as a single, unified «science» existed.
Each scientific discipline differs greatly in its methods and approaches to the object of study — that is, to reality, whose very nature has long raised difficult questions. And sciences are not always harmless tools of knowledge.
They tend to engage in epistemological expansion (epistēmē in Greek meaning «scientific, reliable knowledge») — that is, they often invade other disciplines’ axiomatic domains and attempt to claim them.
It’s worth recalling that every science — even mathematics — has its own «axiomatic core»: a set of fundamental assumptions accepted on faith, without proof, as well as a set of terms, methods, and subject areas that are interdependent.
By declaring psychoanalysis a universal method for solving human problems, Freud committed an act of intervention across multiple domains of human knowledge. And people, as a rule, are not particularly fond of intruders.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Of course, Freud was neither the first nor the only one to cross disciplinary boundaries. But few did so as radically as he did — so much so that, in the end, modern psychology became something akin to a «queen of the sciences». Freud’s metapsychology may not have had a strong foundation in experimental evidence, but over time, more and more experimental attempts were made to identify a priori forms of cognition within the psyche.
Especially since the debate over the nature of reality remains unresolved: we still question whether we are dealing with objective reality or merely our perceptions of it. Another subtle point: while scientific realists view the psyche as an object of knowledge, psychoanalytic practice blurs the boundary between subject and object.
Today, in light of physicists’ discoveries of quantum effects, this should no longer seem particularly surprising. Whether or not you consider psychoanalysis a science, Freud managed to profoundly transform the cultural reality we live in. His concepts of consciousness levels, defense mechanisms, and stages of psychic development have had an enormous impact on both academic and applied psychology.
After him, dreams were no longer dismissed as unworthy of scientific attention. By penetrating the «axiomatic core» of neighboring disciplines, Freud engaged deeply with art, the humanities, and philosophy. Without his theories, it’s nearly impossible to fully understand the work of Proust, Hesse, Joyce, Zweig, Sartre, Dalí, Picasso, Hitchcock, Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, and many other figures of world culture.
REBELLION AGAINST THE «DOUBLE FATHER»?
Of course, Freud was far too vivid and unconventional a figure to be free from mistakes, deliberate myth-making, or even occasional falsifications. These were likely driven by an immense number of personal complexes — hard to avoid on the long road «from rags to riches».
Yet Freud managed to transmute those complexes into a worldview revolution of global proportions — one whose impact rivals that of Marxism. This is why, when Karl Popper, one of the undisputed champions of the «science wars», accuses Freud of being unscientific, something about it feels… unresolved.
Did you know the second German name Popper’s father Simon took for himself was Sigmund? And that the only schoolteacher Popper reportedly admired was a mathematics teacher named Freud? According to psychoanalytic theory, the teacher is one of the symbolic manifestations of the Father.
So perhaps Sigmund Freud was, for Karl Popper, a kind of «double father». And Popper’s attacks on Freud — could they be seen as an unconscious rebellion against the Father figure?
Of course, one could argue these are all just coincidences. But the history of psychoanalysis is full of such coincidences.
Why, out of countless possible outcomes, did fate assign Freud a father named Jacob and a teacher named Freud? Why did it later lead Popper to critique Sigmund Freud when he could have illustrated his philosophical ideas using any number of other examples? In the end, perhaps this is precisely what makes Freud’s legacy such a fascinating case of unscientific science.
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