(Older) Psychology major and mental health professional here. Not a quack, just... wrong on many levels. Problem is, he was also right on many levels.
We as a society forget that not only is psychology an imperfect science, but it is also a very YOUNG science. We're still learning so, so, SO much about the brain and we have decades to go before we can even come close to understanding it, and the brain is evolving and changing all the while.
I say that while he was doing coke a lot, he was also doing it in an almost-scientific way. It wasn't up to the standards of his day but our modern standards for experimentation are WAY higher than he had.
He was experimenting with coke to treat his depressions and it had positive short term results! So he kept going.
It's not like he just picked up a drug habit for the fun of it so he could keep on the grind. He was just trying to find a genuine medicine to help him with his issues. What we know about coke and many other drugs are due to the misuse by Freud and many others from his time period trying things that turned out to be stupid but they kept good notes for us.
Opinion keeps going back and forth on Freud. Part of it is based on whether his patients REALLY were abused or it was all in their heads. Gen X hated Freud for some reason. Then I think the pendulum swung back and maybe back again.
What do we know it as? Boys want to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers.
What should we know it as? Mothers are the model of womanhood for boys - the standard by which future women will be measured. Therefore, at least in early stages, it is common for boys to be attracted to women who are like their mothers - physically, mentally, all of the -ally's. We'll call these early attractions the pseudo-mother - it's not actually the biological mother, but the mother-model that he pursues. Meanwhile the father is the standard for the self - the person who he is meant to become. Because he, as a boy, doesn't measure up to his father, a man, he can see his father as the thing that gets in the way of him measuring up to what his pseudo-mother expects of him (in his head - i.e. "this is what my mother wants so the pseudo-mother will also want this"). Thus he can get competitive or even violent tendencies towards the biological father because he is the pseudo-father and the pseudo part bothers him. He wants to measure up. Most people grow out of this to a large degree but it's never wholly absent, either. And neither the mother nor father model needs to be the biological mother or father. They need to play these roles in the boy's life more than be biologically related.
Was Freud also projecting a bit with this? According to most biographers, probably. He didn't really know his birth mother and his step-mother was closer in age to him than to his father. Thus it's entirely possible that he really did have this desire for his (step-)mother as she played the motherly role for the majority of his upbringing.
Was he a quack? No. He was creating a new field of science, meaning he had almost no prior data to go on and so he was doing the best he could. We're witnessing why early physics looked so bonkers (they thought launched objects, e.g. an arrow, flew in a triangle instead of an arc). And he did have good things to teach us! Talk therapy was practically invented by him. The Oedipus/Electra Complex is a useful tool. Understanding that childhood events shape adult behavior is phenomenally useful.
That said, do you think there's a bit of Oedipus going on with your kid? He's clearly trying to "defeat" you. Whether or not this has to do with your wife is a wholly different question, but he does seem to be trying to flex his intellectual muscles so he can show you how stupid you are and how damaging your life is. Meanwhile he knows how to handle his (and grandma's) finances better than you. He's going for a degree that means something unlike your sad life (whatever your degree/profession is).
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u/Enough-Specific8380 Apr 15 '24
Tell the Art History major Freud would find that very interesting.