Yes, it’s true there have been unsuccessful efforts to debunk most of what Freud wrote, including about dreams. As a practicing psychoanalyst for the past 45 years, his discoveries about dreams and the unconscious continue to allow me to help my patients deepen their self-understanding. Yes, there have been many valuable additions to Freud’s insights as well. Psychoanalysis suffers from theoretical tribalism. Usually, the longer we’ve been in practice, the more comfortable we are making use of all discoveries that benefit our patients.
Isn’t it interesting, speaking of Freud’s training as a neurologist, that cerebral neurons, when they fire, send out collateral fibers to suppress the activity of adjacent neurons, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. And we do something similar when we want to promote a new idea, downplaying the relevance of related ideas. Freud described a “complemental series” of more than one causative factor, interacting in various admixtures. And the psychoanalyst Leo Rangel urged us to adopt what he called “total composite theory” in our work, accepting good ideas and rejecting bad ones, regardless what theory they come from.