Why People Like to Hate Freud

A while back, I did an InForm: Podcast about why people enjoy hating Freud so much. More recently, I found this great bit of text in Janet Malcolm's The Purloined Clinic:

Like the Rat Man's dead father, the dead father of psychoanalysis still "lives" in our imagination as a sort of superstar professor, whose classes are so big that in order to attract his attention we practically have to make a public nuisance of ourselves (p.11).

Reading this made me smile. It casts resistance to psychoanalysis as a sort of adolescent attempt to rebel against paternal (nowadays parental) authority.

It also reminded me of this bit from Psychoanalytic Politics by Sherry Turkle.

Freud believed that too easy an acceptance meant that psychoanalysis
was being denatured, and he also believed the converse: resistance to
psychoanalysis suggested that it was being taken seriously (p.5).