As a trans person stuck in a highly transmed, gatekeepy and pathologizing healthcare system, i’ve been through my share of psychotherapists (not really, i will have to go through at least two more ffs) and Freudians are the fucking worst. I mean, that’s not entirely correct, Jungians appear to be the same but nazi and i’m glad i never had a run-in with one of those freaks, but jfc do Freudians make my skin crawl. And when i ask around in local trans groups, hey, what’s your experience with this and that guy, yeah, the psychoanalytically oriented ones aren’t the ones any of us trust.

I get it, he’s got some nice ideas when he’s not doing his straight ass pulls and blatant mysogyny, he’s also an excellent prose writer and the charm of his Vienesse German even carries over into the English translations, i can give him credit for a lot of things. A lot of things outside of psychology. Yes, he was right about the constructedness of social norms, but you do not need Freud for that, any psychologist with the tiniest bit of background in leftist acedemia understands that part already, it’s been kind of at the center of all humanities for the last decades. Psychology doesn’t need more Freud, it needs more intersectional anticapitalism to understand that some people just have entirely different experiences than those within the normative framework that defines the illusion of normalcy in our system. And i know a psychologist who does that, and she’s got nothing to do with Freud, she just does the usual evidence-based cognitive behavorial therapy slop, but she’s read enough feminist theory and queer theory and anti-racist theory to understand where her biases lie and how to treat people correctly when their very existence is at odds with how society is “supposed” to work, and i’ve never seen anything like that from a Freudian, even though there’s ofc Freudian leftists. But even those appear to be permanently stuck with overvaluing and centering the experience and the intellectual idiosyncrasies of a single cishet dude that are just super fucking misleading about how the human mind works, that perpetuate a very lopsided and hierarchical doctor-patient relation and that mostly work on making the wildest assumptions about your patients and always one-upping and controlling them.