QotD: on Prescientific Psychoanalysis

[liveonearth]

Psychoanalytic concepts captivated popular culture as have no other ideas about humanity's mind and heart. But the Freudian model belongs to a prescientific era in the search to unravel the enigmas of love. The demise of such mythologies is always probable. As long as the brain remained a mystery, as long as the physical nature of the mind remained remote and inaccessible, an evidential void permitted a free flow of irrefutable statements about emotional life. As in politics, the factor determining the longevity and popularity of these notions was not their veracity but the energy and wit devoted to promoting them.
--Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon in A General Theory of Love p8