Scientific ideas don't die, they just fade away into popular culture. Psychoanalysis is as dead a science as alchemy. But its central idea, that somehow catharsis leads to cure, lives on--rages on--in Oprah and Geraldo and Ricki Lake and the whole steaming psychic stew that is our confessional culture.
No serious scientist would credit the notion, both unverified and unverifiable, that recalling the repressed, articulating the instinctual, magically undoes the inhibitions and pathologies of life. But no matter. So thoroughly has this fable soaked into the culture that it is now mere conventional wisdom that if we just let it all...
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