What I don't dig about Freud: I think he's kind of hokey (855-862)

Freud sounds like he was a pretty cool dude, what with all his challenges to man's conception of himself and stuff.  He was careful, original, and tried to explain previously mysterious phenomena (cases of hysteria and insanity in particular) by unifying his clinical observations in a sort of unified theory, a characteristic ambition of the nineteenth century.

On the other hand, Freud's hypotheses were not supported by a large amount of actual evidence; Freud had no actual insight into the human brain (or even the mechanism by which dreams are produced) when he declared dreams to be valuable glimpses of the unconscious.  (By contrast, in the book Phantoms in the Brain, the author, V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, notes that his study of phantom limbs has led him to the hypothesis that the surprisingly widespread foot fetish is linked to the structure of the brain, whereas Freud attributed sexual feelings about feet to their alleged phallic shape.)

A recent article in the Science Tuesday section of the New York Times, about the business of analyzing dreams, mentioned that dreaming subjects of the study tended to attach "more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and they gave correspondingly more weight to a positive dream if it was about a friend."  But these aren't pros! the astute reader might object.  One Dr. Morewedge (apparently a prominent psychologist) suggests that such a "motivated approach" is equally applicable to researchers as well as subjects, citing "Freud's tendency to find what he was looking for--sex--in his 'Interpretation of Dreams.'"