idle thoughts on Sigmund Freud

I'm reading Freud again for the first time since my undergraduate career--Studies in Hysteria. I'm always interested in cutting back to Freud's own work, as opposed to some of the more strained interpretive leaps his followers have made. Freud tends to get a lot of flack from critics because he was wrong about so many things, and, more often, because his work has long out-lived its shelf-life in terms of therapeutic usefulness (Oedipal nonsense and penis envy being rather less useful in the long term than an early modernist gentleman might have anticipated). That said, Herr Doktor was really pretty revolutionary in some regards. While some of his systems and equations don't quite hold up, his is the first modern construction of trauma. He has an understanding of pain as an event that must be processed actively, or else it will come out through the body in some grotesque manner. That doesn't seem so far wrong to me.

Okay, yes, hysteria as a disease is a patriarchal artifact, a pathologizing of women's bodies. Freud as a man immersed in his own time was not interested in deconstructing that myth; he was interested in finding ways to treat patients. And megalomaniac he might have been, but how many people--how many women--did he empower to own their own pain? He notoriously hijacked the personal narratives of many of his patients. But did he also allow them access to language they didn't know they were allowed to use? Did he also allow them to see themselves as human beings with internal worlds as vital and as real as their male counterparts?