Freud Lives (Outside Psychology Departments)!

A lack of empirical rigor, testable hypotheses, insurance companies refusal to fund psychotherapy, and the advances in neuroscience have really harmed psychoanalysis as a scientific field. While still taught at universities, it is not taught usually in psychology departments, but rather in the humanities.

I took two courses on psychoanalysis as an undergraduate english major. In one of the courses, we read his Interpretation of Dreams which I loved. Through recording my dreams on a tape recorder (recommended by the professor to be done in a stream of consciousness manner so as to not impose an ex post narrative structure on the dreams fleeing from my memory), my professor showed me that I was not merely friends with my now-wife, but in fact loved my now-wife! Ever since, I've been fascinated by Freud's theory of dreams. I would need to re-read the book to figure out just what the predictions of the theory were, though. I mainly remember it as relating to the id/ego/superego structure, and dreams being, like Freudian slips and neuroticisms, ways that the id attempted to communicate with or influence the conscious mind those things which were suppressed by the ethical mind. You could model this using game theory, since the three players are all strategically involved with one another, but I'm not sure if it'd be all that useful.