While Freud was not always correct, it is wrong to speak of Freud as undermining the neurological science of psychology. He himself was a neurologist, and it was precisely this that drove him to his psychological studies. He knew the distinction between "mind" and "body" was false; he thought of mind as a physiological entity, but he was unable to study it physiologically because the tools we have now—tools that come from advances in physics and chemistry, not neuroscience—were simply not available.

Freud himself made many inroads into the physiological aspects of mind, bringing to light things such as conversion disorders (when an emotional problem leads to a different psychosomatic symptom), and the effect of childhood on mental development. Today, neuroscience is finding neurologial evidence of what Freud observed. For example, a traumatized child can grow up with an atrophied amygdala, and be prone to exactly the kind of conversion disorders Freud described.

While traditional, formal psychoanalysis is not the best version of therapy (just the first), "the talking cure" has been strongly validated through the exceptional success of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Our cogitations, you see, are physical activities in our brain. Just as an experienced mathematician or pianist uses a different area of the brain when doing math or playing piano than an inexperienced person, so we can develop other mental habits that are reflected neurologically.

That said, many have misunderstood his work and reified the "mental" system as somehow magically standing apart from the physical. The truth, that mental processes are every bit as physical as respiration or circulation, is taking a long time to trickle out into the field and the population at large. Freud is not the reason. Rather, this is a cultural misunderstanding, much of which stems from the Cartesian dualism most of the West still seems to believe. If you must lay blame, lay it at the feet of people like Descartes, who argued that the mind sat in the body like a visitor, rather than at the man who believed, like Brücke, his teacher, that the mind was a dynamic, physiological system, which we could understand and program to some extent with language.

I submitted the below to the WSJ in response to Mansfield's article. I don't know if it will be posted or how it may be edited (they reserve the right to edit or not post), but I'm sharing it here as well.

__________________

I find it difficult to understand how this person has his job. The intellectual dishonesty of selectively slanting his arguments with thinkers such as Machiavelli and Locke, while ignoring the revolution & evolution of thought that led to the U.S.—it takes my breath away.

First, to use Machiavelli's arguments in the The Prince as representative of Machiavelli's support of a strong executive is disingenuous, coming from Mansfield. Mansfield surely must know that Machiavelli also wrote, in the Discourses, "In fact, when there is combined under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check."

The heavy reliance on John Locke is also puzzling. Locke died in 1704. A man born more than a century after Locke's birth and much more of an influence on the development of the American Revolution and the U.S. government, as well as on the French Revolution, offered the below (caps are his):

Wherefore, laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that IT IS WHOLLY OWING TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE PEOPLE, AND NOT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE GOVERNMENT, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey....

Any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one....

But where, says some, is the King of America? I'll tell you. Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law OUGHT to be King; and there ought to be no other...

A government of our own is our natural right.

--Thomas Paine