by Jeffrey Zeig: A Teaching Seminar With Milton Erickson: You see, I don’t believe in Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud did contribute a lot of good ideas to psychiatry and psychology. 
A lot of ideas that psychiatrists and psychologists should have found out for themselves and not waited for Freud to tell them. And he also invented that religion called “psychoanalysis”-wherein that religion or therapy fits all people, of both sexes, at all ages, in all cultures, in all situations. And situations where Freud himself didn’t know what those situations were.
Psychoanalysis fits all problems in all times. Freud analyzed Moses. And I am willing to bet anything that Freud never had any contact of any sort with Moses. He didn’t even know what Moses looked like, yet Freud analyzed him. And life in the time of Moses was far different from life in the time of Freud. And Freud analyzed Edgar Allen Poe from his writings, his letters and newspaper stories. I think any doctor who tries to diagnose appendicitis from an author’s stories and his letters to his friends and newspaper stories about him ought to be committed. (Erickson laughs.) Yet Freud analyzed Edgar Allen Poe on gossip, hearsay and Poe’s writings. He didn’t know a thing about the man. And Freudian disciples have analyzed Alice in Wonderland. And Alice in Wonderland is entirely fictional. The analysts analyzed it, though. And in Freudian psychology, whether you are an only child or one of 11, the only child has as many sibling rivalries as a child with 10 brothers and sisters. There is the father fixation and the mother fixation, even if the child never knows who his father was. There is always an oral fixation, anal fixation, Oedipus complex, Electra complex. The mere truth doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a religion. And I am very grateful to Freud for the concepts he contributed to psychiatry and psychology.
