How It All Got Started
If you've seen A Dangerous Method, then you already have some sense of the (in)auspicious beginnings of psychoanalysis. Freud demanded fierce loyalty and was frequently and famously threatened by rival upstarts like Carl Jung. As he worked to institutionalize psychoanalysis, all this drama caused the dude a lot of setbacks.
The good doctor—whom poet H. D. would later call a "blameless physician"—was branded a charlatan by many of his contemporaries. These Doubting Thomases easily dismissed Freud's would-be scientific theories as speculative nonsense, or worse.
Freud took pains to distinguish his own practice from occult techniques like hypnosis and other forms of "suggestion," but the specter of the occult kept coming back to haunt the poor Dr. F. His movement had a hard time shedding its reputation as hippy dippy, hocus pocus.
You might say that people kept putting the psychics back in psychoanalysis. Ba-dum-tshhh.
Meanwhile, psychoanalytic theories of child sexuality and adult ambivalence violated Europe's still-Victorian sense of propriety. From the perspective of the morally upright, Freud's so-called science looked totally corrupt. Like, shut-your-children-in-the-house corrupt.
It took time for Freud's notion of the unconscious to be accepted. It was never accepted as gospel truth or a miracle cure, mind you. But people at least got into it as a compelling set of workable hypotheses that could teach students and sad people alike about the dark depths of the mind and soul.
And by the time Freud published his reflections on the First World War in 1915, psychoanalysis was widely acknowledged as pretty awesome. Scholars thought it offered insight into collective as well as individual history.
Theorists and clinicians—including practitioners of psychoanalysis, and there are some of those around—continue to contest Freud's ideas, of course. But psychoanalysis is here to stay. Perhaps it's not understood as the "science" that Freud desperately wanted it to be.
Still, it's survived as an intellectual tradition and set of interpretive techniques capable of deepening our understanding of texts and people alike. Now go out there and make Papa Freud proud with your self-awareness.