This is some of the most niche discourse I've brought up but I think that more criticism of Freud should discuss the fact that he had a theory before all of the weird Oedipus/Electra and penis envy stuff.
The theory was 'hey guys I think these girls might be getting molested and that's why they're hysterical' and you can find it stated clearly in any history of Freud's seduction theory. How accurate his claims of sexual abuse are is obviously unknown and a point of significant controversy; while this theory was more true-to-life than his later ones, there were still a lot of flaws in his methodology and data collection, which is frankly to be expected from a science that was in its early infancy. (And please don't fixate too much on the name. This is 'seduction' strictly in the sense that it was done to them, not that they, the children, had any culpability in it.)
And that suggestion fucking destroyed his career. People were outraged. How could he suggest that all of these highly respected, predominantly wealthy men were molesting their children? He was told not to publish his theories, subsequently shunned by his peers, and essentially made an outcast until he eventually recanted it years later.
...Sound familiar?
So yeah, you can say that Freud was a coward. You can absolutely say that he did a lot of lasting damage to the field of psychology, and for sure that his later work had wayyy too much cocaine involved.
But I also think that it's unfair to put the entire weight of a problem we still struggle with today (the difficulty of proving sexual abuse) on one man from the early 1900s, and I'd even argue that had he not faced so much backlash from the times, he would have been able to get a lot further into the whole trauma/mental illness connection instead of spiraling off into weird fantasy land.
