After a century of Freud, you can blame him or thank him, laugh or lie down, but a couch may never again be just a couch. Never again will we look at ourselves and each other in quite the same way. He took us inward. After a century of Freud, a couch may never again be just a couch. A father of three boys and three girls, Freud plumbed the child's-eye view to find the core of the adult.
Nothing is accidental.
Everything has meaning. Mr. Grunbaum respects Freud's genius but says Freud generalized too much and claimed credit as originator of ideas from antiquity. Original or not, Freud's work swept away old views of how the mind works and brought new insights into mental illness. Before Freud's time, the mentally ill were lucky if they didn't get locked away in an asylum, where shackles and beatings were common, said his biographer, historian Peter Gay, who runs the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. An alternative, usually available only to the wealthy, was sometimes called moral treatment or moral therapy.