While at first, Freud and his followers were widely considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they were getting results. Their models could explain all of human behavior, they could make high probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

Then, as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the model portraying all of a person’s experiences as being stored in his brain, even though he can’t recall the experiences at will, is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery, allowing researchers to place tiny electrodes on their brains, are able, when a milliamp current is turned on, to recall all kinds of memories in detail, memories of which they ordinarily have no conscious awareness.⁶

   

                                                                             neurosurgery (credit: Wikipedia) 

Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of nearly all of the motives that drive human behaviour. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; for example, we no longer believe that little girls are consumed with a desire to have a penis. But the larger impact of his discoveries remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy logic and common sense turned out to have a rational explanation. The dreams and visions were, and are, figments of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place at all. No more miracles.

                           

                                                           Bernadette of Lourdes (credit: Wikipedia)