We have no free will, according to a scientist.

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Mental health has paradigms and each paradigm has its place in the different approaches psychological treatments employ. It is not correct to say he "damaged" the profession. One of the many things he contributed to his field is convincing medical practice that the mind and body are connected (prior to Freud) the renaissance thinkers and philosophers declared the mind and body are separate (Descartes famously referred to as dualism).

If I remember right, Freud thought it was milk but I wish I could find what he wrote about the incident. It's not in The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life (at least not in the edition I found on Project Gutenberg), and it seems an unlikely event to put into The Interpretation Of Dreams, and those are the only 2 Freud books I remember reading, so I'm stumped.

Well, there was the Yorkshire Ripper not so long ago. But does anybody know what makes a few men commit such crimes, and does it represent anything at all about mainstream society?

As for the prudishness, I think the picture was rather mixed. Blake used to have get-togethers in the woods during which some women would pose naked, for some obscure reason. Lewis Carroll photographed little girls naked, to the delight of their mothers. And nudes in art were always considered respectable.

I've long thought that there's a disconnect in modern society - monogamy is held by many to be very important, but society freely allows a lot of things that would seem to encourage the very opposite. I suspect the Victorians were just more consistent, and formulated their rules to enforce standards. Not that it always worked.

I suspect that most doctors already knew that mind and body aren't entirely different entities. I seem to remember Freud being critical of one of his contemporaries for thinking the causes of mental illness were physiological.

This 1984 series on the life of Freud is interesting, though the picture quality isn't great and the incidental music was mixed far too loud for me to hear all the words easily:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg_I ... 7oGB3tFRAO

Yes, I think humans find novel ways to engage in sex. In Victorian England the male aristocracy certainly indulged their "peccadillos" in all manner of debauchery. The origin of actresses being a disreputable profession came from the English theatre where "gentlemen" in the gallery would lay bids to sleep with the prettiest actresses who (when not playing drama on the stage) were organised as courtesans for wealthy men.

You would think so but that's not the case. The biomedical model of medicine which treats the body like a clock that needs fixing or "winding" still persists today. We are over reliant on pharmaceutical drugs that could be replaced with psychotherapy,

I don't want to defend everything Freud said/claimed, After all he is a product of his time. Pioneers in particular fields might make breakthroughs but much of what they do or believe ends up as a dead end.

The question of what the unconscious mind is capable of is interesting. Nicola Tesla claimed all his great ideas were streamed to his unconscious mind from an alien being thousands of light years away.

One wonders what the ancient Egyptian who carved these pictures of jet planes and speed boats thousands of years ago was tapping into

We were discussing John Vervaeke (and someone posted the reddit 'quack or not?' thread) a bit further up.

This is a pretty good interview of John Vervaeke by Cosmic Skeptic (Alex O'Connor) where they have a pretty good discussion on the topic of meaning but also have some friction of worldviews (mostly around meaning and fear of death):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqVOwpag4IA

The way this interview worked out - I was a bit surprised that Alex was really hung up on meaning needing an absolute ground in physical reality, ie. he seemed to be suggesting that he takes seriously that if the universe is going to go into heat death so many trillions of years from now why self-improve, etc. (he clearly doesn't apply that to his own life but it seems like it's something that's caught his thinking).