system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What was so revolutionary about Freud?
gpt
He believed that the mind, as opposed to the brain, could be studied scientifically, as opposed to philosophically. In other words, he was one of the first people to separate psychology from psychiatry and from philosophy.

He believed, in an age where the mentally ill were being shoved into asylums and locked up, that talk therapy could treat and sometimes cure mental illness.

He argued that sex and sexuality should be discussed openly, in an era where Western intellectuals still approached these subjects prudishly, at least in public.

And he was one of the first people to try to come up with a scientific theory of the unconscious or subconscious mind, which is a concept so universal we now take it for granted (even though modern psychology doesn't think the unconscious mind works the way Freud thought it does).

He was one of the first to apply his own theories, and thus one of the first to apply the new field of psychology, to the study of society as a whole, and to the study of the arts. In other words, he was a founding figure in the fields of social psychology and of psychological criticism in the arts.

Many of his wackier ideas -- the Oedipus complex, penis envy, castration anxiety, etc. -- captured the world's imagination and are an important part of intellectual history, even if we now think of them as unscientific or flat out wrong.

He *was* often wrong. He was often dangerously, irresponsibly wrong, even by the standards of his own time. He sometimes failed to apply basic common sense to his own patients' cases, and almost certainly made many of their lives worse.

But it's also worth noting that he changed his mind about a lot of things, and he's the rare intellectual figure who's almost as well known for the new ideas he came up with in his 50s and 60s, as the ideas he came up with in his early career.

So even though we now think Freud was absurdly wrong about some of his most basic theories, and he wasn't necessarily a good person, it's impossible to deny that his importance in intellectual history was huge, and in at least some cases, his influence on the world was positive.

We live in a world where we can look back and condemn Freud for being wrong about so many things, but Freud helped make that world possible.