Ask many people to name a famous psychologist and they will invariably say Sigmund Freud. This perhaps exemplifies some of the main problems with psychology today, in that the public has been raised on a sugary diet of pop psychology and self-help manuals.
Studies have found that the general public hold psychology in high regard while simultaneously understanding little about what it actually is. This has perhaps led some in the media to label A-level psychology as soft and easy (try telling that to the multitude of students who fail the exam every year).
So what about Freud? First of all many in the profession would dispute and even reject outright his psychological credentials – he was a psychoanalyst (which isn’t the same as a psychologist).
Second, he wasn’t really a scientist because he didn’t gather and analyse evidence in an objective or scientific manner (most of his theories were based on a small sample of middle-class Austrian women).
Finally, if you choose to study psychology you may perhaps only catch a glimpse of Freud - and even then perhaps only in order to compare his unscientific methods to those of the more evidence based cognitive and biological ones.