His own baggage

The argument

Sigmund was a troubled soul himself. Letters suggest his sister in law was his mistress for many years and he had also had an affair with a male friend. In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias." He was an avid drug user and cocaine addict. He was a lifelong smoker and refused to stop despite losing part of his jaw due to relentless malignancy. He had more than 30 surgeries and requested and received euthanasia from his physician.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This is an ad hominem: Freud's affairs, his drug use, his phobias and his final illness are facts about the man, and they are logically independent of whether his theories are sound. A body of ideas stands or falls on its evidence, internal coherence and explanatory power, not on the character or health of the person who advanced it — Newton's obsessive alchemy and occult theology did not make his mechanics false, and a saintly author guarantees no theory's truth. If psychoanalysis is problematic, as many argue it is, the reasons lie in its testability, its reliance on unfalsifiable interpretation and its weak evidential base — grounds internal to the theory itself — not in Freud's cocaine habit or his jaw cancer. Listing his personal troubles may colour a reader's impression of him, but it supplies no reason to doubt any particular claim of psychoanalytic theory; the position it is meant to support concerns the beliefs, and the biography does not touch them. Judging the work by the flaws of its author confuses the two.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A person's affairs or troubled private life are logically independent of whether their theories are true; inferring the flaws of the work from the flaws of the author is an ad hominem. [Rejecting P3] Addiction, smoking and illness bear on Freud's biography, not on the evidential merits of psychoanalysis — Newton's occult obsessions did not invalidate his physics.