I had never looked into this issue of Freud's deceptive work before.
However, my comment goes towards the idea of "psychoanalysis" not having any worth, which is what one could get from this podcast listening to Dufresne. (I get the sense of someone who may be a very talented historian/scholar, but is possibly way out of his depth in his knowledge of psychology and psychotherapy.) Wow,
we should really be careful here. Though classical, straight Freudian psychoanalysis is pretty much out of date, psychodynamic schools of therapy, which all have their original influence in Freud (more than Jung or Adler and the others, there's no comparison), are very much still practiced and cannot in any way be described as "bunk".
"Object relations" therapies (mostly British: Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, etc.), self psychology (Kohut), relational psychoanalysis, etc. etc, which are all "psychoanalytically informed", are still current and have an immense worth clinically, and I dare say possibly millions of people's lives have been profoundly affected and saved, and still are. They're built upon the clinical practice and research of mountains of people over a century's worth of work. Not to mention the still highly respected work of a "psychoanalyst" such as
Eric Erikson ("identity crisis"), or
attachment theory, a completely empirical theory of child development which is now scientifically widely accepted, which was originally the work of the Brit
John Bowlby, who started out and until the end called himself a "psychoanalyst".
(In the last decades, "psychoanalysts" who have gone way beyond Freud, or his immediate followers, and are more linked to schools like attachment theory and self psychology, have also deeply enriched our understanding of child development and human psychology, human relatedness and the rich nature of subjectivity, partly through closely looking at the scientific, empirical research on child development. An example:
Daniel Stern.)
No matter the deceptions he may have been involved in, and the outdated specifics of his theories (no one but strict, very orthodox Freudians are nowadays buying into the "sex and death" biological instincts), Freud's contributions should not be overlooked. His promoting the role of the unconscious in our daily lives and the view of the human person as therefore not transparent to him or herself, a whole bunch of clinical therapeutic concepts like transference and counter-transference (however transformed since) that relate to the relational nature of what necessarily happens between the therapist and the patient, cannot be overlooked or thrown away. (A lot of these concepts are integrated today in the most modern versions of other forms of therapy as well: cognitive, humanistic, transpersonal, etc.)