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I view the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, 2nd edition (PDM-2)1 as a monumental and very difficult achievement. Freud divided psychoanalysis into three parts: a model of the mind, a clinical treatment, and a research tool. Two of these parts have held up remarkably well, while the third is yet to be developed. Psychoanalysis has shown itself to be a powerful model of the mind. Kahneman and Tversky won a Nobel Prize by essentially proving Freud's distinction between primary and secondary process. They put new language on his qualitative descriptions and added nothing really original except the scientific work they did.
As one of the leading neurobiologists of his time, Freud would be utterly fascinated with that. He would be reading neurological and neuropathological imaging journals and would be most intrigued by the idea that the limbic system has many more connections to the cortex than the cortex has back to the limbic system. This fact explains why we human beings are so screwed up, and why drives influence us so much. Freud has not gotten sufficient credit for his model of the mind. He was way too lionized during his career and has been way too denigrated since, but he deserves credit for the intuitions that inform our contemporary model of the mind.
As a treatment, psychoanalysis is dreadfully impractical, but it is the father of all the other treatments. Cognitive therapy is essentially an offshoot of psychoanalysis. I think that the big mistake psychoanalysts have made is gathering the wagons around the four-to-five-times-a-week frequency issue rather than embracing the fact that all psychotherapy really derives from the work that was done over 100 years ago in Vienna.
The biggest problem for psychoanalysis has been the third area: research. Freud made some remarkable early discoveries by using psychoanalysis as a research tool. But ever since his time, psychoanalytic research has been a weak link in the chain—partly because it is so subjective. If you have ni