Anyone reading Sigmund Freud’s original works might well be seduced by the beauty of his prose, the elegance of his arguments and the acuity of his intuition. But those with a grounding in science will also be shocked by the abandon with which he elaborated his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical evidence.

‘Psychology: A Reality Check’, Nature, vol. 461, no. 7266 (October 15, 2009), p. 847