Why psychoanalysis should be kept outside one’s home

livemint.com:

Home psychoanalysis is a modern disorder. More than ever, people are attributing reasons for a person’s behaviour to something not very obvious, like the distant past or sexual melancholy or the subconscious mind. Thus there are claims that a man does not prioritize his family because he had a bad childhood; or that a woman is unhappy in a relationship because she entered it “on the rebound"; or that a child is scared of birds because she once had a frightening toy, and so on.

And there are interpretations of dreams where serpents mean sex and public nudity means a sense of inferiority. (A search for meaning in dreams is close to the origins of psychoanalysis—in Sigmund Freud’s fanciful interpretations.) And, of course, people also read “body language": folded arms are a defensive pose and a rub of the nose signifies lying. It is hard to dispute that the subconscious mind exists, and that it dictates behaviour.

The collective subconscious mind of society is even perceivable, but the mainstream view that the individual subconscious can be read using general cues that hold good for all minds and that such an analysis is a settled science is a marketing triumph of psychoanalysis. The internet has accelerated the transmission of psychoanalytical cues and labels, inserting them into how people think about others. As recently as a century ago, people did not psychoanalyse much, or at all, as we can deduce from literature that is available to us from many parts of the world.

In the Bible, or the great Indian, Greek or Arabic epics, for instance, characters do not perceive an esoteric cause of an effect. Even dreams are only supernatural instructions and not omens of a secret personality. But after Freud grew popular and gave