I have long maintained that the aetiological and therapeutic theories of Sigmund Freud were mostly unsound and caused some damage to society in general and psychiatry in particular. When I first started actually doing psychiatry in the 1960s such criticism was unusual and heretical, but within a decade, it was becoming more common. By the 1990s it was the norm, except, of course, among a dwindling and beleaguered band of true believers. NHS psychoanalysts fight to retain a tiny enclave in a psychotherapeutic territory populated largely by evidence based practitioners whose preference is for cognitive behavioural techniques (and for evidence, of …