Ryan, I'm quite aware of Miller's writing and have read quite a few of her books, and there was a time when I took her very seriously, and still look back on her fondly.  In the end, she's still an analyst.  Even Freud updated his views and rejected a lot of his own opinions during his life.  Your point about phantasying is well taken, but there have been many invented cases of physical abuse, and his discovering that is one of the things that's been unfortunately emphasized among many other things he had thought about or discovered.  Remember, hypnosis can create false memories and will, which is often enough the case to make things really complicated.  You obviously don't know Freud very well, nor do you understand how his models are applied, particularly today.  First of all, what I am saying is that people can be working from a Freudian perspective and still function well as therapists, while people can be using NLP and be bad therapists.  I'm trained in NLP, so I've made that my choice, but I know people working with different points of reference and when comparing what they do, actually do, it's really not so different.  "Insight" is a word people use for a lot of different things.  People never really understand what's happening to them, so how can they really possibly have insight?  When you think of insight, you can think instead of what happens when people become aware of their internal representations, or when they gain information from taking another perceptual pos, or some sort of reframing.  As far as time and history goes, what difference does it really make whether you're thinking in terms of what happened having a causal relationship with present experience or what current representations about the past having such a relationship?  The people I know doing psychoanalysis realize they are doing art, not science, know that it is a metaphorical process that's completely mysterious to them, while many of the cog psych and nlp trained people I know forget that what they've learned are products of the imagination.  Psychoanalyis is so de-legitimized these days -- there are only a handful of academic programs that even teach it -- that I think it's quite ludicrous and mean to attack them without knowing what they're actually up to.  Yet people make it work. A Freudian I know is one of the best matchers I've ever met (an unconscions, not conscious capability), and he gets great rapport, and his clients respond phenomenally well. He meets people in their model of the world better than any nlper I've ever met.  And yes, I've seen people with small minds make it work badly, but it's the same with everything. A phyicist may apply newtonian energy calculations to a local process, out of convenience, realizing all the while that gravity has more to do perhaps with the bending of space around massive bodies.  This doesn't mean that he "believes" in a newtonian universe.  It means he has useful models. Now, it is somehow easy for me to believe that PhD cog psych programs can indoctrinate people into doing the type of studies you mentioned (psychology and motor development), since psych programs, in their alliance with the APA (speaking from a US perspective here; I don't know where you're from), and their need to legitimize themselves "objectively" especially when it comes to satisfying insurance providers, desire so fondly to think of themselves as scientists.  And remember, these are the same people who distort both NLP and psychoanalysis. best, JS