Most psychologists don’t care about Freud’s work outside of a historical sense and kinda hate him as a person. His work was quite literally used as an example of pseudoscience by Karl Popper.
And yet for some reason philosophers have an obsession with integrating his views into their work and artists keep using his views as inspiration and analyze existing works via the lens of psychoanalysis.
Why?
It’s the only psychologist who has a name known to the bulk of laymen, so he’s quoted for the sake of sounding educated. And more often than not, entirely misquoted to produce a “credible” argument.
The thing is, he wasn’t even a psychologist.
That’s about what I was thinking, the self-perpetuating fame. The general population just doesn’t know the names of many psychologists, but they’ve heard of Freud and a handful of Freud’s ideas.