Today Freud’s discovery is a part of what we call modernity, but when it emerged there was nothing “modern” about it.

Freud could even write, speaking of himself:

“The author of The Interpretation of Dreams has ventured, in the face of the reproaches of strict science, to become a partisan of antiquity and superstition.”

Sigmund Freud “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1906), Standard Edition, Vol. IX, p. 7.

That it went counter to contemporary beliefs is part of the essence of psychoanalysis, and in spite of appearances, that is still true.

Reproduction of the Gradiva which hung next to Freud's Couch. Photo by Edmund Engelman, 1938

Source: Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious