Freud's theory of the unconcious question

[osho]

It is hard to say what he wrote is nonsensical or full of sense and I reserve conclusion, and we, often garbing our ideas in a lot of metaphoric eruditions, allusions are capable of conning people into the kind of thought we have though at the bottom they are trashes. However I have some leaning to what Freud had said, for Marx and Freud are two philosophical giants who shaped modern thought and Darwin too comes in

[Heteronym]

In contemporary therapy, are psychiatrists still engaging in Freudian analysis? Has his methods (as well as those of Jung) become passé? These are moot questions, because few can afford expensive psychiatric treatment these days. From what I've been reading and hearing, cognitive therapy (which takes time) has been superseded
by medical treatment. (Prescriptions for anti-depressives, pills for social anxiety, and similiar pharmaceutical remedies.)

I don't think they're moot questions, because treatment with drugs doesn't solve the patients' problems, it just hides them. Depression, social anxiety and other psychic problems sometimes have causes in the wider context of the society people live in. Drugs provide a short-term solution for individuals but ultimately leave the social problems that caused them intact, and of course the health industry continues to profit from it.

[Heteronym]

Now here's the part the puzzled me. Freud states that there are unlearned biological instincts buried deep within our unconscious. These instincts, he says, include sexual and aggressive impulses and apparently motivate our actions. But what are these "impulses" exactly and why must we struggle to control these to conform with society's rules?

I think the first question someone should pose is, if these impulses are unconscious, how did Freud discover them? Freud was born in 1856; he lived in a time that, having lost faith in god, relatively speaking, was looking for something to fill the vacuum; Marxism was an answer; Social Darwinism (or Spencerism) was another; the unconscious was yet another. The Unconscious is just another abstract entity used to explain people, but like God, it's not a very solid thing. Anyone who is a human being can't have failed to notice that people sometimes do irrational things, sometimes make strange choices that clash with their well-being. Nothing that literature hasn't explored since recorded history. We all know sometimes our logic is faulty, sometimes we act on impulse. This realization is something that is very much present in our everyday existence, and often is the source of humour. An Unconscious is a redudant explanation, because it just creates one more sweeping entity to explain all human behavior when we already had concepts and language to explain our behaviour.

Also, Freud's context informed what he thought was central in human thinking. Coming from a strict, puritan society, Freud put sex at the center of every human motivation, which is obviously absurd. I think Freud's major contribution was making everyone discuss sex when it was a taboo subject, but he extended it into every aspect of human existence. Then after the carnage of WWI, Freud changed his theory and decided that people in fact had a death drive. He was a man of extremes, and human existence can't really be explained by extremes; it's more complex than that.

[Freudian Monkey]

So Mr Freud...

Dr. Freud. Besides writing heavily in fields of psychology and philosophy, he attended medical school, and worked diligently in psychiatry and neurology.

I prefer to call him Uncle Siggy.

Freud actually quite rarely mentions the archaic remnants that OP mentioned. The idea that biological material could transfer from one generation to the next was a interesting question during Freud's days, but this so-called Lamarckism faced a lot of criticism even back then and Freud quietly separated himself from Lamarckism when he realized that it was a sinking boat. Jung on the other hand went crazy with the idea of the archaic remnants and it went on to have an important part in his archetype theory.