I blame their mothers.

Honestly I think it's as simple as his notariety.
He is one of the most well-known psychologists and is a bit of a pop culture icon.
It's like how you see most non-physicists talk about Einstein more than they do Feynman or Higgs.

They spend multiple weeks on him in Intro to psychology classes. Even though they tell you at the end it's a bunch of rot (if you haven't figured it out yourself), if that's like 1/5 of your psychological knowledge, you're gonna use it

Thesis envy

Freud actually did do something very very important for modern psychology. He popularized the idea of the subconscious: that humans have thought processes they are not aware of and mostly can't control (actually the more I learn about it the more I feel like a marionette on my gut bacteria's strings but that's besides the point). I've also heard he did actually nail down the cause of many mental illnesses: child sexual abuse, but that there was some (formal?/ informal?) political pressure to not list that as the actual cause so he caved and said the patients must have made it up. I'm struggling to remember where I heard that but unfortunately given my personal and professional experience with the mental health system (the personal was more than I liked; the professional is getting there), this sounds depressingly familiar.

Probably because his ideas is what made popular psychology known to the world. His ideas have largely been debunked but there are nuggets that have been developed and become something different, rather than abandoned.

His ideas about ego, id superego etc are more commonly understood than the current psychiatric terms.

So, just like we call it pop culture, pop psychology is well known and he's the head.

Because "hehehe penis" is more fun than an actual understanding of psychology.

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.

I think some of this is also just that pop science often lags years or decades behind real science. Most people couldn't name another famous psychologist, or an evolutionary scientist beyond Darwin, or a physicist beyond Einstein.

Specifically regarding art and philosophy, even if Freud's idea were wrong, you can still glean something useful (or at least interesting) from using them as a starting premise.

It's a way of framing discourse, ideas, and concepts. In the most general sense, id, ego, and super ego descibe that which is fundamental and can not change, that which can change but is not known at hand, and that which is presently known and can be actively changed. Try applying this framework to current events and you'll see why people still discuss it.

Police brutality is a good example. What is fundamental to a police officer and drives them? What more maleable mindset does this create? What conscious decisions and actions does an officer take?

Obviously, this framing doesn't perfectly capture the issue, but it does set you on a structured path to addressing it. If having an authoritative personality is what drives a police officer, how might we instill a more positive mindset when they are on patrol? How can the actions of a police officer negate that mindset?

And so on, but sometimes a cop is just a cop...

To be clear, the vast majority of academic philosophers (at least in the Anglophone world) find Freud to be useless pseudoscience. Freud gets taken seriously in literary analysis and continental philosophy. The latter is a minority position (although drawing a hard and fast line between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy is pretty difficult these days).

When I was getting my PhD in philosophy, I would have been laughed out of the room if I wrote a term paper that used Freud in any significant way.

Laziness and expediency.

Freud's theories are pretty simple to understand and easy to map onto. Back when Freud was influential, people were easily able to import and use it in their literary theory, philosophy etc. Same thing happened with Lacan but since Lacan builds on Freud it's essentially the same thing.

In order to use an updated understanding of psychology or even better, neurology, people would have to learn a whe lot of much more complex theory and facts, and explain it to their readers, and apply it into their own thing.

It's much easier for an overworked academic to take this wrong but much-used system that everyone already knows.

Most psychologists kinda hate Freud as a person? Do they want to talk about that? Why have hate for a dead person?

This gets at the history of literary and art theory in the 20th century. The basic answer is that people in the arts adopted psychodynamic frameworks from Freud, Lacan, etc, while actual psychologists moved on.

Not true in Argentina and France, both infected by psychoanalysis and in particular by Lacan.

when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?

I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn't torture any monkeys

Because they literally don't know a single other phycologist. Just as most people couldn't name a modern philosopher so would cite Socrates or Plato.

I would have thought he exists in pop culture because of his ideas about freudian slips and how easy it is to make fun of.

Recognize him for a different OG status:

His work was so bad that all the "internet nerds" worked overnight trying to disprove him.

Most psychologists [...].

And yet for some reason philosophers [...] and artists [...].

Why are you careful/nuanced with psychologists but dump philosophers and artists in the same bag as if they all do the same?

I see this a lot. The other day, I was watching a science video. Same thing: "some physicists believe...", "other physicists...", but "philosophers say...".

Do you think philosophy and art (disciplines that by their very nature are diverse and creative) create only one type of people? I mean, Karl Popper is a philosopher against Freud, you just said it. You could find many philosophers opposed to Freud, indifferent, critical, in agreement, etc. Artists are the same, very different people among them.

Now, the real question should be why is Freud popular amongst some artists and philosophers and other non-psychologists, especially in certain regions like France and Argentina, or certain traditions like old continental philosophy. And that's probably the beginning of an answer at the same time: a strong tradition of psychoanalysis within certain circles. Also, a matter of coherence or lack of. For example, if you start reading French existentialism and keep reframing certain aspects of reality, you may find yourself inclined to epistemological paradigms that do not oppose psychoanalytical theories, so you could combine them if you want to. If you start denying materialism in some ways, you may end up denying biological explanations of psychopathological phenomena, so Freud could be a good substitute (or not, depending on the person).

I guess if I were to give a psychological reductionist answer, Freud and similar authors appeal to part of the population that is skeptical of conventional models, the status quo, scientism, hard materialism, etc.

Dunning-Krueger effect.

Because his 'theories' are easy to understand for the layperson, and have become tropes in our narrative culture. Most people's understanding of freud is simple 'blame your parents for your problems.'

You do see a lot of Jung as well, but Jung's work is more abstract and out there and is often used symbolically, whereas Frued's is used literally and in sitcoms.