Having read the whole piece, my take is a bit different. To say that denial is seductive is simply a outside view of things.

Life's a mess. We're all many things, all the time. We are the sum of all our feelings. If I've lived all my life in one place, having grown attached to it, it would be very difficult for me to decide to leave it for good.

And attaching to Freud more foreknowledge just because he happened to be Freud, the intellectual, is simply to deny him his humanity.

This whole article could perhaps be summed up thus: Freud was just like all of us, attached to the past, blind about the future, hoping for the best even at the worst of times.