Maybe there's a generic term for this (objects or figures held up for attack as a way of signaling group membership), but in the behavioral sciences and psychiatry there's a lot of strawman figures or ideas that get held up by authors as an object of derision, as a way for the authors to assert being part of "real science". This takes a lot of forms, but Freud is one of these figures. Others involve references to mind-body dualism ("this is a brain-based phenomenon, not a psychological one", which is ironic in a lot of ways), there a lot of others. The behavioral sciences often are ridiculed by other sciences, sometimes rightly so, but sometimes by people who are unaware of the complexities involved in certain topics, or who are otherwise just being narcissistic bullies; so people trying in good faith to do research sometimes use targeting figures like Freud to signal their "science credentials."
This case leaves me scratching my head a bit because the idea of suppressing negative thoughts sometimes being a bad thing isn't just a Freudian idea (what Freud was actually saying, and how different modern theories are from those of Freud, is a whole topic onto itself). CBT, which is often held up as some kind of gold standard of empirically supported therapy, has this idea of a hierarchy of beliefs, some a person might be aware of, and others of which the person only holds implicitly. These "core beliefs" go unaddressed, sometimes through active avoidance, which leads to problems (or so the theory goes). Or from a purely behavioral perspective, someone has some fear that leads to elaborate avoidance behaviors, which cause impairments — the treatment being exposure to the feared stimulus.
The framing of this is odd because I don't think any good therapist would say that avoiding negative thoughts is always good or always bad. It depends on the situation. Sometimes someone needs to just shift attention from unproductive rumination. But sometimes people do have a lot of issues that go unaddressed, and that avoidance becomes unhealthy because it leaves a whole belief system or set of interpersonal problems unresolved, or snowballs out of control.
None of this is necessarily Freudian or not Freudian, and framing it as such says more about the concerns of the authors than anything about the theories used in modern therapy or the implications of the study results.