What Is Psychoanalysis?

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Psychoanalysis is both deeply familiar and uncomfortably strange.

While many would like to reduce analysis to its neurophysiological counterparts, I argue we should not.

Core psychoanalytic ideas echo universal human wisdoms about relationships and personal growth.

Scott Stossel begins his Atlantic article entitled “What If Freud Was Right?” with the following provocation:

“To announce that you are embarking on a course of psychoanalytic training today is tantamount, in many quarters, to admitting that you plan to treat your patients using astrology or by parsing the entrails of a goat. To say that you are undergoing psychoanalysis as a patient is to reveal that you are entrusting your mental health to a witch doctor.”

“To announce that you are embarking on a course of psychoanalytic training today is tantamount, in many quarters, to admitting that you plan to treat your patients using astrology or by parsing the entrails of a goat. To say that you are undergoing psychoanalysis as a patient is to reveal that you are entrusting your mental health to a witch doctor.”

As a recent graduate of a psychoanalytic training program (and therefore, as an analytic patient myself), I can attest that both of these statements are essentially true. But Stossel is not writing a criticism of psychoanalysis. Instead he is half-reviewing, half-musing on the new book by the well-known neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. While he does do his journalistic due diligence, reviewing some of the studies Solms cites and pointing out that Solms (like many academic authors of books written for the public) has cherry-picked the studies he builds his strongly-worded thesis around, the heart of the piece seems to be about his surprise over Solms’ enthusiasm for Freudian theory and practice.

Solms, argues Stossel, is making two........

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