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Dear Sirs,
I welcome Dr Symington's interesting comments on my article, as I think that the criticisms may have the benefit of stimulating a discussion.
Although I do not consider the aggressive tone of the letter (which concludes by saying ‘this is not psychoanalysis but a fake replica’) favourable to a scientific exchange, I shall nevertheless make some comments.
I regret that my admiration for Tolstoy, a writer of genius, has not been apparent from my article. This is why I am surprised that my comments should have been interpreted as pejorative. I am equally surprised that Dr Symington is not more tolerant of a viewpoint different from his own. He reproaches me for seeing Tolstoy in terms of the Freudian model. I should explain that, for me, Freud is the primary reference point, although I am very interested in the theoretical and clinical contributions of his successors, for whom he paved the way.
It happens that I found, in my research on Tolstoy, an echo of Freud's work on Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed, these two unusual artists both encountered blocks in their creative work, which in no way detracts from their high quality. In fact, Freud has responded in advance to Dr Symington's criticisms at the beginning of his work ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood’:
When psychiatric research, normally content to draw on frailer men for its material, approaches one who is among the greatest of the human race, it is not doing so for the reason so frequently ascribed to it by laymen. ‘To blacken the radiant and drag the sublime into the dust’ is no part of its purpose, and there is no satisfaction for it in narrowing the gulf which separates the perfection of the great from the inadequacy of the objects that are its usual concern. But it cannot help finding worthy of understanding everything that can be recognized in these illustrious models, and it believes that there is no one so great as to be disgraced by being subject to the laws which govern both normal and pa