Response to Commentary by Mark Leffert

Freud was animated by a love for the truth which cannot be said to be present in all psychoanalysts, today even more than yesterday.

I am very grateful to Douglas H. Ingram as well as to the author of this scholarly and intelligent response to my article, Mark Leffert, for the opportunity to read and to respond to what has been stirred up by my article. I shall divide my response into two parts. First I want to make some general remarks to make sure that I have not been misunderstood and second I will make some more specific comments on Leffert's commentary.

I first became interested in Freud as a 16-year-old college student under the Hutchins Plan at the University of Chicago where in sociology class we read his Civilization and Its Discontents. I was hooked by both the man and what he had to say; it was as if a curtain had been lifted from obscuring my psychic vision. This interest was stimulated again in medical school through a series of lectures by Nathaniel S. Apter, psychoanalyst and chairman of the department of psychiatry at that time. I was also lucky enough to get both extensive supervision from him and a chance to work with schizophrenics in his experimental projects at Manteno State Hospital in Illinois, and so I learned that psychoanalysis even made it possible to understand the communications of schizophrenic patients through their fog of terror (Chessick, 1992). I decided for this and other reasons to go into psychiatry, much to the horror and anger of many of my professors in the medical school, who thought they were grooming me for research in the histochemistry of the nervous system (Chessick & Gomori, 1953).

Psychiatry at the time was dominated by psychoanalysis and considered psychoanalysis to be its fundamental science. But this was already under furious attack. In my first year of residency, 1955, I attended my first American Psychiatric Association meeting, held in Chicago. I will never forget it. The Academic Lecture