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In Freud's well-reasoned argument for lay analysis he outlines the areas of knowledge needed to have a productive dialogue with the psyche. He mentions philosophy and literature, poetry and mythology, cultural history as well as physiology, theology, and linguistics—in brief, a broadly based humanistic education. He obviously does not exclude medicine, but the single-minded focus on medicine he considered detrimental to the practice of psychoanalysis and therefore to the widespread application of psychoanalytic principles.
How many of us have read his recommendations for practicing psychoanalysis with a mixture of intimidation—how does one master such different fields?—combined with an admiration for the founders of psychoanalysis, many of whom had encyclopedic knowledge as well as an impressive mastery of languages (something we North Americans are woefully deficient in)? Freud himself, as we know, knew Greek and Latin, French and Spanish; he was fluent in English and obviously in German. Such mastery is not just a technical skill; it provides its possessor with alternate modes of conceptualizing the world. It helps protect against an overly linear reading of the human situation. While such a broadly based humanistic background seems, in our contemporary North American experience, more ideal than in evidence, psychoanalysis continues to be enriched, at present by advances in neurology. Notwithstanding the ever-present danger of reducing mind to brain, in the quest for empirical verification we have learned an impressive amount of information as to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain and the subsystems involved.
My curiosity was stimulated when a colleague from Canada, Dr. Keith Hartmann, told me that McGilchrist's text The Master and His Emissary, was a must-read, notwithstanding its over five hundred pages and its