It was some twenty years ago, during my sophomore year in college, that I “discovered” Freud. The occasion was a comparative literature assignment that included a reading of “Some Character-Types Met with In Psycho-Analytic Work,” one of a series of essays that Freud published in 1915. Although I no longer remember that much about the course, the assignment became the first of many exciting forays into the realm of classical psychoanalysis.

At the height of my early idealization of Freud and psychoanalysis, I once became embroiled in an argument with a high school counselor who had once been-but was no longer-a staunch exponent of psychoanalysis and of the psychoanalytic method (such an abandonment seemed to me an unpardonable infidelity at the time). She argued that psychoanalytic treatment was unnecessarily long, too costly, and further, if one had the option of traveling somewhere