To the Wall Street Journal. Your February 24 review of Maynard Solomon's Mozart: A Life is introduced with the words “Freudian psychology may have lost much of its prestige in the study of the mind, but….” Since nothing could be further from the truth, and since the remark has nothing to do with the rest of the review, the only reasonable explanation for it must be that the reviewer is misinformed. It is certainly true that in the past several decades enormous strides have been made in our understanding of the organization of the brain, and that we have also learned much about behavioral control from research outside psychoanalysis. We are very far, however, from being able to connect the knowledge so gained with the mental phenomena that make us who we are. If by the mind we mean the total of conscious and unconscious mental processes that make us distinctly human, psychoanalysis continues to be unchallenged in its power to disclose the hidden antecedents and motives of our behavior and thoughts.
This truth is shown by recent studies showing the constant rate at which psychoanalytic scientific references are cited in articles published in a wide range of journals in the social sciences. In publications in the arts and humanities, the only reference sources cited more frequently than Sigmund Freud are Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, and Plato. In clinical practice, there are probably more patients in psychoanalytic treatment worldwide than at any time in history. The growth in the size of the psychoanalytic profession, contrary to popular myth, has been very substantial in recent decades, particularly overseas. It is important to remember that although the mind and the brain need each other, so to speak, they are not the same thing. A study of the structure and chemistry of the brain alone will never lead to a complete understanding of the mind, any more than a study of the structure of a Pentium microprocessor will reveal how a program like Microsoft Windows works, to use a very crude analogy. That's why it is often said that the practice of psychiatry uninformed by psychoanalytic knowledge has “lost its mind.” Many people have wished that psychoanalysis would go away, because psychoanalysis confronts us with truths about ourselves that often are more comfortably ignored or forgotten. During the almost full century of the growth of this profession, various objections and attacks have been raised. While some of these, of course, have validity, as is the case with any science, many others are similar to the words that begin your review—utterly without basis.
Judith S. Schachter, M.D.
Pittsburgh