The pleasure is mine, VR. Thank you.
Got to thinking about your teenage epiphany, then took a trip down memory lane myself to recall what I was doing as a teenager. The habit of reading was inculcated in me early, and I was a great lover of books in those years and have been ever since. I recall at age 16 mainly I was reading Plato, and also Sigmund Freud. (I was hanging around the Boston Public Library pretty regularly in those days.) Soon thereafter, I discovered Dostoevsky.
Five years later — and ever since — I was still reading Plato and Dostoevsky. I read The Brothers Karamazov at least once a decade, whether I need to or not. :^)
I guess my tastes were formed pretty early: It seems my earliest memories were about my impressions (and wonder) regarding the sublime beauty and mystery of the world. Only later did I realize that Freud was one of the legion of intellectuals then and now who deforms and deracinates the world by his "theory," draining all of the truth, justice, and beauty out of it. And Dostoevsky wrote about the dreadful consequences of such a state of affairs....
I really must stop wool-gathering like this. :^)
Thanks so much for writing, VR!
I had an early fascination with psychoanalytic theory as well. I read Lindner's Fifty-Minute Hour at 15 or so. It's a collection of psychiatric case histories from a very Freudian viewpoint, with Lindner essentially cracking the case every time. I thought that psychiatry was the coolest kind of detective work, and I wanted to sign up. A few years later as a sophomore or freshman in college, I saw the movie Freud with Montgomery Clift. That very much reinforced the perception.
So I majored in psych. Got pretty far into it before I realized that psychoanalytic theory was far from the science I had imagined. It's all a crock. All the real progress in psychiatry has been messing with the hardware, mostly pharmacologically.
I think it will prove to have been a historically useful crock, however. Psychiatric medicine gained attention and respectability even if the early successes were ephemeral triumphs over such almost unheard of disorders as "classical hysteria." (Nobody has hysteria as Freud described it anymore. Nobody. Maybe it was peculiar to the repressed Victorian atmosphere. Maybe it was a Fig Newton of his imagination.)