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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.

Hi VR! "Messing with the hardware, pharmacologically," indeed. It's amazing to me how many young boys (especially) are diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder these days, and are getting their brains fried on Ritalin.... Jeepers, 20 years ago (or so) that "disorder" didn't even exist.... It was simply understood that "boys will be boys."

Ever heard of the psychologist Victor Frankl? His book The Doctor and the Soul is a wonderful read. Frankl is a proponent of logotherapy -- which does not emphasize the "hardware" aspects of mental disorders, but regards them as diseases of the psyche or spirit that pharmacology cannot be expected to reach. I gather he's little heard of these days; the Freudians and Jungians pretty much have the field to themselves....

Anyhoot. Brothers K. is one of my favorites of all time, a book about faith and nihilism, among other things. Plus The Devils (sometimes called The Possessed) is an absolutely riveting read about a couple of anarchists and their fashionable friends. Dostoevsky excels at penetrating to the deeper reaches of the human mind and its motivations: Evidently he was an amazingly astute psychologist himself.

I do remember that scene from the Bob Newhart Show! "It's a crock!" LOLOL!

Thanks so much for writing, VR!

I Googled Frankl today. His Logotherapy is described as "the third Viennese school." I wondered how on Earth I hadn't heard of him. That in turn sent me back to my old psych books, especially "Systems and Theories in Psychology." It appears Frankl was an unknown to most of the US establishment 35 or so years ago. OTOH, from his bio I gather he had gained some fame in Europe at least by that time.

The occasional new system notwithstanding, there is still some interest in "the talking cure" for certain neurotic disorders, but it's obviously pretty limited. OK, I'm not keeping up at all anymore. Still, I can tell that pharmacology has practically taken over compared to my college days. That's not too surprising, since 1) we keep finding chemical imbalances and genetic predispostions in mental illness, and 2) the cure rate from psychoanalysis back when was about the same as the untreated spontaneous recovery rate.

Thanks for writing!