Introduction by the author
Freud found the source of human neurosis in our long dependency on others and our capacity for symbolization. The conjunction, he saw, makes for deep longings, conflicts, and disappointments, breeding at the same time an imagination that can embroider reality for our short-term ease but our enduring pain. Psychoanalysis is essentially, and necessarily, a theory about creatures who have minds. But Freud’s vision is continually in jeopardy. He himself, attracted as he was by mechanism on the one hand, biology on the other, and always passionate that psychoanalysis be a science, continually tried to reduce mind to something else. In this many analysts continue to follow Freud, when they have not fled in the opposite direction to ‘hermeneutics’.