David J Linden in Aeon:
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I gradually came to realise that my father was not the stereotypical psychoanalyst. Yes, he had an office with enigmatic modern art on the walls, copies of The New Yorker in the waiting room and the requisite analytical couch. It’s true that said couch had a wedge-shaped pillow designed for the client to assume the supine posture so frequently portrayed in the cartoons from those same issues of The New Yorker. And, during psychoanalytic sessions, my father did indeed perch in a black leather Eames chair, notebook in hand. But beyond those trappings, he had the sceptical and logical mind of a physician (in those days, nearly all psychoanalysts were, like my father, MDs).
Starting when I was a small child and continuing until I left for university, my father and I would eat dinner together at one of several local restaurants every Wednesday night. Over matzoh ball soup at Zucky’s Delicatessen, we’d discuss anything and everything, including the progress of his psychoanalytic clients (with names and identifying details omitted of course). It was an odd way to grow up and I loved it. In our Wednesday night case studies, there would be the expected psychodynamic talk of dream interpretation and early childhood experiences, but it was all tempered by what would come to be known as neuroscience. He would say that, when the talking cure worked (as it did for most of his clients), it did so not in the nebulous realm of id, ego and superego, but rather by changing the cellular and molecular structure of the brain.
More here.
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