Click here to read Dr. Stone’s piece.
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Dear Dr. Stone,

I would like to share my thoughts about your interesting article in the Harvard Magazine. I am responding to the following questions you raise.

“Whether critical of Freud, as some people were, or reverential, as we were here in Boston, we all hoped to be able to see farther than the giant and to build on the foundation Freud had begun.”“Psychoanalysts can no longer assert that what they learn about their patient’s childhood will help them to explain the etiology of the patient’s psychopathology, or even of the patient’s sexual orientation.”

“The task of constructing self-descriptions in psychoanalytic therapy also encounters the problem of memory. Everything we have learned in recent years about memory has emphasized its plasticity, the ease with which it can be distorted, and the difficulties of reaching a hypothetical veridical memory. Much of what psychoanalysis considered infantile amnesia may be a function of the reorganizing brain rather than of the repressing mind. All of this makes the task of constructing meaningful histories of desire in the individual more daunting.” Continue reading OP ED: a response to Dr. Alan Stone’s piece from the Harvard Magazine