Madam, - Kate Holmquist's article on Sigmund Freud (Health Supplement, May 9th) is most welcome in its openness to the contribution Freud's insight makes to an understanding of our mental lives.
Indeed, it is what our organisation works to advance. It is certainly a much more interesting and productive response than one which is intent on ridiculing the person of Freud on stage or wherever. Shooting the messenger does not remove the uncomfortable truths about human beings that psychoanalysis brings to our attention.
The position attributed to some psychoanalysts concerning the aetiology and responsibility for the onset of autism is nowhere to be found in the theoretical and clinical teaching of either Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan. Furthermore, the latter, while fully versed in the field of linguistics, was a highly respected, courageously innovative psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who made the ethics of psychoanalysis central to his practice and teaching.
Psychoanalysis is a form of work distinct from the psychotherapies and is not competing in the marketplace with them or with psychopharmacological intervention. Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis in France (or anywhere) is not "quaking" in response to the recent publication mentioned in the article. It is getting on with its work, which is to allow articulation of one's own part in one's life, principally in one's relation to work and love.
I welcome the relevance today of psychoanalysis being brought to the attention of your readers. Through clarifying these few points this letter participates in the discussion which the work of Freud and Lacan can productively generate. - Yours, etc,
Dr BARRY O'DONNELL, Chair, The Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland, Dublin 6.