Freud’s Exitus

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Patching Up the Frayed Couch

IN the 1950s and 60s, the nameplates of Freudian analysts adorned the doors of Central Park West and Park Avenue like so many mezuzahs. Freudians were the doyens of intellectual New York: Nearly everyone had an Oedipal complex, and few were the dreams that went uninterpreted.

The spirit of those years is rarely evoked anymore, except as a theme of New Yorker cartoons and the occasional Woody Allen revival. Yet its traces can still be discerned in a dowdy building on East 82nd Street, where one group of analysts is striving to revive the public’s interest in their profession.