It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Today, life, art, and therapy.

Whatever happened to psychoanalysis? Once it was the most influential and fashionable science of the mind.

Today, it's more like a cartoon schick. The bored doctor sitting behind a patient lying on a couch.

And the man who invented psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, has been so devalued.

He seems like a sex-obsessed old man.

But maybe we've gotten Freud all wrong.

Adam Phillips is one of the leading defenders of psychoanalysis, and he writes brilliantly about it.

In books like On Tickling, Kissing and Being Bored, and Missing Out in Praise of the Unlived Life.

He's just come out with a biography of the young Freud, which got Steve Paulson curious.

Freud is, he's not the most popular guy these days anymore.

He's had shinier moments in our culture,

but I think one of the, you know, the recurring criticism is he's just too sex-obsessed.

He reduces everything to sex. Do you agree with that?

Well, I think in many ways he dignifies everything by talking about sex. I think the point is that Freud

re-described sex to include many, many more things than it had previously included. And I think

what Freud is really saying is something like, we are bodily creatures who begin our lives by falling

in love with a beautiful body, which is our mothers, if you see what I mean,

so that we're naturally, in that sense, hedonistic.

We survive through our pleasurable experience of other bodies.

I didn't think Freud puts sex exactly in the center of the picture.

He puts the erotic.

And that means an erotic apprehension of reality.

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