Freud was just plain wrong about the sexual underpinnings of neurosis. I don't know why it took me so long to realize exactly how wrong. Today, sitting on my terrace in Rome reading Lou Breger's biography of Freud, I finally got it.

What is strange is that I wrote a memoir ten years ago writing ruefully about my various analysts giving me sexual interpretations. The most ill advised came from the analyst I had as a young teenager who kept trying to get me to talk about masturbation when what I was suffering from was the loss of my father and my mother's breakdown. I related that but somehow failed to fully realize that it wasn't just the quirky emphasis of my particular analyst, it was doctrine being imposed on me the way Freud tried to impose it on Emma and Dora and his own daughter. I hadn't quite realized the extent to which Freud was blind to other possibilities. For instance during WW1, he insisted that the shell shocked soldiers had underlying sexual problems even though Rivers and others who worked with them said they didn't, said that they were traumatized by actual events, combat and fear of death! How did I miss this? I can feel a paradigm shift going on in my head, rather like the slow grinding of tectonic plates. Wow!