Freud

Thank you for Peter Wolson’s “A World of Psychophobia” (Opinion, May 28), on Sigmund Freud and his great contribution that has helped so many people know their “deepest feelings and thoughts.” Wolson’s piece stands in sharp contrast to the breast-beating, self-proclaimed ignorance displayed by columnist Mike Downey (May 17). Downey first mocks Freud as a “fraud,” then as “a virtual Elvis of psychoanalysis, as off-center as a square peg in a round hole.”

I don’t agree with much of Freud’s overworked theorizing, because it encourages people who are truly suffering to simply label themselves as “neurotic” or “Oedipal” and miss their own painful but life-giving discoveries. Still, Freud opened the door to the unconscious and its power to heal, as well as its frightening power to destroy. We ignore it at our own peril.

WELLFORD W. WILMS

Los Angeles