But implicit in even the most avant-garde position is a belief in a basic experience called psychoanalysis—a belief in its unique efficacy with mental suffering and in the (homeopathic) idea of curing suffering with suffering. To do its profound and searing work on the soul, analysis must be an ordeal. (“Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient’s suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely,” Freud wrote in “Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy.”) And at
