Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain

We would all like a quick fix for our problems, a simple pill to take away our anxiety and lift us out of our depression. But there is no quick fix for the soul, and anxiety and depression may be signals of the soul's unmet needs. In this landmark work, Dr. Elio Frattaroli challenges our fixation on psychiatry's "Medical Model," which treats mental illness solely with drugs instead of seeking a deeper understanding of our problems-in other words, treating symptoms rather than people.

Combining a Renaissance humanism with a sophisticated understanding of modern science, he makes an impassioned, persuasive case for "listening to the soul"-paying attention to the inner life of the emotions, both in psychotherapy and in our everyday lives. Drawing upon philosophy, literature, psychology, and riveting case histories from his own life and practice, Frattaroli explores what has happened to a culture that has been "listening to Prozac" and hearing nothing else.Healing the Soul in the Age of the BrainAcknowledgments

Part I: The Importance of Being Conscious

1: A Brief Introduction to the Soul
2: The Technocrat and the Cowboy
3: An Introduction to the Psychotherapeutic Process

Part II: The Medical Model and the Psychotherapeutic Model: A Personal Commentary on Psychiatry, Science, and the Philosophy of Life

4: A Lecture to Young Psychiatrists
5: The Swimming Pool and the Quest
6: The End Is in the Beginning: A Tribute to Bruno Bettelheim

Part III: Science: The Untold Story

7: Two Kinds of Truth: The Principle of Complementarity
8: A Science of Subjectivity: Complementarity and Consciousness

Part IV: Experiencing the Psychotherapeutic Process

9: Anxiety and the Spirit of Questioning
10: Introspection and Putting It into Words
11: Resistance and Transference
12: But Isn't Psychoanalysis Supposed to Be About Sex?

Part V: History Lessons

13: Respect the Symptom
14: Freud's Theory of the Soul: From the Swimming Pool to the Quest
15: Integrating the Swimming Pool Within the Quest: "Where It Was, There Shall I Become"

Part VI: The Mind—Body Problem and the Crisis in Our Culture

16: What Is the Soul?
17: What Are We Really Hearing When We Listen to Prozac?
18: Repetition, Reflection, and the Search for Meaning

Notes
Index

If Freud experiences a revival, he may thank Frattaroli for it. (Booklist)Elio Frattaroli, M.D., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in full time private practice. He is on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and is also an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied Shakespeare at Harvard and trained with Bruno Bettelheim at the University of Chicago before turning to medicine. He has written and lectured on Shakespeare as well as on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. This is his first book.