June 6, 2003

Psychiatrist Explains the Freudian Underpinnings of Medical Therapies

By JENNIFER K. RUARK

There's a lot of Freud in that prescription for Prozac, says Jonathan Michel Metzl, a psychiatrist and assistant professor of women's studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Antidepressants and other medicines have not simply replaced talk therapy, he argues in Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs (Duke University Press). Rather, "psychoanalysis formed the unconscious of biological psychiatry."

Q. What do you mean?

A. In this replacement