Elio Frattaroli, M.D., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst — member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is in full-time private practice, doing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy with adults, adolescents and couples. He is on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and is associate director of their Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Training Program. He 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. He lives and practices in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

Synopsis of Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain

Frattaroli is a classical Freudian psychoanalyst in his beliefs that both the source and solution of mental illness reside in the person, bucking the model of cognitive psychotherapy among other popular fads. The practitioner of pure cognitive psychotherapy identifies inappropriate cognitions without regard for their function within the broader personality and without regard for their inherent ties to the emotional conflict (to which they hold a clue). Frattaroli contends that the profession has by and large forgotten the intrinsic role of the symptom in self-healing, that in a symptom is the person's attempt to realize the goals of psychotherapy: the resolution of inner conflict and the achievement of personal growth:

"And that's why biological and cognitive/behavioral therapies are so popular nowadays. They allow us to dismiss anything that makes us uncomfortable or uneasy, anything we don't like about ourselves, as a mistake for which we aren't responsible: either a chemical imbalance caused by a faulty gene or an inappropriate cognition learned from a dysfunctional family. By encouraging us to look outside ourselves for the cause of our distress, these therapies make it easy to ignore the distress as we can feel it inside. They make it easy not to be fully present to ourselves. They treat painful feelings as something alien and detachable from the self, something that can be medicated away with the right pill or explained away with correct cognition. But in fact there's nothing less detachable from our sense of self than our feelings. It is only through our feelings-including our painful feelings-that we can discover who we really are. It's only through our feelings that we can know what we want, what we need, what we fear, what we hate, what we love, what we admire, what we condemn. So therapies that seek only to relieve us of painful feelings are depriving us of an opportunity to become ourselves, to be fully present to all the richness and subtlety of our inner lives. And it doesn't matter that these therapies claim to be scientifically proven. The kind of science they depend on looks at things only from outside, in terms of what can be seen and measured. But it's impossible to be fully present while looking at yourself from outside."

The demonization and decontextualization of the symptom (i.e., excising it from the broader history and person like a common polyp) based on brute authority of logic alone (and the perceived authority of the doctor and his or her medical persona), without an examination of the person's inner life, is conducive neither to long-term relief nor to personal growth.

An educated and astute Frattaroli in turn recognizes that the pathology of modern psychiatry cannot be fully understood out of the broader social context. Frattaroli believes the current state of the psychiatric profession to be emblematic of a materialistic trend, the pursuit of creature comforts and physical appearances coupled with a contempt for the inner life. Consistent with many psychodynamic models of the human psyche, Frattaroli holds that the mental health system will itself fall victim to its own repressions. He notes that given the widespread practice of prescribing pills for manualized diagnoses, the psychiatrist can easily be replaced by primary care physicians and nurse practitioners. "Modern culture is relentlessly materialistic, relentlessly superficial, and relentlessly short-sighted, and many indicators suggest it is relentlessly self-destructive as well," remarked Frattaroli in an interview with New Therapist magazine. "The more Western culture goes out of control with mindless externally directed action, the more the human soul will need to assert the corrective measures of anxiety and depression to shift the balance toward internally directed reflection."

Like J. Wyatt Ehrenfels, who dubs himself the 'shadow' of modern psychology after the name Jung ascribed to the complex of repressed and incompatible ideas/values, Frattaroli likens himself to a good psychiatric symptom that calls attention to disharmony within the psychiatric system and broader material culture. Frattaroli notes that he has been largely ignored by the mainstream psychiatry simply for use of the term 'soul,' which does not jibe with modern scientific discourse. Frattaroli encourages fellow psychoanalysts intimidated by science to be less uncritical. Not unlike the effect of pills on persons receiving therapy, science itself has had a numbing effect on the personal and professional growth of individual practitioners, dulling the advancement of the mental health system. The mindless faith placed in contemporary scientific practices is one of many indications that science serves a quasi-religious function within the professional community. Like fellow author J. Wyatt Ehrenfels, Frattaroli cites as a mass delusion the belief that brain science and psychiatric research have made positive contributions to an understanding of consciousness.

Like J. Wyatt Ehrenfels, who refuses to allow his adversaries to label him 'anti-science,' Frattaroli refuses to allow his critics to label him 'anti-medical.'