ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows that the key to mental disorders was to be sought within the brain. Private madness will be there to meet us more often than we would either foresee or hope for. One may as well recognize it and reckon with it. One generally believes that an analyst who presents clinical material in a paper shields himself from the reproach of being abstract. When an analyst assembles a number of his papers into book form, he becomes aware of a curious phenomenon. An analyst’s written work is probably another way of continuing his self-analysis in a form by which others may profit. Perhaps writing is also part of the analyst’s private madness. He can rid himself of it, in part, only by writing of others’ private madness: that of his analysands, to whom the psychoanalyst consecrates one of the most precious parts of himself in the inter-subjective exchange of the unconscious.
