Psychoanalysis

You stand forewarned: Once you have been indoctrinated with the theory behind "photo analysis," chances are you will find yourself analyzing every photo in sight. Not likely, you chortle? You've heard of palmistry, after all, yet you deftly quash on a regular basis the temptation to read meaning into every hand you shake. Well, photo analysis is different from such age-old occultisms as numerology and astrology.

THE BELOVED PRISON by Lucy Freeman (St. Martin's: $18.95; 370 pp.) While psychoanalysis, Freud's school of psychotherapy, certainly had its fair share of detractors when Lucy Freeman first celebrated it in "Fight Against Fears," her 1951 book apparently struck a chord, selling over a million copies. One suspects that "The Beloved Prison," billed as a sequel to that work, arrives in a far less receptive climate, however, for the "cognitive" school of therapy, which has become most popular in the 1980s, couldn't be more different from psychoanalysis.

To the Editor: FOR some reason the Los Angeles Times assigned [a review of] my book "Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis" [July 11] to a historian of 18th century British "lunacy" (Andrew Scull) who has not the slightest feel for such aspects of 20th century Western culture as artistic modernism, the struggle for women's equality, political radicalism, homosexuality, mass consumption, film, advertising, bohemia, the "new Negro," the Harlem renaissance, surrealism and the like.

Helen Kraft began tracking her father's story a decade ago. She knew vaguely that he had some association with Sigmund Freud and she knew that he was one of America's first psychoanalysts. But the Alexandria, Va., woman's tireless inquiries into the life of Horace Westlake Frink, who died in 1936, have shed light on far more than her family heritage.

If we only had a couch to take "The Talking Cure." It's apropos not only because Christopher Hampton's play, now at the Mark Taper Forum, features founding figures of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and their sometime protege Sabina Spielrein. A couch seat also suits Hampton's reverent, simplistic portrait of these pioneers, which comes off as the sort of studied, speechifying docudrama for which cable television was meant.

A man who police believe has committed five rapes and who has unnerved this quiet beach community might be motivated by a need to exert power and to find a "perfect victim" who will resolve his feelings of inadequacy, say local and national experts in sexual assault. While police have revealed little about the rapist's habits, experts interviewed last week drew a rough psychological profile of the man based on what information has been released and common traits found in serial rapists.

You don't have to be a psychologist to appreciate "It's a Wonderful Life," the 1946 Frank Capra movie in which fatherhood is honored, small town values celebrated, greed thwarted, God's existence validated, a suicide averted and a world war won. But critics and academics recently have been psychoanalyzing the beloved Christmas story in professional journals, dissertations and interviews.

On "Geraldo" one afternoon last month, three women offered up horrific accounts of sexual and psychological torture inflicted upon them as young children--abuses they only recently began to recall. The women spoke of monstrous acts against them almost as soon as they could walk and of later being forced to torture others. One woman claimed to have murdered 40 children in service of a satanic cult to which her family belonged.

What do men want? That's the question Freud would ask today. But if we are to believe the mavens of popular culture, the answers are evasive. The TV talk show guests endlessly discuss the men who can't find themselves. Phil Donahue listens to women describe all the reasons they're "fed up with men," and then to the men the women are fed up with. These men prefer work to women, sex to commitment, hedonism to being husbands. One man who has been seeing the same woman for 14 years isn't sure why.