2 DECEMBER 1966, Page 13

SIR.—A good many St Georges have had a go at

Freud. The old fellow refuses to die, however: kill him in therapeutics, and he awkwardly reappears to provide the key to a whole section of primate biology.

It may well be that analysis does not remove symp- toms—it is, in other words, often instructive as much as, or rather than, beneficial. In this respect the master was over-hopeful.

But the short answer to the notion that Freud put the unconscious, and sexual symbolism, into his patients is that he couldn't possibly have put it into the Australian aborigine, Aeschylus. or Tristram Shandy. Freud's guesses organise human and primate behaviour and experience much as Darwin's organise the fossils in the British Museum. If psy- chologists, especially those who prefer veterinary methods of therapy, are not interested, the biologists are. I think the old man himself might have relished