The cover of TIME for Oct. 27, 1924, featured a familiar face with penetrating gaze and neat white beard, and the story inside was sprinkled with what would soon become household words: ego, neurosis, libido. Only one year after the magazine was founded, Sigmund Freud, then 68 years old and still refining psychoanalysis in Vienna, made his first of three cover appearances (he reappeared in 1939 and 1956). Altogether, TIME has published more than a dozen cover stories on psychiatry. This week's article continues that long-running analysis with an examination of the anxieties and doubts that are now, more than ever, besetting Freud's specialty.

Associate Editor John Leo, who suggested and wrote this week's story, first became fascinated with the subject during his college years at the University of Toronto. He was studying modern philosophy at the time, but a chance encounter with a paperback on Freud sent him burrowing through the master's voluminous collected works. Says Leo: "Here were the philosophers playing their bloodless word games, and Freud saying all these amazing things about real life." Now he is convinced that the three greatest thinkers of all time were Aristotle, Freud and Groucho Marx.

Leo continued his interest in psychiatry through subsequent jobs as an editor at Commonweal, book editor of the social science magazine Transaction (now Society), a New York Times reporter covering the behavioral sciences, and TIME'S behavior writer since 1974. During the past few years he has kept notes on the increasing, well, schizophrenia in the profession. Explains Leo: "Many psychiatrists now doubt they are engaged in a legitimate profession. Some are beginning to wonder if they have any more healing powers than a good bartender."

Furnishing her own experienced analysis of the profession was Ruth Mehrtens Galvin, a senior correspondent who has been specializing in studies of behavior for ten years. Last spring she received the Robert T. Morse Writer's Award from the American Psychiatric Association for her "outstanding contributions to the public understanding" of the discipline. For this story she drew on interviews with biochemists, social workers, patients, psychologists and psychiatrists and on conferences she has attended across the U.S. and in Europe. "What has always impressed me most about psychiatrists," says Galvin, "has been their capacity for selfcriticism. That psychoanalytic imperative to examine one's own motives, all the time, seems to me Freud's most important legacy."

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