For Sol, Freud’s best books, The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , read like fast-paced detective novels. Why did I forget the name of that town? Why did I just call my boss “Dad”? Why does my patient arrange her pillows into a diamond shape every night? Sol delighted in Freud’s ability to find reason, logic, and necessity in what lesser minds dismissed as random and accidental. Dreams meant something. Forgetting meant something. A slip of the tongue meant something. Madness meant something. A young girl compulsively arranges and rearranges her pillows as a distorted symbolic fulfillment of her desire to sleep with her father. For Freud, the simplest word or gesture was a complex puzzle to be solved. Article continues after advertisement Thanks to Freud, Sol decided to become a psychiatrist. It was the ideal solution to the problem of wanting to be a doctor but hating science.…