The publication of such a glib, superficial and ill-considered “psychoanalytic” attack on freelance activity beneath a sensationalized headline was obviously intended as a provocative act; I found myself impelled to respond. A great many of my professional colleagues and close friends — artists, writers, photographers and others — have chosen to exist in what this remarkable diagnosis so condescendingly calls a “lowly status,” and they don’t strike me as inherently any more neurotic than the average late-twentieth-century American. […]