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Stone's suggestion that the failing science of Freudianism be rescued by putting it into literature is truly awful. Is his opinion of literature so low that he would use it as a landfill for discarded science, however well written? If so, here are some articles your magazine might consider for future issues: "Bloodletting and phrenology: they failed as medicine, can they survive as literature?" or "Cold fusion: poor science, but great storytelling" or "The geocentric theory: it may be wrong, but it's easy to write about."

The essence of science, and the reason it is cumulative, is the constant use of experimental tests to discover if you are wrong, and if you are, to change your mind. People outside of science sometimes find this approach unsettling, preferring instead the security of dogma, religious and otherwise.

If Freudianism cannot survive as science, it should not be venerated as literature, either. Scrape your shoe and move on!

Kevin Jon Williams '76, M.D.
Wynnewood, Pa.

Stone missed some of the key factors that have led to the failure of American psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis should have been the science of understanding the impact of childhood intrapsychic and interpersonal experience on adult behavior and emotion. Three factors missed in the article contributed to this failure. First, psychoanalysis continues to pay excessive homage to Freud, reflecting a policy rampant in psychoanalysis that I have always viewed as a manifestation of castration anxiety: don't dare say anything bad about Freud, for fear of being made impotent, valueless, of no account.

Second, American psychoanalysis exhibited excessive adherence to its method, rather than its concepts and theory. Psychoanalysis never embraced the prospective study of childhood, staying excessively wedded to retrospective recon-struction of experience. Those who took the route of following children over time have been frequently rebuffed, excluded, and dismissed. To be a science, psychoanalysis should have relinquished its reliance on retrospective construction as its method of scientific inquiry in favor of more revealing approaches. The opposite choice has been fatally stultifying.

Most important, American psychoanalysis is no more art than science. Rather, it is a guild designed to protect the guild, the guild members, and the guild rituals. Neither art nor science promotes the rigid exclusion of those not meeting particular credentials, as psychoanalysis has excluded nonmedical therapists. Neither art nor science requires both a protracted socialization process and a requirement that the individual pay for the process, as psychoanalysis requires of its trainees. And neither art nor science supports a theory that can instantly refute potential contributions by arguing they are the opposite, the projection, or the denial of what is Truth.

Fundamentally, American psychoanalysis made the same mistake as much of American medicine: it tried to make itself invaluable, unassailable, and irrefutable, and it failed. More is the pity, because childhood experience often does affect adult behavior. It is only psychoanalysis's fault that it has failed to understand how this takes place.

William H. Berman '76, Ph.D.
Associate professor of psychology,
Fordham University
White Plains, N.Y.

Stone suffers from science envy: he fears that the claimed knowledge basis underlying psychiatry is something less than science. His view is that psychiatry fails the tests of unity and cumulativeness required of a science.

On these criteria, virtually no academic discipline qualifies as science. At the leading edge of the natural science disciplines, all is fractionated, as the favored hypotheses of individual investigators await verification. Where are all the neutrinos? Are some stars older than the universe? Where is all the dark matter of the universe? In the social sciences, where theories cannot be falsified by crucial experiment, contending incompatible theories linger on. In economics, for example, a distinction is now drawn between neoclassical and new classical economics. Psychiatry has thus no reason to feel inferior to other sciences because it is not unified and cumulative.

Psychiatry has standardized diagnosis, has a conceptual causal structure, is rich with hypotheses, and is daily engaged in therapy in which it can observe results. In this respect, it is more mature as a science than seismology, which has a zero record in prediction.

The historic contribution of Freud was to posit a causal relationship between the mind-content of a subject, as recorded in unconscious memory storage in the brain, and his or her mental state, particularly as manifested in the subject's abnormal behavior. Although many hypotheses proved false, Freud was also a very fecund inventor of specific hypotheses, drawing on myths and literature, as well as hints from biology.

Using animal models, and recently probes in the human brain, neuroscience is in the process of confirming the causal model already accepted in psychiatry and psychology. In time, biology may replace psychiatry as the science basis for therapy, but this is many years in the future. The professional therapist is, of course, free to use whatever tools suit her personal style, just as the lawyer is free to choose a line of defense for her client from the available options. Treating a patient is undoubtedly an art, but nothing forecloses a science standing behind an art.

Monroe Burk, M.B.A. '40, Ph.D.
Columbia, Md.

Stone's acknowledgment of the failure of psychoanalysis as a science is a welcome, albeit belated, act of courage. He sees that failure as restricting Freudianism's impact to helping mentally sound people "deal with ordinary human suffering"--through a kind of religious experience. He fails to recognize, however, the extent to which America's huge, sometimes self-centered, quasi-religious, non-medical, psychotherapeutic enterprise is a continuing, and not always useful, product of Freud's "interpretive discipline."

Stone's description of Freud's coming up with "a new hypothesis every day," and his then unscientifically equating it with fact, is particularly important. The late Percival Bailey, world-renowned neurosurgeon and neuropathologist and director of research for the Illinois mental health department, pointed out in Sigmund the Unserene (1965) that Freud learned from French psychiatrist J.M. Charcot, with whom he studied in the mid 1880s, to make "his discoveries by looking long and hard at the data until they arranged themselves in some order in his mind"--a kind of revelation. But this, as Bailey emphasized, is "only the first step in making a scientific discovery"; such hypotheses must then be verified. Bailey, who studied later with Charcot, described "how the interns manufactured the data for [him].... Freud was to fall into the same trap, only he manufactured his own data."

Stone's acknowledgment of psychoanalysis's failure as a science requires that attention be paid to the effects of that scientific failure on society as a whole. These include psychoanalysis's harmful effects on the clinical care of the mentally disabled (with the consequent triumph within psychiatry of psychopharmacology over reassurance and problem-solving), the undermining of sexual morality by presenting celibate antisexual attitudes as scientific and ignoring the pro-marital, the undercutting of political vigilance despite both the Nazi attacks on individual opponents before they took power in Germany and similar assaults on individuals in this country, and the creation of a new religion based on distress-relief for the ambulatory-troubled, rather than, or sometimes even at the expense of, social values.

Nathaniel S. Lehrman '42, M.D.
Roslyn, N.Y.

Alan A. Stone, M.D., responds: I would like to acknowledge an erratum and offer a few notes of general clarification.

Thanks are due to several readers who pointed out the erratum. Dr. Merton Gill had, of course, abandoned the notion that psychoanalysis was a "natural" science, although continuing to believe it was a science. Gill and many other major psychoanalytic theorists were compelled by their examination of the evidence to conclude that none of the "objective," "empirical," "experimental," or "systematic clinical" studies had validated the central tenets of psychoanalysis qua natural science. I assume that is part of the reason that Gill and other respected psychoanalytic scholars accepted the contemporary formulations of psychoanalysis as a "constructivist hermeneutic" science. With his customary candor, Gill acknowledged that it was quite unclear how the hypotheses of such a science could be "tested for validation." The constructivist-hermeneutic reading of psychoanalysis signals the retreat into the domain of subjectivity, or, as some prefer, "inter-subjectivity."

Philosophers of science have debated the changing scientific claims of psychoanalysis for most of this century. The debate often becomes a disagreement about the definition of science itself. It would not be a misreading to characterize this literature as harsh in its judgments about the status of psychoanalysis as any kind of validated science. However, much of the collective wisdom of humanity is not based on validated science.

Dr. Leo Rangell, whom I quoted about the collapse of the Freudian center, was specifically lamenting the fact that many of his psychoanalytic colleagues were unwilling to identify themselves as Freudian therapists. This is not just because advertising oneself as an orthodox Freudian has become a professional liability. Psychoanalysts are today so fractionated that they have trouble agreeing on which contributions of Freud, if any, are central to their therapeutic practices.

It was not my intention to suggest that childhood experiences and family relationships had no impact on the adult. The problem has always been deciding which versions of that history are consequential. My impression is that the particular childhood experiences which Freud emphasized are not decisive factors in creating either psychiatric symptoms or disorders of personality.

READING WELL

The approach of the Bureau of Study Counsel's "Reading Strategies" course ("The Undergraduate," "Read Better, Sleep More," by Miriam Udel Lambert, January-February,) is absolutely dead wrong. The best way to complete a reading assignment, at Harvard or elsewhere, is to read slowly and carefully. Indeed, any attempt to hurry will create anxiety as well as inhibiting learning.

I am surprised that Harvard Magazine would quote with approval words such as, "I get the ideas; I don't have to get every word." A love of language is part of any academic discipline; and the only way to learn is to read every word with respect.

Hal Wasserman '86
Berkeley, Calif.

FDR FACTS

Peter Heinegg ("Letters," January-February) condemns Franklin D. Roosevelt as a "traitor to humanity," claiming that David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews "irrefutably proves that Roosevelt bears a major burden of responsibility for the deaths of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of European Jews."

Wyman's argument has been refuted so many times and so effectively that he now declines invitations to debate the matter. I would call Heinegg's attention to FDR and the Holocaust (St. Martin's Press, 1996), Verne W. Newton, editor, and to the forthcoming study by Professor William D. Rubenstein, The Myth of Rescue.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. '38, Jf '43
New York City

It is true, as John Bethell wrote ("Frank Roosevelt at Harvard," November-December 1996), that Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's daughter, married Nicholas Longworth, A.B. 1891. It is not true that Longworth was a senator, and I believe that he would have resented your misstatement.

Longworth was elected to the House of Representatives in 1903 and served there for more than a quarter of a century. In 1925 he was elected speaker of the House, an office he held with distinction until his death in 1931. By his talents and verve he restored to the speakership much of the power and influence that that office lost in the overthrow of Speaker Cannon in 1910.

As speaker, as required in that office, Longworth held the Senate in a mild form of benign contempt, and he would not have appreciated confusion about him in the magazine of his College.

Neil MacNeil '49
Bethesda, Md.

CONTEMPLATING CHAIRS

Edward Tenner ("The Life of Chairs," January-February) should remind readers that human beings did not sit much for the first million years. They squatted instead, leaving squatting facets on their leg bones, which is how we know. Even so, early humans had disc problems, crushed vertebrae, polinidal cysts, and osteoarthritis of the hip joints--without chairs.

Chair building waited for the advent of nice level floors, which is why four-legged chairs were first used in temples and palaces. From the beginning, seating comfort was given second place to appearance. Take a look at the backbreaking chairs designed by Wright, MacIntosh, Eames, and others. While it is impossible to make a one-size-fits-all chair because of differences in femoral and tibial lengths, spinal curvature, etcetera, some of the automobile manufacturers have come close with "power seats" that move up and down, forward and back, and even provide inflatable lumbar pads. Of course, even such pre-adjustable seating arrangements become uncomfortable with prolonged sitting, especially for males with their limited gluteal fat covering.

Stanley M. Garn '43
Center for Human Growth and Development
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor

Tenner refers to "the prophet Elijah's reserved seat at the Passover Seder." There is no chair for Elijah at the Passover Seder. On that night, Elijah must visit every Seder throughout the world. Passing through the room at the speed of light like a will o' the wisp, he is visible only to the most alert child through a slight ripple in the wine contained in the Cup of Elijah that we lay out for him. He certainly has no time to sit down.

The actual Chair of Elijah (kiseh Eliyahu) will be found at the bris, or ritual circumcision. Elijah is present at every Jewish bris, and we set out a chair for him so that he can see that we have not forsaken God's covenant. We hope that he takes the time to sit, to have a glass of wine, and perhaps to receive a tip.

Michael A. Ingall, M.D. '61
Providence, R.I.

CRIMSON, CONTINUED

The new doctoral gowns' "Harvard crimson" color, as reproduced on page 74 of the January-February issue ("The College Pump"), looks suspiciously like the cerise that I recall from the college scarves worn by students at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Given Emmanuel's status as the institution that produced John Harvard and many of Harvard's founders, is it possible that this resemblance is not a coincidence?

Bruce E. H. Johnson '72
Seattle

CORRECTION

The photograph of Richard Wendorf on page 73 of the January-February issue was incorrectly credited. It is the work of Diane Asséo Griliches. Her evocative new book, Library: The Drama Within, contains several photographs made at Harvard.


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