Damage & Defense

To denounce psychoanalysis a fortnight ago when its creator Dr. Sigmund Freud was celebrating his 80th birthday would have seemed an ungracious act. Last week bars were down and psychiatrists, notorious among doctors for insistent talkativeness, gave tongue. Loudest sound & fury broke in Manhattan, at a meeting of the New York Neurological Society.

Glaring at Dr. Abraham Arden Brill, 61, who translated Dr. Freud's books into English and introduced psychoanalysis to the U. S., Internist Harold Thomas Hyman, 41, began by denouncing the $10 an hour fee which psychoanalysts ordinarily charge for their services. Most patients, Dr. Hyman estimated, require 375 talking treatments before they end their course. Cried he:

"Their justification of these prices is sheer rationalization. They say that a patient must make a real financial sacrifice before the treatment does him any good, and also that economic insecurity keeps the analyst from doing his best work. This seems to me an attitude which in itself borders on the neurotic.

"The literature of psychoanalysis is opulent in its imagery and in its broad vistas of potentiality. But it offers little for the general physician. The transplanted European analyst actively resents requests for information from a patient's regular doctor, and all psychoanalysts, in spite of their volubility in a living room or before some child-study association of young mothers, refuse to make to their colleagues reports of failure or confession of the limitations of their methods."

Dr. Hyman had sent 15 "serious" cases to psychoanalysts whom he trusted. Of these two committed suicide, seven were commkted to institutions, four did not improve, one is beginning his seventh year of psychoanalysis, one "made a brilliant recovery." In defense of his specialty, Dr. Brill argued that psychoanalysis is struggling to cope with social problems which Dr. Freud's revelations of the id, ego, superego and libido have stirred up. Among such social problems is the utility of psychoanalysis itself. Testimony to the new science's utility is Chicago's Institute of Psychoanalysis, founded by Dr. Franz Alexander, 45, an understudy of Dr. Freud.

Such defense mollified in no way one of the show pieces of Manhattan medicine, Dr. Bernard Sachs, 78, longtime professor of clinical neurology at Columbia University. Years ago, a Manhattan legend goes, when Professor Sachs called upon patients, his footman would accompany him to the bedside, hold his high hat during examination of the patient. At last week's meeting Neurologist Sachs rose to charge: "Psychoanalysis more often prolongs and engenders mental disorder than it cures it. No person who has undergone the treatment can ever be entirely normal mentally again. It is a disruptive and not a constructive mechanism. Dr. Brill, I want you to keep your hands off the children. Your doctrines already have done outrageous damage."

This vexed another pugnacious pundit. Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, 69, who gained fame & fortune as an alienist for the defense of Madcap Harry K. Thaw in 1907 when "brain storm" was first offered as a valid excuse for murder. Commented Psychoanalyst Jelliffe: "Dr. Sachs was talking ex cathedra. It's just a new attempt to spread the old gossip and scandal we've been fighting for 40 or 50 years. They don't like to see us get any fees.

"One day some one sent an epileptic imbecile to me from out West and I saw him once. There wasn't anything you could do for him unless you shot him. Well, don't you know, it wasn't much later when I learned of the 'bad results of psychoanalysis to this case.' And I'd only talked to him for ten minutes.

"It's just the old sex bogey dressed up in new clothes again. If there's too much sex in the world we didn't put it there. It started in the Garden of Eden. As a matter of fact we're trying to get the patient away from sex overemphasis. Many of the patients think the whole world's attention is centred on the midsection of the human body. . . .

"After all, what harm can we do when we sit a patient down on a bench and ask a lot of questions?''

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