Mental Pay Dirt

Among the foes of Freudian psychoanalysis, few are bitterer than psychologists of rival schools. A savagely outhitting example is Andrew Salter, Manhattan behaviorist and hypnotist, splenetic disciple of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. Psychologist Salter paid his disrespects to the Freudians and set out his own pet creed in Conditioned Reflex Therapy (TIME, Oct. 10, 1949). Now older (37) but no mellower, Salter makes another attack in The Case Against Psychoanalysis (Holt; $2.50).

Salter points jeeringly at Freud's own followers who, he says, "have become filled with doubts and are constantly reinterpreting and rewriting the Master's gospel. There are the Jungians and the Adlerians, the Stekelites and the Reichians, the Horneyites and the Menningerites, and the so-called Washington and Chicago Schools. Great indeed is the confusion of tongues."

From an old (1940) technical journal, Salter culls a case which he thinks may still be news for laymen: Psychologist Carney Landis, who underwent 221 hours of psychoanalysis for a Rockefeller Foundation inquiry. During it, Landis asked his analyst, "What is normality?"

"I don't know," the analyst replied. "I never deal with normal people."

Landis persisted: "But suppose a really normal person came to you?"

Admitted the analyst: "Even though he were normal at the beginning of the analysis, the analytic procedure would create a neurosis."

To Psychologist Salter, the procedure of psychoanalysis is like salting a mine. "The analyst sprinkles and buries false nuggets of Oedipus, castration (or penis envy) and bisexuality," he writes. "Then, as the patient digs (where he is directed to dig) and discovers the planted material, the analyst is convinced that he has struck pay dirt ... It is by suggestion that the patient is taught to find what he never possessed in the first place . . . Psychoanalysis can make no discoveries in the individual. It can only discover itself."

"Modern psychology," Salter goes on, "has shown Freud's map of the mind to be as inaccurate and wildly fanciful as the pre-Columbian maps of the New World." And with approval he quotes Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin: "What is sound in Freudianism is very old; what is new, very doubtful."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.