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by dal mcintire

Amid the ikon and relic worship (connected with the Freud centenary) at recent American Psychiatric Assn, convention in Chicago, and while most speeches breathed the air of worshipful orthodoxy, several top speakers criticized the notion that analysts have a corner on psychiatric science, and some denied that the methods of psychoanalysis are scientific at all.

Dr. Percival Bailey, University of Illinois neurologist, called the psychoanalytic technique a failure, charging Freud had no patience with scientific method and that his disciples take his writings like Bible dogma. He was not trying to bury Freud, he said, any more than to praise him, but only to guard against his deification. He charged that Freud's writings, far from being scientific treatises, were mere reveries or ruminations, the fantasies of a visionary, but not the labor of a scientist." The technique of deep therapy seems to be to lead the patient along the very brink of the abyss, hoping that he will not fall in something like Dulles' diplomacy." Attacking also the brutal and undependable methods of electric shock and lobotomy, he suggested that analysts go back to the asylums and put their theories to real test.

Main emphasis in the convention pointed the hope for further use of drugs to treat mental illness and deviations another method which ought to be approached with caution.

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