Sarah took her first ferry ride with the twins. A warning of winter chilled the November air, but she didn't mind; no cottage in Connecticut until spring. As the ferry approached the Battery, she saw Edna and Gene waiting to take her to Fraunces Tavern for dinner.
the rays of the sun on the tops of greening trees-
In the Garrick Theatre, as the curtains parted, the girl with the red gold in her hair looked beyond the footlights to an empty seat in a row, and for a brief moment her lips trembled. In that row a dog lay quietly at the feet of a splendidly built man in white tie and tails. Beside him sat an angular woman in a maroon pan-velvet evening gown. A gold band gleamed softly on her finger. At her side sat two brothers and next to them a young man in need of a haircut, yet somehow his tousel hair looked right with his black velvet jacket and floppy bow tie.
BOOKS
1000 HOMOSEXUALS, by Edmund Bergler, M.D., Pageant Books, New Jersey, 1959, $4.95, 249 pp.
Who is Edmund Bergler? The question is important, for this man insists in this book that he speaks as one of unimpeachable professional and scientific authority. Let us examine the record.
He is listed as a medical graduate from the University of Vienna in 1927, in the days before Hitler. Does this mean that his medical thinking is out of date? Possibly so. Some doctors grow with the times, others stagnate professionally.
He was for ten years on the staff of the Psychoanalytic Freud-Clinic, in Vienna. This fact unmistakably tells the observer the type of psychonanalytic psychiatry Dr. Bergler espouses. His two hundred and sixty published "papers" and twenty books unvaryingly bear this out. A question we need not take time to examine here is whether this voluminous output repre-
one
sents a genuine scientific fertility or, rather, some compulsive need on his part for attempting to thrust himself into good company.
Since around 1937 Dr. Bergler has been in private psychiatric practice in New York City. His address is currently listed as 251 Central Park West. His fees are reported to range in the neighborhood of fifty dollars per hour. To maintain any such fee scale calls either for lots of sensational publicity, or some astonishingly fine results. The latter, Dr. Bergler assures us he has. The former, thanks to United Press, TIME and others one might have expected to be taken in less easily, has made him a public name of sorts.
Is there other evidence of the professional position this man has achieved in his more than thirty years of practice in Europe and America? Yes, there is. His publishers state that he was lecturer for the Psychoanalytic Institute of New York as recently as 1945, fourteen years ago. One finds no mention of his connection with universities or medical institutions of standing either earlier or later than that date. This gap seems significant, in view of the proverbial eagerness of such bodies to enlist the talents of those having serious contributions to
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