SCIENTIFIC APPROACH IS NEEDED

One of the most moving experiences of my medical career came to me a few weeks ago as I sat in a huge, jampacked audience made up of medical students from all over the United States. They were attending the annual convention of the Student American Medical Association. As one of their guests, I listened to a brief talk from the heart of a remarkably fine psychiatrist-Dr. Corbett Thigpen, the man who recently wrote up the case of the woman whose problem he described in "The Three Faces of Eve." He is a handsome, fortyish, sensitive-looking man with fine eyes and a very moving voice. Time and again, during his talk, when he

would say, perhaps that many of the ideas of modern psychiatry are just theories for which no one can adduce any scientific proof, the audience much stirred applauded. At those moments, I wished all dynamically-inclined psychiatrists could have been present just to sense the relief that seemed to come over these students when told that if they were reluctant to swallow a lot of weird theories, they were perfectly justified. They registered their approval only as people do when, at last, they hear an authority say something that they have long felt to be true and much in need of being said. As Dr. Thigpen emphasized, he was not at-

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contique to quote from his work.

As Dr. Thigpen went on to say to the students, what he prays for is that psychiatry may soon come out of the doldrums to become again a field for scientific research. Perhaps the change-over is now being effected by the brain physiologists, pharmacologists, surgeons, and geneticists who are getting inter-

tacking anyone; all he wanted was to find ways in which to cure his patients. After years of experience, he knows to his sorrow that modern psychiatry does not give all the answers; in fact, in many cases of mental aberration, even good psychotherapy does not help. Dr. Thigpen told me that he and his eminent chief, Dr. Hervey Cleckley, had started in practice with analytic indoc-ested in the problems of mental disease. trination, but later had turned away from We will hope so. Naturally, there is it. In their practice, they had come to little hope of changing the mental pro behave like any good scientific physicesses of the older psychiatrists, they cian does who will use any form of are too firmly set in their ways; and so, treatment that he finds useful psyour hope must be in the young men of chotherapy, rest, tranquilizers, brain the present generation. If they will acstimulators, electroshocks, or hypnosis. cept only ideas for which there is scienDr. Thigpen was sorry to have to admit tific proof, we will get somewhere. Movwhat all of us physicians know: that, ingly, Dr. Thigpen told of the similar for the last 30 years or more, under the frank talk which he gave at a recent dominating influence of theories of earmeeting of a great psychiatric associa ly sex trauma, psychiatry has largely tion. There, also, he pleaded for scienstagnated, so that there has been little tific honesty. When, after the talk, a advance in it. Many psychiatrists have physician came to the podium and asked, cultivated the habit of writing in such "Would you have us give up our prac an almost-unintelligible jargon that few tice and starve?"; Dr. Thigpen said, people can guess what they are trying "I have no desire to rob anybody of his to say. In doing this, they have fooled livelihood, but I feel that if patients themselves and some of their readers are paying us for our services, they deinto thinking they know something. serve to receive scientific knowledge As Dr. Thigpen, Dr. Freyhan, and others not beliefs." At the close of his talks have pointed out, much of psychiatry in Chicago, the students were so moved has changed from a science into a rethat they stood up and applauded for ligion with Freud as its Prophet. Whenseveral minutes. I will never forget that ever one of Freud's old friends came experience so long as I live. It is a to differ with him, he was promptly exwonderful thing to hear an able and hocommunicated, and after that his name nest man confessing from the heart was never mentioned, and his papers that there is something terribly wrong were never quoted. This, of course, is with the work of the group with which not science..In science, one may differ he has long been associated. It takes strongly with a man, and yet love him tremendous courage and dedication to as a friend, revere him as a teacher, and do such a thing.