Medicine: Do You Lack Confidence?

It is high time, declares Park Avenue Psychologist Andrew Salter, “that psychoanalysis, like the elephant of fable, dragged itself off to some distant jungle graveyard and died. Psychoanalysis has outlived its usefulness. Its methods are vague, its treatment is long drawn out, and more often than not, its results are insipid and unimpressive.” With this blast against his rivals and competitors, Salter opens his Conditioned Reflex Therapy (Creative Age; $3.75), published last week. The book is more than a sneer at psychoanalysis and its father, Sigmund Freud; it is also a loose-jointed exposition of the wonders of Author Salter’s own specialty, behavioristic psychology. Freud’s followers, says Salter, waste their patients’ time (and money) on an interminable dredging of the past. Salter is confident that he can find out all he needs to know about a patient’s past in a few minutes, and can usually cure him in as few as six easy lessons (for $1,000 or more).

Never Mind Your Manners. Almost as extreme as his bitterness against the Freudians is Salter’s veneration of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the physiologist who coined the term “conditioned reflex.” (Pavlov’s classic example: a dog which has heard a bell ring whenever it was fed will eventually drool whenever it hears the bell, even though no food is offered.) The behaviorist school is founded on what Salter calls “the firm scientific bedrock of Pavlov.” Its main tenet: man is a creature of habit; he can be “conditioned” to the habit of not even hearing a pistol fired next to his ear.

Like the Freudians, the Pavlovians have their own special jargon. In the words of the founder: “. . . All the highest nervous activity . . . consists of a continual change of these three fundamental processes— excitation, inhibition and disinhibition.” Everything good is excitatory; everything inhibitory (in the Freudian jargon, repression) is bad—it deprives a man of self-confidence. Says Salter: “The happy person does not waste time thinking. Self-control comes from no control at all … The inhibitory think, without acting, ‘and-delude themselves into believing that they are highly civilized types … All people whose good manners are noticeable are excessively inhibited . . .” Nonetheless, he admits that a few inhibitions, e.g., waiting for the green light and the family bathroom, are all right.

Let Yourself Go. For an “inhibited” patient, Salter prescribes “excitatory” exercises. First & foremost is “feeling-talk.” The sentence, “Today is Friday” is dry, inhibited “fact-talk.” Salter would rather hear his patient getting some emotional outlet by saying, “Thank heavens, today is Friday and the weekend is here.” There is also “facial talk”: if a cat purrs when it is happy and a dog howls when its paw is stepped on, so should a man—or at any rate, scowl. From this it is.a mere step to another Salter prescription: “Contradict and attack. When you differ with someone, do not simulate agreeability.”

Salter insists on deliberate use of the word / as much as possible (his book is full of it). Mock modesty is all nonsense: “Express agreement when you are praised.” Finally, “Don’t plan. Live for the next minute . . . and tomorrow will take care of itself.”

Application of these basically simple remedies may be a complex job, sometimes even requiring hypnosis. At 35, Salter is an acknowledged master of the behavioristic school’s technique. With it, he claims to have cured a businessman of blushing, a young woman of stuttering, a society girl of flatulence, an ex-cabin boy of homosexuality, a doctor and his wife of morphine addiction.

To more conventional psychologists who say that Salter’s cures prove nothing about the soundness of his theory, Salter retorts that the best proof of a theory is how it works in practice. In his own practice, Pavlov’s theory has worked well —well enough to give Author Salter great self-confidence.