Medicine: The Couch Cult

Is psychoanalysis a cure-all for the minor ills of the mind? Or is it a costly fad full of humbug? Few healing techniques of modern times are fought over with such violent partisanship as the long-drawn-out Freudian analysis. For the past fortnight, a layman and two prominent psychiatrists have carried on the argument in the Nation.

“My husband and I were recently divorced upon the suggestion of his psychiatrist,” wrote Dorothy Ferman (pseudonym of a former newspaperwoman and advertising writer). “Several weeks later my husband voluntarily entered a sanitarium to be treated for depression. I, too, am depressed; I’m also angry. In our lives there was no mother-in-law, no ‘other’ man or woman. But there was always a psychiatrist.”

Oversimplification. Writer Ferman complains that her husband became utterly dependent upon his analyst. As a social-work executive, he said, “to hive had an analysis was as desirable as to hold an advanced academic degree.” She had hoped, after their marriage, to supplant the analyst “in a woman’s way,” but Jim went running from one analyst to another. Eventually, he tried to get Dorothy to go to an analyst. She refused, largely because of the cost, and concluded: “What it might do for me was less important than the fact that it would initiate me into the cult.”

Her experience with Jim left Dorothy with some strong views: “I can’t see that a mother’s apron strings are much worse than a psychiatrist’s couch. Maybe it is unsophisticated and ‘naive oversimplification’ to handle one’s own problems to the best of one’s ability . . . But something like this was the basis of mental health for hundreds of years before Adler, Jung and Freud.”

Impertinence. The Nation’s editors gave “a number of prominent psychiatrists” advance copies of the Ferman article and invited them to reply. Most refused. But from outspoken Psychiatrist-Author Fredric (The Show of Violence) Wertham came outspoken agreement: “What she writes rings true. In fact, I have encountered literally dozens of similar cases . . . Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are the only physicians who blame the patient—or at least his relatives—when they do not cure him.”

From his long experience in New York City, Dr. Wertham was convinced that eight out of ten psychoanalyses should not have been started, and that six out of ten were more harmful than helpful. “I believe . . . that the patients are often right, and so are their relatives,” he concluded. “If this be treason, send me to St. Elizabeth’s!”

Another psychiatrist-author, Dr. Gregory (Mind, Medicine and Man) Zilboorg, appeared nominally for the defense of psychoanalysis. While deploring argument by charges and countercharges, he accused the public (and by inference Writer Ferman) of “verbose ignorance and terminological impertinence.” Zilboorg charged that anybody who makes this kind of attack on psychoanalysis is wrong, because he mistakes “use for abuse . . . illness for unreasonableness, and Freud tor the ghost which so many people in their amateurish or professional ignorance make of him.” But Defender Zilboorg conceded much of the prosecution’s case. “In our age of propaganda and pragmatic go-getting,” said he, “psychiatry and psychoanalysis have been oversold.”