Medicine: In the Age of Anxiety

I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.

—Psalms 34: 4

If King David knew what he was talking about, then Freud was off base. From many of the Psalms, it is plain that Psalmist David understood the meaning of anxiety. Psychologist Orval Hobart Mowrer, associate professor of education at Harvard University, assured the top U.S. scientists convening last week at Chicago (see SCIENCE) that David, for all his poetic language, was on solid psychiatric ground.

Modern psychiatrists, Mowrer said, have been a long while catching up....