Medicine: Can You Measure Love?

Though a few psychiatrists have applauded the sex studies of Biologist Alfred C. Kinsey, most have opposed his work, largely on the ground that he was muscling in on their territory without sufficient qualifications. One who formerly backed Kinsey for his research on males has now turned against him: Topeka's famed Dr. Karl A. Menninger. Last week, before 160 mind-doctors and their guests at an American Psychiatric Association dinner in St. Louis, the two battled it out.

Said Psychoanalyst Menninger: "This book [Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — TIME, Aug. 24] does not represent American women, much less the human female. It should have been labeled 'What 5,000 or 6,000 rather talkative ladies told me about sexual behavior of women in the U.S. under certain conditions' ... I don't much care what they said because I don't believe them." Dr. Menninger scoffed at "a certain naivete in Dr. Kinsey's approach to the problem." Accurate scientific research into human sexuality is more difficult than among Kinsey's first subjects, the gall wasps, he said, "since sex is some thing that people do only in a bedroom." He criticized Kinsey's attempt to express human sex life in statistics showing the frequency of orgasm. "Is orgasm the goal of life? There is some importance, after all, in reproduction of the species."

Replied Kinsey: criticism of his methods of collecting data was either "careless reasoning or malicious misinterpretation." He tried to cut Menninger off from his colleagues: "I do not believe that those [psychiatrists] who have been most vocal in criticizing what we have done represent the mass of you." In fact, he said, there has been "no more loyal group" than the psychiatrists supporting his research.

As for love, which Menninger accused him of ignoring, Kinsey asked: "How can you measure love? Nobody knows how to approach it scientifically. We shall never write about love, but that doesn't mean that I as an individual don't recognize its value." On the allegation that he translates data from the animal kingdom into human sexuality, Kinsey countered that he had not tried to draw analogies. Anyhow, he added: "Animal data are ignored in no other branch of medicine [than psychiatry]. It is apparently a disgrace to be a biologist, a disgrace to be a scientist. It is a sorry day for psychiatry when it publicly disclaims any connection with science."