The Explorer

(7 of 10)

Britain has been made Freud-conscious by the championship of Dr. Jones, the masterly translations of James Strachey, the polemics of Partisan Edward Glover, and the fatal fascination—plus plot ideas —Freud held out to all fiction writers. Yet all of Great Britain (pop. 51 million) has half as many analysts as New York City. There are Englishmen who still like to quote Punch's burlesque "explanation" of Freud back in 1934: "Without psychoanalysis we should never know that when we think a thing the thing we think is not the thing we think we think but only the thing that makes us think we think the thing we think we think."

Pickers & Choosers. "All good theories go to America when they die." In the case of Freud this was at least half right. With a thoroughness unmatched elsewhere in the world, psychoanalysis has found its citadel in the U.S. its founder despised. Most of the nation's 750,000 mental patients in understaffed state hospitals still are not reached by modern theory or practice. But the progressive states making radical and energetic attacks on the problem of mental illness are doing so under the leadership of psychiatrists who owe most of their orientation to Freud. Even among psychiatrists who confine their practice to analysis, it is now the practice to avoid complete allegiance to Freud and be an eclectic—a picker and chooser among all the theories and systems of psychology. But psychiatrists trained in the last quarter century and virtually all those now in training have an outlook that is rooted at least 70% in concepts and practices springing straight from Freud.

Though most do not practice "classical analysis"—because they believe it uneconomic to devote an hour a day three or more days a week for two or more years to a single neurotic patien*—they practice psychotherapy on analytic principles, try to reach something like Freud's goal by a short cut—often in one or two hours a week for three to six months.

Among the 9.000 psychiatrists in the U.S., only 619 are hard-core analysts. Several hundred psychologists also practice analysis (and are slightingly referred to by M.D.s as "lay analysts"). Perhaps 15,000 patients are in analysis at any one time; the estimated total of Americans who have tried analysis (though many did not stay the full course) is well over 100,000—more than in the rest of the world.

Who's Better? What does analysis do for patients? Says Hans Jurgen Eysenck, a bright, up-and-coming British psychologist: "I have yet to meet a Freudian who can prove that there is a higher [improvement rate] among neurotics who are psychoanalyzed . . . What evidence they do offer is anecdotal ... In mental cases of all types about three-quarters will recover in about the same period whether they have treatment or not."