THE GROWTH OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—Could some action be taken against the growth of psycho-analysis in this country? So far as my investigations have led me, it results in far more failures than successes, and the inevitability of failure is invariably recognised after a large expenditure of time and money. Four out of five Harley Street doctors are fiercely intolerant of it. Of psycho- logists, the late Professor William McDougall declared that the New Psychology—the theoretical basis for the practical process—had gone completely off the rails, and Doctors Harry Roberts and Margaret Jackson, in their book The Troubled Mind, have conducted a vigorous assault on the symbolism employed for the important interpretation of dreams. As for the analysts themselves, most of them have been neu- rotics, now supposedly cured by this supposedly effective process. We would never allow a physical operation to be practised in this slap-dash fashion. Why, then, should we be so tolerant in the case of a mental operation, the failure of which is often accompanied by chronic melancholia and sometimes by suicide?—Yours faithfully,
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