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“Adultery, race problems, war, Communism and Freud, not altogether fraudulently presented, raise their seldom lovely heads in even the most discreet magazines and books…” a Saturday Review novel critic wrote in 1953. I wondered about this grouping of “evils,” why this gratuitous gesture to Freud “not altogether fraudulently presented.” How often in these pages do psychiatry and psychoanalysis get the back of the hand, how often the open hand of friendliness?
Being a psychiatrist and analyst, I was more than casually interested. I collected all the references to my field in the 1953 issues of the magazine. They numbered just over seventy. They should, I thought, give a fairly good cross-section of book and play reviewers' attitudes toward this new science and what psychiatric and psychologic subjects can expect at the hands of professional critics. Unlike many popular magazines, incidentally, psychiatry is not “defused” by jokes and cartoons in Saturday Review. In my clipping collection I found only one cartoon obliquely having anything to do with the subject, and only four jokes by one columnist. I put the clippings into four arbitrary categories: 1. Condescension and Exasperation; 2. Word-Freud and Word-Psychoanalysis; 3. Psychiatry and the Patient; 4. Criticism by Psychiatrists, Analysts and Psychologist-Philosophers.
Condescension and Exasperation: one can often feel the