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April 21, 1992
I am writing with regard to what may look like a small error in a book review in the Journal (40:247–251), but an error that seriously vitiates the impact of the phenomenon being described.
Ginsberg, in his review of John Frosch's two volumes on Psychodynamic Psychiatry, cites data and conclusions presented by me in an article, "The Future of Psychotherapy," which appeared last year in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. He says that I documented extensively the serious decline over the past several decades of the amount of time devoted to specific psychotherapy training within the psychiatric residency. The figures he quotes are that it was once 300 hours over the residency span and is now down to 50 hours. The actual figures from my article were 3,000 hours during the three years of residency when I was a resident starting in 1949, down to anywhere between 200 and 600 hours within today's four-year program (the difference depending on the particular data source used). The decline from 3,000 to somewhere between 200 and 600 is enormous and horrendous, and has all kinds of implications. It does not capture all this to use the wrong figures to begin with, even by today's standards. This has nothing to do, of course, with Dr. Ginsberg's disagreeing with me on my assessment of all the reasons for the decline and its various meanings and implications.