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Schachter says that he questions “whether Fernando's review was reasonably objective, fair, and collegial.” And he continues by asking the question, “Why would someone write a review that was entirely critical and pejorative?” This is a very good question. Of course a critical review, which found a book wanting in many, or all, key aspects is not necessarily a pejorative one, which would seek to belittle and demean the book and the author. I would agree with Schachter that an entirely pejorative book review is a problem, and clearly he feels that mine was pejorative in tone. Tone is a very hard thing to judge. In reading over my review, I can find a few places where I have something of this tone, but the rest of it strikes me more as critical, and perhaps even angry in places, rather than pejorative. The distinctions are important, since Schachter suggests that when faced with an entirely critical and pejorative response, the reviewer should either refrain from writing the review or the book review editor should reject the review. Is he really suggesting that all entirely critical book reviews should never see the light of day, either through self-censorship or editorial censorship? What about entirely laudatory reviews? Should they also be kept from going to press? The problem, I think, is that Schachter makes the assumption that an entirely critical review could not be objective or fair, while to my mind this depends on whether the book really has the characteristics referred to in the review.
To return to Schachter's question—Why would I write an entirely critical and pejorative review?—there are, in fact, many possible reasons, and as analysts we may be tempted to think that these characteristics of the review had multiple causations. One possibility is that there really is a lot to criticize in the book and I was pointing this out. Schachter suggests another possibility: that “Fernando, reading my questioning of Jacobs's similar traditional etiological inference