Letters to the Editor

DEAR SIR,

Only recently I came across and was able to look through your Fiftieth Anniversary Number (1969, Vol. 50, Pt. 2). While I am normally resigned to the fact that any given issue of a psychiatric or psychoanalytic journal will contain articles of various calibres, the paper by Dr K. R. Eissler has stirred me sufficiently to write to you. I suppose this paper is not outstandingly inferior and I am probably responding to it on the basis of cumulative impressions from various past readings. In essence, I feel and I will attempt to show that Dr Eissler, for whatever reasons, was not prepared to deal with his topic within the broad parameters that he himself had set. I am sure that my annoyance that will show in the subsequent text is shared by a number of colleagues who are unhappy about continued criticism of the medical profession with respect to its members being rather narrow in the scope of their knowledge and education. Dr Eissler in his article was obviously and embarrassingly out of his depth, and yet he demonstrated but a playful hesitation in presenting his 'historical statement' (sic).

• 1While discussing whether psychoanalysis is a science, and after making a flat statement that 'notwithstanding the many assertions that have been made to the contrary, psychoanalysis is a science', the author continues: 'So long as any procedure is based on empirical observation. …, so long as it does not resort to deductive or metaphorical thinking, it is scientific' (p. 464). The implication is that deductive thinking ought not be used in science and that there are no sciences which are not based on empirical observations. But how about mathematics? Here is a quotation from Henri Poincaré: 'the genesis of mathematical discovery is the problem which must inspire the psychologist with the keenest interest, for this is the process in which the human mind seems to borrow least from the exterior world, in which it acts, or appears to act, only by itself and on its