Correspondence

Dear Mr. Evans:

Your paper on Serendipity, published in THE PSYCHOANALYTIC QUARTERLY, No. 2, 1963, was sent to me by Dr. Arthur A. Miller of Chicago because I am known to have a special interest in Serendipity.

I write to call your attention to the definition from which you reached some erroneous conclusions and which led you to use the word Serendipitist improperly to describe one suffering from certain abnormalities.

You claim that the dictionary definition (which you fail to cite) is technically correct. My guess is that it is from the Oxford English Dictionary. Unfortunately, this definition is incompatible with the very etymology supplied by Oxford and therefore the definition is a distortion of the word invented by Walpole. This I will demonstrate.

The dictionary definition omits the essential component, sagacity. You correctly quote the gist of Walpole's definition on page 167 which includes it: discovery 'by accidents and sagacity of things which they were not in quest of'.

Without sagacity you do not have Serendipity; you concerned yourself with what is left. This residue could be anything you wish to call it—except Serendipity. Whatever the maladies suffered by your patients which led them to become helplessly engulfed in labyrinths of unimportant and unrelated miscellany, their discoveries are not the result of Serendipity nor therefore are they Serendipitists.