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To the Editors: To comment on Dr. Harold Marcus' discussion—he and others indicated that a greater amount of case material would be valuable in passing critical judgment on the hypotheses we presented. Such material is available in three additional publications: “A Comparative Psychiatric Study of Accidental and Suicidal Death” [Arch. Gen. Psych., Jan., 1966]; a chapter in the about-to-be published Essays in Self Destruction on fatal accident, and a soon-to-be published article in “The Psychoanalytic Quarterly” entitled “Fatal Traffic Accidents.”
In regard to Dr. Marcus' point that “information from friends and relatives is superficial, subjective, biased—and not reliable as a scientific tool,” I would not agree. I think information from informants is subject to various kinds of biases, even as information from the accident victim himself is. A critically thinking scientist-observer takes neither at face value but attempts to judge the biases so that his impression as to what is probably going on takes into account those biases. In addition, there has been published work to indicate that the impressions and judgments of relatives and other informants concerning subjects in psychiatric studies in at least some circumstances bear a striking correlation with the independent observations and impressions of social scientist-observers.
Dr. Marcus does not believe that the impulsive activity which we hypothesize is a regression, but on the contrary that its purpose is to discharge extreme anger. Interestingly, later on he states: “The impulsive act is akin to a childhood temper tantrum.” Our feeling is that it is not necessary to choose one or the other of these two alternatives. It is possible that anger is sometimes expressed in the impulsive act. However, what we are attempting to emphasize without excluding the other possibility
is that the impulsivity is very much an ego issue and that the expression of anger or other impulses takes place because the ego is not opera