I have been enjoying the local histories in TAP, as well as the interviews with survivors of our eventful past. My only complaint, rather minor, is the length and tedium of a letter by Ruth and Theodore Lidz (TAP 28/2) criticizing Else Pappenheim's reminiscences about Adolf Meyer and Phipps. Her light-hearted personal impressions of Meyer and his court in the 1930s hardly merit a stern rebuke for her failure to understand “the culture of American psychiatry,” when this was the very point of her memoir: how odd he seemed to a newly arrived European.

Most analysts know something about the important and highly ambivalent role Meyer played in American psychiatry and psychoanalysis. But Dr. Pappenheim was not presenting a history of Meyerian psychobiology, and her bewilderment at its elusive doctrines and cumbersome nomenclature was not too different from that of many native American psychiatrists of that period.

The Lidzes' labored and humorless sermon on Meyer's importance may be worth publishing elsewhere but as a comment on Dr. Pappenheim's personal recollections it seems an exercise in “breaking a butterfly upon a wheel.” And perhaps, in prolonging this correspondence, I am guilty of the same fault.

Sanford Gifford, M.D.