Gilmore: Let's look backward first. I'm sure you have thoughts about the future, your own and that of JAPA, but I'd like to review the past.
Shapiro: I started the job as editor nine years ago, at a stage in my career when I was doing a good deal of analysis, but I was also an academic psychiatrist. There were some questions about whether I could take the time and generate the interest to do the job, but I realized that there were many things that could be done with the Journal that I thought would be useful for American psychoanalysis. Parenthetically, one of my teachers at Bellevue was John Frosch, the original editor of the Journal, so I had some idea of the background of the Journal from talks with him. I also spoke with Harold Blum before I accepted the job. I considered the Journal a distinguished and fine publication, so the question was, What was I going to be able to do?
There were a couple of areas where I thought I could make a contribution. First, I felt that analysis was beginning to slip in academic psychiatry, and I thought that if I could do something to maintain continued contacts with medicine that would be useful. It was beginning to seem as though psychoanalysis was more parochially interested in its own house than in the issues facing American psychiatry. Such matters as the efficacy of analysis, empirical evidence to warrant its advocacy, and the importance of keeping some aspects of our work related to psychiatry and empirical work had to be addressed. I thought it would be important to promote interest in people who were doing empirical research on the psychoanalytic method and to open the Journal as a forum for them, as well as those who were writing theoretical papers and studying the fine points about Freud. The other thing I felt was that the Journal's focus had become rather narrowly ego psychological. I thought that a more open intellectual horizon would be desirable, especially since the Journal is the house organ for The American. It's the Journal of a large group of people who work in a number of areas with various viewpoints.
Gilmore: As editor, how quickly can you effect such changes?
Shapiro: I learned from Harold before I took the job that the editor has a free hand. In fact, it is probably the least politically hamstrung position in the organization. Once appointed, the editor has a five-year opportunity to do what he can do, and then another five years if he is reelected. About a third of the board turns over every year, and each board member remains for three years. My first group was already chosen, so my first job really was to win the interest and confidence of the board I inherited from Harold. I did change some things immediately. I told my board, right from the start, that I was going to use them not only as readers of papers but also as advisors in regard to policy issues that came up in The American. They were really to be my counsel, and I considered it my first task to win their interest, confidence, and participation. I think I've done that. I did use the appointment of our associate editors, for one-year terms, as a way of introducing new and younger people, and then counted them among the experienced editors so that we were constantly able to infuse the Journal with “new blood.” But it was only that I had my own new board. And of course the Journal doesn't really represent an editor's efforts for the first two years, because you have a backlog of papers and everything is already in press. Nobody even notices what you've done to the Journal until you are two or three years into it, unless you change its color as I did. Then you have a period of about three or four years when they get to know you and then another two or three years when they can get to hate you, and you can then pass into the wind.
Gilmore: But your influence will continue for a couple of years after you step down.
Shapiro: Sure. But I am pleased we now have a more rapid turnover. We've gotten the decision time down to under three months, which is a real change from the old days, and we also have gotten the acceptance-to-publication time down to sixteen months at this point. By the time I leave, we are going to be in pretty good shape. That's because we've negotiated with our publisher to increase the number of pages. At the earliest stage, the only way I could make my voice heard was through editorials and through slipping in a few articles that were very timely, while bumping a few which, like the unconscious, were timeless. For example, there was a hot controversy over the Grunbaum book when I first started in. So early on I got in a paper or two about that. And there was also an editorial early on in regard to my plans for the Journal. In that sense, the editor does have some prerogatives whereby he can make his agenda known.
Gilmore: It seems your aims could be construed as contradictory, since your personal career and your interest in trying to integrate psychoanalysis with psychiatry and medicine might conflict with the interests of The American's membership, which you are also striving to represent.
Shapiro: The body of the membership is moving toward greater inclusiveness, but I don't think it is necessarily moving away from psychiatry. I don't see the two tendencies as entailing each other. I know we have lived through a period in which our medical identity as analysts was under constant scrutiny and was appropriately changing. But I don't see any great benefit in a complete break with medicine. We'd lose something essential in taking such a path.
Gilmore: Do you have any influence on the future direction of the Journal?
Shapiro: No. In regard to the choosing the next editor, the search committee has met with me to discuss what I think the job entails, and occasionally a candidate will call to get my views on the issues and what they should be thinking about. The ultimate recommendation comes from the search committee, and then the executive committee negotiates with the candidate.
Gilmore: How much do you work with the new editor once the appointment is made?
Shapiro: I can only tell you what I did with Harold. I had a meeting with him when I came into the job to find out the mechanics of how he did things, and then he transferred the files one Saturday morning, I think it was from his car to mine. And then I would call him whenever I got into trouble. It was not frequent, but frequent enough so that we became friendly. Having been an academic, I'd been on many editorial boards. I had been on the Quarterly. I was in the original group of Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, and had been on the Journal of the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. When I was in college, I was editor of the campus newspaper. So this is not new work.
Gilmore: What effect had the job on you and your professional life?
Shapiro: The experience has been very important and very formative. It has intensified my interest in the literature of psychoanalysis and of course has exposed me to much more of it, so that now I can better tell what's really new and interesting and what's not. It's permitted me to help shape the changing scene and to determine what is found interesting in psychoanalysis. I came in when the Mahlerian and Kohutian models were riding high. I have lived to see a serious diminution in the application of the Mahlerian model, which makes me wonder how much it depended on her personal force. Although self psychology seems to have established its place in the world, there too the force of Kohut's personality seemed
critical. I have a sense now of a much more uniform American school than I had thought existed. The big struggle at this point, I think, is going to be between the various hermeneutic or interpretive approaches and those that take a more “scientific” or, to use a growl word, “positivistic” position. I think that almost everybody, from ego psychologists on down, have come to a very strange place considering the history of psychoanalysis. The old struggles over the interpersonal schools are beginning to be irrelevant as we all come closer to a two-person model. There is a striking increase in writings about interaction, countertransference, and the role of the interpreter, in contrast to the historical notion of a closed one-person system. So the idiom of the profession has changed a great deal in the nine years I've been editor. It's been a spectrum of change over time.
“All of the topics I've written on have some affinity to my essentially hard-headed quest for greater certainty or at least greater clarity about the significance and meaning of what we do.”
Gilmore: Are you going to miss the job?
Shapiro: I'm looking forward to seeing whether I'm going to have “more time.” If so, what I'm going to turn my attention to is still uncertain. It's a little like when I finished my analysis and expected I'd have all that money and all that time and then realized that somehow I didn't know where it all went. I have a feeling it's going to be the same way. I don't have any plan for a direct substitution during this next period. I may be ready to do a book, but don't ask me about what.
Gilmore: Judging from your curriculum vitae, the editorship didn't put much of a damper on your writing, but perhaps you shifted your focus to more analytic writing. Were your interests in any way shaped by the editorship?
Shapiro: You're right, there is more analytic writing, and there's no question about the impact of the editorship on my interests. One of the areas that of course has occupied me over the years is the relation between language and symbol formation in psychoanalysis, unconscious fantasy, and so forth. So I can't or won't put aside that interest. And then the developmental area has certainly been important, because I also do child psychiatry. When I was asked to do the Rado lecture, I began to think about the issues at the forefront of my Journal experience, and the topic I chose was very much in line with what I considered the unnecessary neglect, in the hermeneutic interpretive approaches, of the role of memory. I took a new look at Freud's idea that we suffer from reminiscences. The choice of topic clearly came from my experience with things I had been reading for the Journal. But you know, I could have done that without being a journal editor. This was my view of what was new in our world.
Gilmore: How did the topic of empathy arise? You've written a series of papers on that subject.
Shapiro: Empathy came up for the same reason probably. There is a trend that you can begin to decipher in who I am. How can I define it? I am very suspicious of romanticism of any sort. When I hear words like empathy without further definition, something which is seductive because everybody should have it, I wonder why we need all this professional training. All of the topics I've written on have some affinity to my essentially hard-headed quest for greater certainty or at least greater clarity about the significance and meaning of what we do. In the end, we're professionals, “hired guns,” and employees in a service industry. I think it behooves us to have skill and a knowledge base that are firmly grounded, as well as having sympathy, empathy, and a caring attitude. So just as the role of actual memory is important with regard to psychopathology, sober curiosity about the nature of empathy and its role in the analytic process is essential. My interest actually arose from another source, since I had described a case earlier, in a paper on distortions in empathy, where I examined a patient's supposed empathy toward his girlfriend. This proved to be a defensive stance. I thought if we could subject that kind of feeling to analysis in a patient, we should certainly subject it to analysis as a purported instrument of analysis.
“One of the things I had hoped to do with the Journal was to try to make those who read it understand that American psychoanalysis is open to a variety of ideas and to nonpsychoanalytic science.”
Gilmore: Why do you think that is?
Shapiro: Analysts are lazy about doing things like hard research. They're not trained to do that kind of thing. And the few who are get involved in issues like the microanalysis of process rather than outcome studies. Yet the ultimate threat to the practice of psychoanalysis is going to be the threat to our pocketbook. I'm going to make a critical remark about myself and my brethren on this front. I'm an academic, so why didn't I do that kind of work? The reason I didn't is that it's relatively tedious and uninteresting. To our own detriment, we're much more willing to accept the tedium of waiting for an appropriate interpretive remark than the tedium of planning a study that involves lots of measures and so forth. It's a very different kind of approach to empiricism.
Gilmore: Do you think there is anything in at least some analytic thinking that might work against a research orientation?
Shapiro: Oh, yes. Have you ever heard an analytic discussion where somebody didn't have a different point of view? Even in presenting case material, there is a difficulty in discourse that comes from the fact that there's always somebody who has a little more to say or a different tack. And we tolerate that kind of thing because we believe it broadens our scope. But it's not necessarily good for the profession or our credibility with the rest of the world. That's the part that I find more difficult. And while it may not be different in other fields, it's more unfortunate for us because we continue to claim therapeutic efficacy where the public is demanding more evidence. Especially if funding comes increasingly from the public sector, accountability is going to be more important. I believe we help many, as do my colleagues, and there is some evidence that we do. But we need more.
Gilmore: In terms of your own identity as an analyst, how important is the clinical work?
Shapiro: The clinical work is very important for me. I think because I do academic work it's been difficult for some of my office-bound analytic colleagues to consider me fully immersed in analysis. I have struggled with that immensely. When I finished analytic training I was very quickly welcomed into the community. I was a member of the board of trustees at my institute, I was secretary of the organization, etc., and I worked hard and long on a number of things. That soon quieted down when I wasn't appointed a training analyst on first or second pass. Whatever my skills were and whatever the judgments were, I think that was in no small part related to the fact that I spent what some people thought to be too much time doing things that were not analytic. Now, that's the privilege of the analytic community. But we have to bite the bullet and decide whether we want to keep our contacts with medical academia or we don't. The best way to do it is to have a “man in Havana” who belongs to us, rather than somebody who is going to make a loose liaison with us. Now, since then I have been made a training and supervising analyst and I'm teaching at the institute. But I remain aware that the distinction is a kind of false dichotomy that makes for distance and a feeling of not being included.
Here's where the issue of having a molding effect versus being a participant observer may have some relevance. What happens is that a journal editor gradually is understood by his audience to be interested in attracting certain types of papers. There is then an increased flow of such papers, which have a greater likelihood of being accepted. I made it explicit that we would be favorably disposed to papers that have an empirical approach. However, the fact is that no more than 5% of our total submissions fall into that category, because there are so few people working in that way. The other thing I've done is that I have deemphasized applied analytic papers. I thought, given the precious amount of space we have available, that an unoriginal fifteenth interpretation of Hamlet and its significance has no place in a journal like ours. On the other hand, a paper that brings a truly innovative approach to literary interpretation or art interpretation will be noticed. We've been very stringent in trying to establish standards for judging applied analytic work.
It might be mentioned that, while the Quarterly has always been dominated by a clinical focus, we at the Journal have a broad array of theoretical submissions as well as clinical papers and research. We also have the benefit of a somewhat captive audience, because all the members of The American are automatically subscribers. At this juncture, however, that accounts for less than half our total subscriptions. We have for a long time maintained a list of about seven thousand subscribers.
Gilmore: In terms of personal commitment, how much time does the job take up, and what sacrifices has it required?
Shapiro: People always ask that, and I understand the question, but it's almost impossible to answer. It's a function of how I handle my time and how I juggle various interests. The only analogy I can make is when I was twelve or thirteen and had homework to do, I'd have to figure whether I'd start with my math and then go to my English and then to my history, and whether I could listen to the radio at the same time. Fortunately we didn't have television. So the radio was always going, and then I'd say, well, I want something I can do fast and dirty now. So I'd do my math. Then I'd get tired of that and move on to something else. So the editor's job became an inter-digitated exercise, like everything else I do. When I'm going to read is all the time. The only thing fixed in my week is when I meet with my secretary to write my letters, and when I look over the readers' reviews. When I do the supplements and the Journal together, it probably averages out to about fifteen hours a week. Then there are other jobs the editor does, like renegotiating contracts with the publisher, dealing with the Executive Committee about the Journal, dealing with the associate editors in planning new supplements, book reviews, etc. I've had great help from Otto Kernberg, our book review editor, and from Bob Emde, who works with me on the supplements and on policy issues. Theirs is a labor of love because their responsibility is to the Journal and to me and to the subscribers. It's been terrific having them as participants.
Gilmore: Did something have to go? Did you give up some of your clinical time?
Shapiro: I probably gave up some. I began to use my Saturday mornings a little bit more for reading. But it merged into other things I was doing.
Gilmore: Was your interest in language a response to the idea that affective issues are paramount in severely disturbed children? It seemed as if it might have been a way to address the idea that the defect was purely in some interpersonal or affective sphere.
Shapiro: The interest in language came from three sources. One was a lifelong interest in philosophy. Second was the fact that in the mid-fifties the Chomskian revolution occurred, and, related to that, the language study group under Victor Rosen and Henry Edelheit began. I joined them and in Victor Rosen found a very important mentor. Third was that while I was in analytic training I was also a research associate in Barbara Fish's unit at Bellevue, doing work with autistic kids. I was really struggling to see what path I was going to take and why I always had to make it hard for myself by doing two things at once. Then I recognized that in the study of language and its
development I would have a nice unifying principle and wouldn't have to struggle any more with my “bisexuality.”
Gilmore: It does seem to be a more rigorous way of thinking about these severely disturbed children.
Shapiro: In many ways I brought that area of study to the work with these children. I also realized, in my reading of Freud, that his early interest in aphasia was highly significant in his attempts to understand symbol formation and the role of language in the psychoanalytic process. In his later years he ignored this completely. The structural theory doesn't have a theory of symbol formation, whereas the topographic theory does. I thought that perhaps the new knowledge of linguistics could serve as a wonderful bridge, a modern way of understanding language that could be integrated with contemporary psychoanalytic thought. People forget the fact that Freud was much influenced by the philologists of his time. “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,” the paper on aphasia, the paper on negation, were all very much based on Hughlings Jackson's kind of thinking, rooted in knowledge outside or alongside psychoanalysis.
Gilmore: In regard to your joke about bisexuality, how do you understand the duality of your early career? Doing research and psychopharmacology with severely disturbed children and simultaneously pursuing psychoanalytic training—how did you reconcile these divergent interests?
Shapiro: I think that's harder to understand now than it may have been when I was a psychiatric resident. You have to remember that having trained at Bellevue I was always involved in what is now called neuropsychology. It was a very strong trend, and at the same time most of us took analytic training. If you think about it in terms of the people who became analysts in the thirites, forties, and early fifties, many of them came through neurology, not through the state hospital system, where the psychiatrists were. So it wasn't so anomalous. The only thing that is anomalous is that I stayed on in the university and continued my allegiance to the analytic world. What happened to a lot of people who stayed on was that they stopped doing analysis. So in that sense I was one of only a few who carried both torches for any length of time. There are still a few like me being produced, but it's harder and harder. The other thing is that the modem world requires such a degree of specialization in the research area that it's ever more difficult to have that kind of dual career. It would be more possible if the analytic institutes were willing to make accommodations for people doing academic work. I belong to a committee originally chaired by Bob Wallerstein, then by Bob Michels, and now by Arnold Cooper: The American's Committee on University and Medical Education. Its task is to create the conditions that would allow people who would like to stay in academic work to take analytic training. If I had a job at a university and were pursuing training, I think the issue would come down to the need for a slower rate of progression. It would be hard to cultivate each field separately and continuously. When I went to analytic school, let's face it, so long as I could fit a day's labor in, go to classes three nights a week, and find some time to see my family, which would seem to be a central concern of anybody who has any interest in analysis and the rearing of children, then it was feasible to do both. The fact is in those days it was permissible for us at Bellevue to cut down on some of our academic time when we were at the height of our analytic training. So nothing had to give, really, except some of the academic stringency. That's impossible to do these days. Money is tight all over. So it's very hard to take people of my generation as role models. The increasing demands of research and the tight money situation are relatively new. Who is going to bear the cost of all this? Analysis is for the most part still not considered a fundable area to cover academic costs. However, there are grants available and there is certainly a lot of room for clinical research on psychodynamic psychotherapy and analysis, too. Few have picked up the ball on this one. One of the things I am somewhat chagrined about is that the victories that have been claimed by cognitive therapy and the interpersonal therapies are victories that in some ways properly belong to analytically oriented therapies, too. We've let it get away from us. Neither of those therapies disclaims any debt to analytic thinking. They just take an aspect of it and explore it, and we go unacclaimed.
On the other hand, the analytic world is perfectly correct in demanding a major time commitment, since there's a lot of work to be done at analytic institutes and there are only so many hours in the day. If you're doing work in an academic institution, it's hard to give that time. Something has to give. Further, the fact that analysts depend on their office work for income is another deterrent to their doing work that is not income producing. This mindset makes the analytic institute something of a night school. Everybody volunteers many hours to the education of candidates, while my work as an educator
is paid for by the university. In many ways we suffer from our dissociation from the universities. I hope we haven't lost the opportunity to become a part of that world in the next generation. Psychoanalysis is certainly alive in such nonmedical specialty areas as literature and history. It's too bad that interest in psychoanalysis is so dissociated from those who do clinical psychoanalysis. Often the hue and cry goes up among clinicians, “What do those guys know about Freud or psychoanalysis?” And there's some truth in it. There's also some truth in the statement that a xenophobia has grown up among analysts that is very dangerous. One of the things I had hoped to do with the Journal was to try to make those who read it understand that American psychoanalysis is open to a variety of ideas and to nonpsychoanalytic science.
Gilmore: But you're saying that the analytic community would benefit from being reintegrated into the medical school.
Shapiro: Either the medical or the university world, one or both. I am quite positive about some psychologists becoming analysts. But when you say reintegrated, it presupposes they were integrated before, and the fact is that unfortunately, because of Freud's problems with universities, analytic institutes have always been segregated except in a few instances, such as the University of North Carolina, Duke, and Columbia and Downstate New York. We've suffered terribly because we have identified ourselves as outsiders. The Pittsburgh experience is one that stands out: during the heyday of psychoanalytic influence in universities, many analysts were in ascendance, but when that had passed and the new biological era in psychiatry dawned, it was almost as if the Pharisees had been driven out of the temple. Had they been a vital and essential part of the university, it would have been harder to do that. They could have demanded the same respect as their peers.
Gilmore: Do you think that institutes with university or medical school affiliations at least have the potential to do so?
Shapiro: I don't know if they do, but they certainly should have the potential for it. Or at least they have more potential for maintaining their ties, so at a clinical educational level they are secure. I don't know if in ten years a place like Cornell, under a new chair, will have the same rich array of analytic supervisors that we have now. As least it's a threat that we won't. I think it's important for the analytic world, because as we increase the proportion of non-M.D.s and lose supervisors who are medical psychoanalysts, our candidates will not come from medical schools as before. I tell you frankly, I had no idea I was going to be a psychiatrist, let alone an analyst. But when I went to Bellevue, it was teachers like John Frosch who influenced me to pursue analytic training. Had they not been there, I wouldn't have known about the field. Now, who is going to cultivate the interest and curiosity of young psychiatrists unless there is a portion of our work that is conducted in departments of psychiatry? As far as I was concerned, the only ones who knew anything about the cases I saw as a resident were the analysts. And although we had chlorpromazine we didn't have the wide array of medications—or the iatrogenic pharmacological problems—that we have now.
Gilmore: So you would consider Frosch an important influence alongside Barbara Fish, but from a very different point of view?
Shapiro: Yes, though Barbara was trained as an analyst too, the William Alanson White Institute. It wasn't the same type of training I received, but it engendered a highly cultivated curiosity about what makes people tick. She used to commute to Washington for supervision with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. This whole business of being a neuropsychiatrist or a neuropsychologist, or being an analyst versus a biologist all seems hokey to me. Nobody ever thought about that. Now everybody is getting reintegrated because they were artificially polarized. One of the reasons to become a psychiatrist was that you then had both the biological and the psychological view. What's happening unfortunately in many residency programs is that the psychological view is going down the tubes, because they don't have any analysts. If you go to Iowa, they don't teach psychotherapy. The Residency Review Committee is trying to enforce a requirement that a certain amount of psychotherapy or dynamic psychotherapy be taught, but that is not the same thing as insisting that dynamic psychotherapy or dynamic principles be taught. So you have a lot of options in the curriculum that allow psychoanalytic thinking to be ignored. Before we had a brainless psychiatry; now we have a mindless psychiatry per Bob Michels.
Gilmore: Have you some concerns or thoughts about the future of psychoanalysis?
Shapiro: I have a perspectivist view. When I was a resident, I heard analysts lament that psychoanalysis was on the wane, and I thought, “That's crazy. It's in its heyday.” Now I'm somewhat older I think we may be on the wane in some ways. But I don't think that that's because the neurological perspective has really taken over. From my vantage point, we still have to take care of patients, and the best way to do this is to understand them and know what they're about. The psychoanalytic model is still the most comprehensive we have. We don't yet know how a thought is related to an action potential in a nerve, and in fact we may be speaking here of different domains. Nor, for that matter, is the care of the patient with pharmacological agents very clearly related to whether they are serotonin reuptake inhibitors or noradrenergic activators. Those are all models and theories in need of empirical verification. You give a drug and watch what happens to the patient. You have the side effects thrown in. So patient care is still very much related to a knowledge of psychology. And the hardest thing for residents to learn these days is how to integrate the knowledge from both areas while being the best doctors they can be. So I don't think psychoanalysis is finished or that it's in decline. It ought to be in the ascendancy in regard to its complementarity to other approaches, because it's still the best way to understand. What's happening, I think, from talking to candidates at the beginning of their careers, is that analytic cases are fewer and fewer, or if the patients are there, analysts can't get them to treatment because the economics are lousy. Either situation is a serious deterrent to people learning what psychoanalysis is about. On the other hand, I think they also ought to learn about the fact that one of the important applications of the psychoanalytic model is to dynamic psychotherapy. I see no objection to people being trained in psychoanalysis so that they can do dynamic psychotherapy. I think it would be a shame if we stopped doing that. But I agree that it's hard to learn how to do good dynamic psychotherapy unless you've done some analysis.
Gilmore: What do you see in your professional future? Do you see yourself moving further into analytic work?
Shapiro: I think the past is probably the best predictor of the future. I'll probably be evening things out pretty much at about the same balance. I've always maintained a fairly large practice even while doing other kinds of work. I think that to be a psychiatrist, if you're not seeing patients you don't have a fresh vision of what's going on.
Gilmore: And in terms of child psychiatry?
Shapiro: Since I have an area of high expertise, I do many consultations with children. But I don't do a lot of child treatment. I do treat some adolescents, but by and large my clinical work is the analytic treatment of adults.
Gilmore: And your research interest in child psychiatry? Will you have an opportunity to pursue that?
Shapiro: I continue to pursue it. Part of the problem in academia now is the demand to get grants. I'm sixty years old, so I may take the cop-out of the Eriksonian stage explanation and say I'm generative. I'm involved in some hands-on stuff and like to look at data. I don't love collecting it. Somebody else can do that if they like. Modeling, formulating research, trying to guide others so that they can have careers. That's a very important part of what I do.
Gilmore: Any final thoughts about the Journal?
Shapiro: I would hope that the next editor has a personal vision about what psychoanalysis ought to be. But one of the things the editor will have to remember is that this is the Journal of The American. Whatever personal mission the editor might wish to pursue, he or she will have to take into account what the profession and the organization is about and what it will be. I do hope that what I have started will be maintained and that the Journal will continue as an intellectual forum for the exchange of ideas, with successful peer review the prerequisite of publication. I hope the Journal retains that kind of openness. It should not be turned over to somebody with a parochial vision of what psychoanalysis is. If I have one regret, it is that though I opened up the letters section more, and we had a few letters and a few responses, it never really took off as a forum for debate. Perhaps the new editor will find a way to encourage these exchanges, which can be exceedingly valuable in airing and resolving differences, whether political or scientific.