| ; meen PELL ESB foved For Releasd S06vi0ei"1 : CIA-RDP96-00782R000700660003-6 Reset With a Cause: THe AuTosiocraPrHy of Hans EYSENCK W.H. Allen & Co., London, 1990. 310 pp. Hans Jurgen Eysenck was born in Berlin on 4th March 1916, of parents who were both professional actors. In the first chapter of this autobiography, we learn that his parents soon separated, and the young Hans eventually found himself with a father who later embraced National-Socialism, a pretty, young step-mother who danced in cabaret, a Jewish ‘step-father’ who had retired from being a Professor of Aesthetics to become rich as a film director and author, and an attractive, cultivated mother who guided his introduction to literature and kindled his athleticism, yet without ever being able to relate to him asa child. He actually lived for most of his childhood, in circumstances of relative penury, in the devoted care of his maternal grandmother, a practising Catholic. Physically venturesome to the point of folly, it was only by good luck that he avoided entering adulthood with a shattered arm and one useless eye. Precociously rational and intellectual, sceptical, self-reliant, adventurously curious and distrustful of dogma, he avidly explored a confusion of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Socialist and Nazi values. The ‘psychologising’ that Eysenck explicitly forbids himself in the Introduction to this autobiography might plausibly identify in this first chapter the roots of the search for meaning and structure that was to direct so much of his later development. He had fallen in love with science even before he left school, and was looking forward to a career in physics. Eysenck calls himself undisciplined, wild, a bad penny and a sanctimonious prig at this stage of his development. For those schooled in the English art of understatement where self-reference is involved, this exercise in objective self-criticism may render more tolerable a narrative style which, even before the end of this first chapter, they might otherwise find uncomfortably self- congratulatory. Leading into Chapter 2, a wealth of often amusing detail somewhat conceals the heartbreak of voluntary exile, first in France and then in England, to escape from an intolerable Fascist milieu. As an extra turn of the screw, University College, London, found that his German qualifications did not entitle him to read for a physics degree, so he perforce entered ithe only vaguely ‘scientific’ course that would admit him—in psychology. By the end of the chapter he has acquired a First Class Honours degree and a wife. A son, a divorce, a second wife, and then more children, are introduced later. In the realm of ideas, it appears that the particular stance which has characterised all his work evolved quickly and early. Being a physicist manqué, it is hardly surprising that his approach to psychology should be ‘hard-nosed’, This predisposition was reinforced by the college where he obtained his degree. There, the powerful intellects of Pearson, Haldane and Burt were wrestling with forms of statistical analysis designed for studies in which no accurate control of variables could be achieved. Developing in such a climate, he evolved principles and assumptions which he thought should govern a scientific psychology. For readers of this journal, the most interesting of these is to be found in his assertion that psychologists should “plump for” that resolution of the mind/body problem which treats Approved For Release 2000/08/11 : CIA-RDP88-00709RUG07ONEeUOOSS | | Book Reviei both as aspects of a single continuum. ‘Plump’ seems exactly the rig] verb here, in the sense of an abrupt plunge rather than a cautious choic although he himself asserts that the reasons for rejecting Cartesian dualism a: “too obvious to require any supporting argument”, Later in this review, | considering the views on parapsychology which he developed much later, will be interesting to ask whether he considers that his plumping has remaine ghost-proof, Chapter 3 opens with Eysenck, most improbably, having afternoon tea wit Aubrey Lewis, who promptly offered him a job as a research psychologis Lewis, later knighted, was a psychologist mangué who had tumed to medicir as a second-best and then achieved pre-eminence asa psychiatrist, directir the work of the world-famous Maudsley Hospital. Of immense ability an influence, he planned to found a post-graduate Institute of Psychiatry withi the University of London, and he eventually found in Eysenck the design: and head of this Institute’s psychology department. But there was no hint « this at this first meeting. Eysenck accepted the job, at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital for Wi Neuroses, and found himself free to design his own programme of researcl Using an innovative combination of experimental and statistical methods, an with both the patients and the psychiatrists as his experimental subjects, h started stripping psychiatry down to its nuts and bolts. After years of work, his results challenged dogmatic beliefs in psychiatry psychology, education and politics. When he went on to investigate the relativ influence of biological and social factors in determining human characteristic: his conclusion that genetic factors were important aroused hostilities whic on at least one occasion led to physical assault. Chapter 3 tells of all this, sketches in some of the science involved an. charts progress up to the stage where he is about to be appointed Reade: although not yet as head of his own department, in the Institute whic Aubrey Lewis has just successfully established. He tells also of the progressiv breakdown of his first marriage and the beginning of the relationship tha succeeded it. In Chapter 4, he tells of his survey of the available evidence on the value o the psychotherapies, and in particular of psychoanalysis, as treatments for th: neuroses. He concluded that such therapies seemed to have little demonstrabl value, and Aubrey Lewis agreed. Eysenck then went on to claim that the onl function of psychiatry should be to make practical use of the fundamenta insights achieved by psychology, Clinical psychologists should be recognised quite independently of psychiatrists, as being qualified to design and us: treatment regimes properly grounded in psychological theory. He propose: one such regime himself, evolved from the work of Alexander Herzberg. Thi was the method of ‘behaviour therapy’, based on the view that neuroti disorders are concatenations of conditioned emotional responses, which can bi extinguished by applying techniques fully described in any standard textboo} on learning and conditioning. Working in a psychiatric institute, Eysenck’s study of this therapy, anc of the possibility that it could be administered by psychologists rather thar When he eventually made it public a 99
: CIA-RDP96-00792R000700660003-6 Approved For Release 2000/08/11 * journal of the Society for Psychical Research [ Vol. 58, No. 825 a meeting of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, all hell was let loose, since the idea that psychologists could treat, excepi under psychiatric supervision, was an anathema. And on this issue Aubrey Lewis was whole- heartedly with Eysenck’s opponents. In the power-struggle that followed, Eysenck’s survival was helped by the fact that, by that time, he had achieved the cherished status of Professor, with his own independent post-graduate Department of Psychology within the Institute’s- structure. And not only did he survive but, against all the probabilities, he won. The research on behaviour therapy, and the training of psychologists to develop and use it, became one of the Department’s main activities. In Chapter 5 he describes the part he played, and continues to play, in the controversy over the role of tobacco-smoking in the causation of cancer, cardio-vascular diseases and so on. His stance here reflects some very basic characteristics — his concern for the quality of data, and for the statistical adequacy of its analysis, his rejection of facile interpretations of complex evidence, his essentially combative (but certainly not aggressive) nature, and (to quote one of his closest colleagues and admirers) his mastery of “the strategies of fair and unfair debate”. In agreeing with, and extending, the criticisms of Doll, and others advanced by authorities such as the statistician R.A. Fisher, Eysenck has sometimes been represented as asserting that smoking is in no way implicated in the aetiology of cancer and cardio-vascular diseases. In this chapter he disowns any such view, but states that the quality of the evidence usually adduced is inadequate to establish the relationships beyond reasonable doubt. One might ask, of course, what level of doubt is too unreasonable to tolerate in matters of life or death. Nevertheless, his fascinating account of his own more recent studies in collaboration with Kissen and with Grossarth-Maticek, seems to show unequivocally that smoking has to be considered in interaction with personality and stress, if its effects are to be understood. In Chapter 6, Eysenck talks about his theory-building in the areas of intelligence and personality. These were the fields in which the writer of this review (himself a renegade physicist) had, for fifteen years, the privilege of collaboration. The friendship then engendered of gratitude and admiration must inevitably show through in this review, all attempts at objectivity notwithstanding! Chapter 7 is of particular interest to readers of this journal. Here we find him demonstrating qualities that only a few adventurous scientists exhibit in any generation —in his case, by insisting that well-attested data in the fields of astrology and the paranormal should not be dismissed without proper examination. He considers that his own contributions to the field of para- psychology have been modest — one substantial investigation which failed to find any evidence for precognition in rats, one theory (suggesting that extraverts should show more evidence of parapsychological phenomena than introverts), which has been well supported by subsequent experimental work, and one book (Eysenck & Sargent, 1982) reviewing the experimental evidence in the field. In the area of astrology, he concludes that, even when well- designed and properly-analysed experiments at first seem strongly suggestive 100 October 1991] Book R of astrological tradition, further investigation will usually lead to en plausible alternative explanations; and this conclusion is supported by he himself completed in collaboration with David Nias. However, a c: involvement with the French psychologist Michel Gauquelin and his Francoise led him to become involved with a major series of ipvestig: and analyses, and to the eventual conclusion that ‘‘the results geport: the Gauquelins ... suggest novel and hitherto unknown relatigns be: terrestrial life and effects upon it by the planets” (p.252). =4 The reader may feel that it would have been-safer to couch agnclusic terms of correlations between planetary positions and certain Brracte of some terrestrial life-forms, without implying anything about@ausalit alone its direction. But this is not the place for evaluation ofSconch reached about particulay hypotheses and controversies. What is@elevan review is that the account he gives of his studies in these fields we! illus: not only his open-mindedness, but also his rigorously critical appeqach. What would have been interesting would have been sompP>?atter unravel the web of motivations which must have operated toqersuac ‘““psychologist they most love to hate” to expose even more of hfp neck hatchets. We learn that the route to the paranormal! was via studi@@of hy; and a visit to Rhine’s laboratory, but students of suggestibigty ha. invariably, or even frequently, beaten a path to that particular or. Ey asks this same question about himself, about motivation, but chéXcteris: refuses to address it. s The other question not explicitly addressed is as to whethex ge feei some of the parapsychological data are going to compel what Kuhn ( has called a shift of paradigm. He does not yet seem sure thatsuch « is unavoidable, and indeed, in Explaining the Unexplained, Sne fir attempt to relate some ‘paranormal’ evidence to theories in quaggum p! However, in the same publication, the question of post-mortgp sun considered at some length, and the possibility not dismissed.GAre w« to conclude that Eysenck would be less confident in urging psgqholog reject Cartesian dualism, today, than he was at the outset of hisggareer he prepared to postulate a curious kind of mind/body continuun not d in terms of the mutual transformability of its two aspects? I@wouk been intriguing to be told. @® To consider now the book as a whole; the author warns in hi@M{ntrod that he will not be over-modest. He certainly has not been, althdggh th: is not lacking in objective self-criticism, or in verbatim reports ofthe crit of others. If you are brilliant of mind, large, fit and athletic o&pody, a self-confident and combative temperament, the number of @pport you have for presenting yourself as a rather average bumbler t bes limited, 5. But the style is certainly self-congratulatory, and this is not thgonly of irritation. For example, any attempt to evolve a straightforwa€@ chro: from the discursive narrative involves much to-ing and fro-ing, and in fails completely, as one finds, for example, in attempting to deduce tk of the all-important first meeting with Aubrey Lewis. One could also co: that, although the author says in his Introduction that he will “deal w 101