For Releas^ 2tl6b/08Hl
:
Rebel With a Cause
: The Autobiography 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 as a 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
‘psychologizing’
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
png
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 Z, 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
F ascist
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 the 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 manque,
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 m 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
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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 remain!
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 manque who had turned to medicir
as
a second-best and then achieved pre-eminence as a 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 desigm
and head of this Institute’s psychology department. But there was no hint
i
this at this first meeting.
Eysenck
accepted
the job,
at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital for W;
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 Readei
although not
yet
as head of
his own department,
in
the
Institute whici
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 demonstrable
value, and Aubrey Lewis agreed. Eysenck then went on to claim that the onh
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 textbool
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 thai
-Rd
When he eventually made
it public
a
oo
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