Word: baileys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Next day an equal number packed the same hall to hear the University of Illinois' tart-tongued Neurologist Percival Bailey, a top brain surgeon, dissect the entire psychiatric revolution of the 20th century's first half. Revolutions, Bailey said, "bring change but not necessarily progress." Echoed Cincinnati's Dr. Howard Fabing: "The second half of our century finds us in a swing back to a more orthodox type of medical investigation...
...Bailey's attack was directed not just against Freudian theory, but against a wide range of psychiatric practices that owe little or nothing to Freud. Psychosurgery, said Bailey, has built a sorry monument of mutilated frontal lobes. "I am frankly appalled by the [aftereffects] of lobotomy and similar operations-abusive and obscene language, uninhibited sexual drive, obnoxious mannerisms, stealing, suggestibility . . . The great neuro-surgical revolution has proved abortive; it has not emptied our state hospitals." Later, "much the same panegyrics attended the spread of the shock gospel as had attended the spread of lobotomy and -in a previous generation...
Quietly Dropped. Neurologist Bailey used his sharpest scalpels on Sometime Neurologist Freud: "His ideas were often launched with great enthusiasm, like scare headlines in a newspaper, and then quietly dropped without retraction . . . Many of Freud's psychological writings are not scientific treatises, but rather, reveries-a sort of chirographic rumination...
Psychoanalysis, complained Bailey, is not a science-if it were, "psychoanalysts would ere this have merged into the academic community . . ." Bailey had a final cut for the process of analysis: "Deep psychotherapy is as dangerous as deep surgery. The technique of deep analysis seems to be to lead the patient along the very brink of the abyss, hoping that he will not fall in-something like Dulles' diplomacy." Finally, affirming his own faith that the problem of schizophrenia will be solved by the biochemist, he quoted Boston's late great neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Gushing: "The task...
...Trend to Drugs. There may have been as much heat as light on Surgeon Bailey's operating table, but the trend toward new directions was illustrated by several other speakers who had proposals to make rather than criticisms. Montreal's famed Stressor Hans Selye (TIME, Oct. 9, 1950) flew in to declare his faith that physiological change is related to emotional disturbance. Recent research shows that three classes of hormones can create such varied "psychic" disorders as pathological confusion or excitement, chronic fatigue (neurasthenia), deep depression, psychoses or neuroses during pregnancy, convulsive seizures, paralytic "spells," and even degenerative...