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DEC 3 1969

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 19140

 

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY

25 November 1969

Dr. Joshua Lederberg,
Department of Genetics,

Stanford University School of Medicine,
300 Pasteur Drive,
Palo Alto, California 94304,

Dear Dr. Lederbergep,
I enjoyed your commentary on science and man.

I enclose a reprint of the paper you asked for. As you
probably noticed it is somewhat of a potboiler. However, we
are involved in a number of studies on psychotherapy including
one comparing psychoanalytic therapy to behavior therapy and
both to wait-listed minimal treatment groups. As you point
out, however, we will probably be left with a certain amount of ;
the "arts" of psychotherapy. However, I am optimistic that'art
in that it relates to the therapist's style, may be analyzed
further. Certainly your conment "exploiting the expectations of
the doctor and patient as part of healing" is susceptible to
experimental ways of increasing or decreasing this expectation.

However, I think we are now moving away from the study of
how psychotherapy works more toward whether it does, in fact,
work and what it accomplishes. The 'how' approach always stood
the danger of spending a long time in discovering why the wrong
horse lost the race. In particular our group and others are look-
ing to better methods of the assessment of outcome. Certainly at
the moment the claim of objective statistical evidence for the
effectiveness of one therapy, whether it is behavioral versus
another, is quite invalid.

With regards.

Yours sincerely,

RBS/jp R. Bruce Sloane, M.D.

Enclosure