REBEL WITH A CAUSE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HANS EYSENCK

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Jo .real of the Society for Psychical Apprroved For Releasd1Ob168 1
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 `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 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 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 thisjournal,
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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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 with]
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 WZ
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 psychiatr}
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 Reader
although not yet as head of his own department, in the Institute whit;
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 b(
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, ant
of the possibility that it could be administered by psychologists rather that
: CIA-RDP? cu `42R O Obd6i tf~r-36- When he eventually made it public a
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