Causes and Effects of My Disturbing

Review and reflection indicate that no more than 5 % of what was written in the 1954 book entitled, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction (Meehl, 1954), needs to be retracted 30 years later. If anything, these retractions would result in the book’s being more actuarial than it was. Seven factors appear to account for the failure of mental health professionals to apply in practice the strong and clearly supported empirical generalizations demonstrating the superiority of actuarial over clinical prediction. In my early teens, I had intended to be a lawyer, but a copy of Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind (1930) fell into my hands. Because it was effective dramatic bibliotherapy for me, I decided overnight to change my vocational goal to psychotherapist. Having reread Mennin-ger’s book recently, I still think it is one of the best expositions of basic psychodynamics. Minnesota’s Psychology and Psychiatry Departments were strongly anti-Freudian, the psy-chologists being behavioristic in theoretical orientation and (except for Fred Skinner) highly statistical in method. The Neuropsychiatry Department stressed neurology, and although excellent in descriptive psychiatry, it was weak in psychodynamics and psychotherapy. My undergraduate minor was biometry (as was true of most Minnesota psychology majors i