Mum's the Word

Psychiatrists who seize upon each slip of the tongue or pen and find unconscious Freudian motives for it can go too far, protests Psychiatrist Eugene J. Alexander. In the Henry Ford Hospital's Medical Bulletin he writes:

"Such neat analyses make us very proud of ourselves as psychiatrists, but also very close to being dealers in idle speculation instead of physicians. No, the mental process is simpler than that ... I read all the signs along the road; my wife sees all the flowers. Why am I so blind as to think a petunia and a nasturtium look alike, and she so blind that she reads 'I am not rich' as 'I am now rich?' . . . When I call a chrysanthemum a gardenia, just call it ignorance, and not evidence of a repressed destructive wish toward mums, mummy, mammy, mommy and mother."

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