Psychoanalytic Prison

To the Editor: In his discussion of Franz Alexander in Images in Psychiatry, Judd Marmor, M.D. (1), wrote, “Alexander was a rare psychoanalytic pioneer who, despite a thorough grounding in classical Freudian theory, had the courage, vision, and flexibility to modify his thinking in the light of newer knowledge.” This presumably indicates how stifling the intellectual orthodoxy associated with psychoanalysis was, at least at the time that Alexander practiced, rather than constituting faint praise for him.