Success Quote by Hans Eysenck

A polite academic sentence, sharpened into a scalpel. Eysenck’s phrasing performs restraint while delivering a frontal challenge to psychotherapy’s postwar prestige. “In general” and “certain conclusions” are the white lab coat; “they fail to prove” is the cold verdict. The syntax doesn’t merely doubt Freudian therapy, it questions the entire therapeutic enterprise by lumping “Freudian or otherwise” into one evidentiary basket. That move is strategic: it blocks the easy retreat from attacking Freud to defending psychotherapy in the abstract.

The intent is less about settling a clinical question than about disciplining a field that, in mid-century Britain and the U.S., was growing culturally powerful on thin methodological ice. Eysenck is writing in a moment when “talking cures” carried the sheen of modernity, and when institutional psychoanalysis could feel like a priesthood. His subtext: if you want authority, you owe the public something sturdier than compelling case narratives and professional consensus.

The sentence is also a weapon in the emerging battle over what counts as scientific psychology. Eysenck’s behaviorist leanings and devotion to measurable outcomes are visible in what’s not said: no interest in meaning-making, no deference to clinical intuition, no patience for unfalsifiable theories. “Fail to prove” is a methodological demand dressed as understatement.

Even now, the line lands because it exposes an uncomfortable dynamic: therapy often wins cultural legitimacy faster than it wins decisive evidence. Eysenck’s provocation isn’t that psychotherapy never helps, but that belief should not outrun data. That’s a critique aimed as much at a profession’s confidence as at its results.