Success Quote by Hans Eysenck

Eysenck’s prose is doing double duty: it sounds like neutral bookkeeping, but it quietly rigs the argument in favor of his broader skepticism about psychotherapy. The key move is in the bland phrase “appears to be reasonable,” which smuggles a value judgment into what’s framed as mere “tabulation.” By collapsing dropouts into the “not improved” category, he turns an ambiguous outcome into a clean verdict. The rhetoric isn’t flashy; it’s bureaucratic. That’s the point. If you can make a contested clinical reality look like an obvious accounting choice, you win without ever sounding combative.

The subtext is methodological policing. Psychoanalysis, in mid-century clinical culture, often relied on long, expensive treatment and case-based persuasion. Eysenck, a prominent critic, wanted harder evidence and clearer benchmarks. Defining “failure” this way pressures the therapy to meet standards closer to medicine: finish the course, show measurable improvement, or the treatment doesn’t count. It’s also a subtle rebuke to a system that can interpret almost any outcome as progress (resistance, transference, etc.). Dropout becomes not a complex signal about fit, cost, stigma, or therapist competence, but a damning endpoint.

Context matters: psychotherapy research has long wrestled with attrition and how to analyze it. Eysenck’s choice resembles what later gets formalized as an “intent-to-treat” instinct, but with a sharper edge: it treats non-completion not as missing data but as clinical indictment. The line reads like a footnote; it functions like a cudgel.