ABSTRACT
H.J. Eysenck is a prolific writer of immense scholarship who has a penchant for espousing some extremely dubious causes. Although there are about a thousand British academic psychologists, his publications alone account for an amazing one-tenth of all the citations they receive in learned journals. No doubt many of these arise from attempted rebuttals of Eysenck's unorthodox views on such subjects as the medical harmlessness of cigarette smoking, the dependence of one's vocation on one's astrological birth sign, and the reliability of statistical data and associated theories produced by the now notorious Sir Cyril Burt (whom Eysenck defended almost, but not quite, to the last). But many other citations must refer to his much more soundly based, if still iconoclastic, work on the practical and theoretical deficiencies of Freudian psychotherapy, and the virtues of ‘modern methods of treatment derived from learning theory’ (the sub-title of his influential book of readings Behaviour Therapy and the Neuroses, 1960).
