Dr. Kinsey's Misrememberers

More in sorrow than in anger, a prominent psychiatrist named Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie last week unraveled the Kinsey Report. Despite his professional courtesy and his careful occasional praise, Dr. Kubie's article, in the current Psychosomatic Medicine, was the most devastating scientific attack on the report yet.

Dr. Kubie stuck a scalpel into the heart of Zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey's whole project: the interviews. Kinsey and his coworkers, he said, give human memory a precision it does not have; "they recognize that we can 'forget,' but not that we can 'misremember.'" For instance, he said, the book seriously discusses sexual experiences recollected from early childhood without taking into account all the forces, like dreams, that can distort children's memories.

Accurate Inaccuracy. The statistics based on the interviews add up all right, said Dr. Kubie, but may be "accurate recording of inaccurate data."

Dr. Kinsey got off on the wrong foot, said Dr. Kubie, by making two wrong basic assumptions. "One is that the overt manifestations of sexual patterns are all that we need to know about human sexuality. The other ... is that where any behavior pattern is widespread ... it is superfluous to attempt to explain it ... The implication that because homosexuality is prevalent we must accept it as 'normal,' or as a happy and a healthy way of life, is wholly unwarranted."

Caricatured Psychiatrists. When he discusses Kinsey's attitude toward psychiatrists, Dr. Kubie loses his proper bedside manner entirely. It almost seems, he laments, that the Kinsey Report is trying to caricature the psychiatrist. He cites one statement: "There are some psychoanalysts who contend that they never had a patient who has not had incestuous relations." Snapped Kubie: "There has never been and never will be any psychoanalyst who has made such a statement . . . We expect such distortions from occasional biased and irresponsible ignoramuses, but not from responsible fellow scientists."

Editors of Psychosomatic Medicine asked Kinsey to reply. He declined.

In a speech last week to the American Psychopathological Association, in Manhattan, Dr. Kinsey stuck to his guns--arguing, even more emphatically than he has before, that man's sex habits aren't very different from those of other mammals. Most of man's sexual behavior that is now considered abnormal, he said, is "part & parcel of our inheritance as mammals and is natural and normal biologically." It is, he said, scientifically sound to look to mammalian background "as sources of human behavior." He was seconded by Yale Psychologist Frank Beach, who has studied sex habits from shrews* (mouselike mammals) to humans. Dr. Beach reported that homosexuality is common among some animals.

Columbia University Psychiatrist Abram Kardiner attacked what he called Kinsey's plea for tolerance toward perversion. Moral laws that separate men from the other animals are not "historical happenstance"; they grew, he said, out of necessity for control.

* Last week 104 elephant shrews (socalled because of their lithe proboscises") reached Washington, D.C., from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the first ever to be imported. They are considered ideal for malaria research. Half of them had malaria already, which will save the researchers the trouble of infecting them.

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