Books Reconsidered: Fears and Phobias: Isaac M. Marks

Abstract

A week may be a long time in politics, but how fares a book on an aspect of clinical psychiatry, published more than two decades ago? Isaac Marks wrote his book, Fears and Phobias, in 1969, at a time when a third intruder, behavioural psychotherapy, had intervened in the battle between physical treatment and psychodynamic psychotherapy as the two polarised options for correct care of the mentally ill and particularly for the neuroses. Eysenck had annoyed many by his study demonstrating that patients receiving dynamic psychotherapy did no better than those on the waiting list; psychoanalysis was an expensive way of passing the time until the condition resolved spontaneously. Clinical psychologists and a few psychiatrists began to take an interest in the work of Wolpe and looked back to the 1920s when William James and Mary Cover-Jones had demonstrated the induction and the treatment of fears in young children. No ethical committee would accept a research protocol on these lines today.