Saul Bellow was a critically-acclaimed, best-selling author. Paul Meehl was an obscure psychology professor with a sideline in the philosophy of science.
That said, to the audience of this blog, Meehl may be more famous than Bellow. At least, we may spend more time thinking about Meehl’s critiques of science than of Bellow’s characters, and we might even spend more time reading Meehl (for example, here and here) than Bellow.
But here’s something you might not know: Meehl was Saul Bellow’s therapist! From Bellow biographer James Atlas:
Bellow saw four psychiatrists during his lifetime: Dr. Chester Raphael, a Reichian who practiced in Queens and who was the model for Dr. Sapir in his unfinished novel about Rosenfeld; Paul Meehl, a psychologist in Minneapolis he had consulted during the disintegration of his second marriage, when he was teaching at the University of Minnesota, Albert Ellis, the famous “sexologist” whom Bellow saw for what he once described as “pool room work,” or sexual technique; and Heinz Kohut.
The meetings with Meehl came when Bellow was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. Atlas continues:
I [Atlas] had interviewed the first three, all of whom were willing, no doubt out of vanity, to violate patient/doctor (or psychologist) confidentiality.
This made me sad. The great Paul Meehl, violating therapist-patient confidentiality!
Then again, Atlas also writes that Meehl was the model for Dr. Edwig in Bellow’s novel Herzog. I’ve never read that one, so I did a little bit of googling . . . it seems that Edwig is not a major character in the book, but I did come across one source that says that Edwig “is described as a dupe.”
So maybe Meehl, having felt betrayed by Bellow for how he was described in the novel, thought it was ok to betray Bellow in turn. Or maybe he had the opinion that Bellow, as a public figure, did not deserve the usual sort of patient confidentiality. Or maybe doctor-patient confidentiality wasn’t such a thing back in the 1950s. I don’t know. This short memoir by Meehl discusses his motivations for becoming a therapist, but Saul Bellow never comes up.
Anyway, I remain a fan of Meehl–I’m not saying we should “cancel” the guy–; it’s just an interesting episode, an unexpected historical encounter between two worlds.
We only have Atlas’s word that the psychologists violated confidentiality. We also don’t know exactly what he meant by that. Technically, simply acknowledging that Bellow was a patient would be a violation but how serious is that?
I’m not saying Meehl et al. didn’t behave badly, maybe they all shared their notes and dished all the juicy stories. But if you’re writing a biography you might have an incentive to exaggerate your access to this sort of material, so I don’t trust Atlas’s assertion any more that I would trust a denial by Meehl.
I would be more inclined believe a denial by Meehl than the positive assertion by Atlas. But Atlas is somewhat at a disadvantage there because I know little more than his name.
That said, Meehl is also human, so no doubt imperfect in all things. Does anyone really doubt that lawyers, therapists, and the like regularly violate confidentiality? You need to hang out more with people in these trades if you think that is the case. So, I agree when you intimate that the severity of the violation is probably more important than the act itself (since I wouldn’t trust any human not to violate confidentiality in some way at some time).
Doesn’t say they didn’t have written (or past verbal) permission from Bellows to share with a biographer.
That type of misleading omission is extremely common in academic literature (so I have a fine tuned ear/eye for it), but also in a biography? It would seem unnecessary.
Anyway, only person I’ve heard of here is Meehl, so I’m on his side. Some thoughts though: Did Bellows already know he was having a biographer when seeing Meehl? And when exactly was the Atlas visit?
Anon:
Bellow was biographied many decades after he was seeing Meehl.
Yes, I was thinking about writing something similar. I am also not sure what this confidentiality implies, could it be that Meehl merely confirmed he was a therapist for Bellow but, for instance, not disclose any further information or details.
Anyway, I am gonna listen to “Heard it through the grapevine” by Marvin Gaye. If I am not mistaken it includes the lyrics: “People say believe half of what you see, some and none of what you hear” which might be appropriate in this all.
Phil:
I don’t know of any “denial from Meehl.”
I don’t either and I’m sorry if I implied that I know of one. I’m just saying that, absent any corroborating evidence, I’m skeptical of the claim that Meehl dished on Bellow, but I would also be skeptical of the claim that he didn’t.
I actually met both Bellow and Meehl. Bellow at a bookstore reading well before he became Nobel Prize famous and Meehl more than several times, somewhere along a road paralleling the Mississippi River. I was on a bike and he was walking and wildly gesticulating to himself, oblivious to the world; I would dismount and we would walk together for a bit. Only decades later did I find out via this blog that Meehl was a famous believer in statistics, and much admired by Andrew and others. To me, he was just another UofM academic out for a walk in the fresh air.
Without knowing what Meehl said it’s a little hard to figure out whether he violated confidentiality or not. Anecdotes about Bellow unconnected to his actual therapy sessions wouldn’t seem to be a problem, though I know little about the actual psychotherapist code, and I suspect Atlas doesn’t know a lot more than I do. Personal impressions or anecdotes outside of therapy would seem to not violate any confidentiality requirements at all.
But secondly, Bellow cooperated extensively with Atlas: [From Publisher’s Weekly: In essence, Atlas notes with admiration, Bellow “gave me permission to write the book I needed to write and to quote from his own words… and he agreed not to interfere and not to read the book or demand to sign off on it.”] Atlas had all of Bellow’s letters which may have already discussed his therapy and served as an implicit imprimatur.
Jonathan:
Agreed on your first paragraph. I just got the impression from the quoted book that Atlas is a reliable narrator with values similar to mine, so if he said that Meehl was “willing, no doubt out of vanity, to violate patient/doctor (or psychologist) confidentiality,” I take Atlas at his word that whatever Meehl was willing to talk about was indeed something that I would consider such a violation. But, yeah, I don’t really have any idea. I’m mainly just interested in the Meehl-Bellow interaction, this juxtaposition of two intellectuals who are famous in different ways; also, it amuses me that this blog will have readers who know all about Meehl but are unfamiliar with Bellow.
Sorry to be tangential, but I think the characterization of Albert Ellis by Atlas as a “sexologist” is inappropriate. While he did work as a sexologist early in his career, Ellis is an important figure in the field of psychology, being one of the developers of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and an early proponent of the key role of cognition in psychology. While these were widely rejected in the 1950’s, when behaviorism and psychoanalysis dominated the field, they gained widespread acceptance starting in the 1960’s and are now the dominant paradigms in psychology research and clinical practice, respectively. In the 1980’s a survey of American and Canadian psychologists named him as the most influential living clinical psychologist, and he was at the time the most cited author in the field of clinical psychology.
Clyde:
From wikipedia: “Albert Ellis (September 27, 1913 – July 24, 2007) was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who founded rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and was certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). He also founded, and was the President of, the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and an early proponent and developer of cognitive-behavioral therapies.”
But also this: “By the 1960s, Ellis had come to be seen as one of the founders of the American sexual revolution. Especially in his earlier career, he was well known for his work as a sexologist and for his liberal humanistic, and in some camps controversial opinions on human sexuality. He also worked with noted zoologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and explored in a number of books and articles the topic of human sexuality and love. Sex and love relations were his professional interests even from the beginning of his career. . . . In 1958, Ellis published his classic work Sex Without Guilt which came to be known for its advocacy of a liberal attitude toward sex. . . . In 1958, Ellis published his classic work Sex Without Guilt which came to be known for its advocacy of a liberal attitude toward sex. . . . in 1976, Ellis clarified his earlier views in Sex and the Liberated Man . . . Near the end of his life, he finally updated and re-wrote Sex Without Guilt in 2001 and released as Sex Without Guilt in the Twenty-First Century. In this book, he expounded and enhanced his humanistic view on sexual ethics and morality and dedicated a chapter on homosexuality to giving homosexuals advice and suggestion on how to more greatly enjoy and enhance their sexual love lives.”
So it seems fair to describe Ellis as an eminent psychologist or as a sexologist. Either description seems fine to me, and it doesn’t seem misleading for Atlas to have focused on the sexologist part, which is presumably the aspect for which Ellis was most famous among the general public.
Paul Meehl, we as psychologists owe him so much! Reading this post I was much moved noting that my good friend Lee Sechrest(RIP) once hinted you to Meehl.
Given the replication crisis, does everybody know that psychology also owes Meehl the best replicated result of psychology, ever? See clinical versus statistical prediction.
I recently visited a conference where the main topic was how to better integrate KI into the health areas and I pointed to the dangers of halluzinations of these tools, due to their extensive use of correlations in the large language models. We also learned from Meehl that the model of an expert is most often better than the expert himself. But how do we know that the expert also suffered from halluzinations? Then the model of the expert will also suffer from halluzinations. So always check whether the elements in the expert model are evidence based or not. Unfortunately we can no longer ask Paul Meehl about this problem, but we can ask you Andrew? Guess that this a severe unattended problem in many expert based guidelines in all areas.
What is more interesting to me is the rapid descent of Saul Bellow into irrelevance. I’ve read all of his works at a much younger age but honestly cannot think of anyone of them, other than perhaps “The Adventures of Augie March,” that I would want to reread. His works do not transcend the era that he wrote in.