How free is free will?

Deborah Skinner Buzan's article in the Guardian, meanwhile, reads as if she has never even picked up Slater's book. Slater, Buzan says, bought into every rumor floating around about B.F. Skinner -- that he was a fascist and perhaps a Nazi, that he was cold and uncaring, and that he raised Deborah "in a cramped square cage that was equipped with bells and food trays, and arranged for experiments that delivered rewards and punishments." Buzan concludes: "The plain reality is that Lauren Slater never bothered to check the truth of [the rumors] (although she claims to have tried to track me down). Instead, she chose to do me and my family a disservice and, at the same time, to debase the intellectual history of psychology."

But that is not at all the sense one comes away with from Slater's chapter on B.F. Skinner. Slater's point, in fact, is to restore Skinner's good name, which, as Buzan points out, has fallen into disrepair in the decades since Skinner made his psychological breakthroughs. And Slater does manage a kind of restoration of Skinner. Much of what we think we know about Skinner is nonsense, she discovers. Skinner was a humanist at heart; he made no peace with the Nazis and, in his book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," instead called for ridding society of negative stimuli -- "wars, crimes, and other dangerous things."

Slater does write of an heroic effort to track down Deborah Skinner, and though she does not manage to do it (a shortcoming about which we can gripe, but not really condemn), Slater does put to rest the idea that Deborah died in a suicide. Slater even quotes Deborah's sister Julie as saying, "My sister is alive and well," and "She's an artist. She lives in England." And what about the myth that Deborah was raised in a box? Slater quashes that, too. Slater's description of the box is pretty much in line with Buzan's description in the Guardian -- Slater writes that it was actually an "an upgraded playpen" whose "thermostatically controlled environment" prevented diaper rash and other kiddie ailments, reduced the chance of suffocation by blanket, and allowed the daughter to walk around without any impediments, building a baby of impressive self-confidence.

But some of Slater's other problems are not so amenable to an easy defense. Many of these occur in the chapter she devotes to David Rosenhan's experiment on the diagnosability of psychiatric disorders. In 1972, Rosenhan, a psychologist, wanted to see whether psychiatrists were, as they claimed to be, objective investigators of mental disorder, or whether they were closer to subjective guessers. He and eight friends attempted to fake their way into different psychiatric wards around the country by claiming to hear a voice that said one odd word -- "thud." They were stunningly successful; all were admitted to the hospitals, and they remained committed for an average of 19 days, with one member of the group kept inside for 52 days, even though they all behaved completely normally on the inside.

Rosenhan's experiment rocked the world of psychiatry, deeply shaking the belief, cherished among many in the profession, that psychiatry is well grounded in science. The study attracted a great deal of criticism, but none more passionate, Slater writes, than that of Columbia's Robert Spitzer, who wrote two papers "devoted to dismantling Rosenhan's findings." Spitzer is portrayed in the book as a man who is more than a little pleased with himself, and who felt personally affronted by Rosenhan's attacks on psychiatry. When Slater calls him for a comment on Rosenhan's work, he asks her: "Did you read my responses to Rosenhan? They're pretty brilliant, aren't they?" In another section, Spitzer asks Slater how Rosenhan is doing. Slater tells him that Rosenhan is suffering from a disease that can't be diagnosed, and that he's paralyzed. "That's what you get," Spitzer tells Slater, "for conducting such an inquiry."

"I never said this," Spitzer wrote in his letter to Norton. "I would certainly not have gloated over Rosenhan's illness." Spitzer also says that he did not tell Slater -- as she quotes him as doing -- that Rosenhan's experiment would never work today. "It would not make sense for me to have made a blanket prediction (twice!) that it could never happen now," he wrote.

Of course, Spitzer has a reason to backpedal. Not only does he come off as callous, his predictions (if in fact he made them) are also wrong. Slater does reproduce Rosenhan's experiments, and manages to show that even today psychiatrists are something of a guessing crowd. Go to them with a voice that says "thud" and they'll write you a prescription for antipsychotic medication. Spitzer is absolutely shocked when Slater informs him of her results. "You're kidding me," he tells her. So isn't it conceivable that, now, he wants to step away from those predictions he made, just as a way to save face?

It is conceivable. The trouble is, there's not much more reason to believe Slater in this story. In her letter to Spitzer and in press reports, she has said that while she did not use a tape recorder in her conversation with Spitzer, she did take careful written notes. But how careful is Slater? The book, as various reviewers have remarked, has a good number of careless errors of fact, misspelled names and misused terms. Reviewing it in the New York Times Book Review, the Princeton bioethicist and animal rights pioneer Peter Singer pointed out that the animal rights activist Roger Fouts lives in Washington, not Oregon, as Slater wrote; that his chimpanzee's name is Washoe, not Washou; and that the activist Alex Pacheco's last name is not spelled Pachechio. Singer also notes Slater's curious assertion that "the last time the Catholic Church considered naming someone a saint was in 1983" -- Pope John Paul II has actually named more than 400 saints since then.

Next Page: What Slater has to say is worth hearing -- too bad her own sloppiness has made that difficult

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