To the Editor:
—I have just read Dr. Southard's article in The Journal, October 25. I like to read and hear psychiatrists and neuropsychiatrists. It reveals stupidity, leads to investigation, and results in humiliation, and then there is hope for regeneration.But why all this esotericism? Here in this astonishingly "informative" report made, it was discovered, by one of the doctor's own former psychopathic hospital interns, is the phrase, "ideas of a somatopsychic character." I went to my medical dictionary, a good one of recent issue, to find the word "somatopsychic," but it was not there. I consulted the Century and Webster, the very latest editions, with the same disappointment. Now I should like to know just what kind of idea it is that has a "somatopsychic character." Do these people have a little esoteric dictionary that they keep chained to the desk in the inner recesses of some sanctum