Hans Eysenck; Psychologist Challenged Traditional Therapy

Hans Eysenck, a psychologist who questioned the scientific value of psychotherapy and published controversial books on intelligence, crime and smoking, has died at 81.

Eysenck, who had cancer, died Thursday at a hospice in London, his family said.

A persistent critic of conventional psychotherapy, Eysenck advocated “behavior therapy,” which aims to treat immediate problems rather than probing for buried causes, as the devotees of Sigmund Freud would.

Some accused Eysenck of treating symptoms rather than causes. His response: “The symptoms of neurosis are indeed the disease itself, so that to cure the symptoms is to cure the disease.”

In “Crime and Personality,” published in 1964, Eysenck suggested that criminals had failed to develop conditioned moral and social responses and could be cured by behavior therapy. His 1965 book, “Smoking, Health and Personality,” theorized that smoking did not cause lung cancer, but that both were symptoms of an underlying emotional disorder.

Even more controversial was his 1971 book, “Race, Intelligence and Education,” about data that found IQ scores persistently lower among American blacks than American whites. He endorsed the theory of American psychologist Arthur R. Jensen that intelligence is affected by race.

But Eysenck kept an open mind on intelligence. In his 1990 autobiography, he noted that Afrikaans-speaking whites in South Africa once scored lower than English-speaking whites on intelligence tests, but that the gap closed over time.

“Whatever the reason for this change, it suggests that differences between groups may not necessarily be genetically caused and may be susceptible to change,” he wrote.