The reciprocal betrayals of Saul Bellow and Paul Meehl

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.