We have great admiration for the work of Alfred Katz and Lowell Levin in the analysis and promotion of self-help and mutual aid in the United States. We also respect the usefulness of the dialectic method, as they have employed it in their “reply to critics”(“Self-care is Not a Solipsistic Trap”) in a recent issue of this Journal (1). But our admiration for their work and for this method does not permit us to excuse or ignore what we view as their selective, out-of-context, and therefore misleading citation of our work. On the contrary, we believe that the dialectic method requires accurate citation of the views of others and, where relevant, explanation of the context in which the views are presented. Katz and Levin have, we submit, violated these fundamental principles.

Their reply, Katz and Levin state, is “an answer to criticism of the self-care, selfhelp movement in health recently advanced by Robert Crawford and other writers.” We are the only writers other than Crawford specifically cited and “answered” in the course of the article. We cannot speak for Crawford, whose views (2) we believe are also misrepresented in the reply. We must, however, speak for ourselves. The entire specific “answer” to “other writers” in the Katz and Levin article reads as follows (1, p. 334):