Wave of the future

o blatantly commercial enterprise?

o the "cure" for victims of traumatic memories of questionable authenticity?

o a quick psychiatric fix tailor-made for a generation unwilling to do the hard everyday work necessary for mental health in a complex world--the behavioral equivalent of Prozac?

o a substantially untested treatment?

o a promising treatment for such stubborn anxiety disorders as posttraumatic stress (PTSD), especially among Vietnam veterans?

EMDR, it turns out, is all of the above.

And this is the story that ate my spring vacation. I had been hearing about EMDR for over a year, but after listening to EMDR's creator, Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., talk at a meeting in March, and learning that there would be presentations on EMDR at the upcoming meeting of the American Psychological Association, I decided a news article was now in order. A few phone calls, some journal articles, that would be it. But nothing proves to be simple about EMDR except the hand waving.

Don't get me wrong, I'm used to information that's confusing, complex, even contradictory. But every time I try to nail down something about EMDR, nothing is quite what it seems, even the hand waving. Shapiro, for her part, diligently leads me to many people who have worked with EMDR. But there is no closure to any line of inquiry. For every claim of a positive result-and she overlooks anything otherwise--there is at least as much that is conflicting or negative. I ask every psychologist I talk to about EMDR. Many tell me they tried it but nothing changed. And results pointed out as negative don't always look too bad. It's clear: this is only proximately a story about a therapeutic procedure.

Born of improbability, the technique supposedly first presented itself to Francine Shapiro, an English teacher from New York who moved to California in search of new modes of healing after a bout with cancel One day in 1987, while walking in the park, she noticed that some disturbing thoughts, which had descended out of the blue, vanished as her eyes spontaneously darted from side to side. When they did come back, they "didn't have the same charge." They were like a faded newspaper story. She then forced other distressing thoughts to mind, applied the eye movements, and noticed that she no longer was troubled again.

She rounded up some friends to test the eye movements on, but soon found that "most people aren't capable of performing the eye movements on their own." So she began the hand waving.

Then she tested it on 22 persons with histories of trauma, and persons with "traumatic memories." The only criteria of distress, and of improvement, were their subjective ratings of disturbance.

Not long after, armed with patient videotapes and testimonials, she began taking her show on the road, giving workshops at meetings of professionals of various credentials. She has outraged many by her insistence that workshop participants sign a waiver that they will not apply the simple technique unless they enroll in one of her expensive training courses--and they will not teach the procedure to anyone else. This is not the usual way--free and open--science chooses to propagate itself.

For that reason among others, EMDR is not just a garden-variety fad coursing through the often-idiosyncratic world of psychotherapy. EMDR exposes a large and expanding rift separating the science of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy, an emerging class struggle between the re-search-literate and the practically trained. EMDR is a highly charged technique that splits the nation's increasingly troubled psychotherapeutic enterprise cleanly in two.

On the one side are the largely (but not exclusively) M.D. psychiatrists and Ph.D. psychologists, some of them researchers, all of them trained in methods of critical analysis. They tend to reserve judgment about new treatments until they can see proof of efficacy in controlled studies. Many no longer call themselves psychologists but neuroscientists, neuropsychologists. They see psychology reinventing itself in the laboratory. So they often go out of their way to distance themselves from those in the field, who practice what they believe above all to be nonscientific... "boobe-mysehs," says one M.D., in the Yiddish for old wives' tales.