Norman Garmezy, the Minnesota professor of psychology who last Fall resigned his appointment as head of Harvard's clinical psychology program, yesterday attacked the "immaturity" of university departments which neglect clinical studies.

"How can you understand a field as complex as psychology without observing patients?" he asked in a speech at M.I.T.'s Kresge Auditorium.

After the speech, he told a reporter that he included Harvard's Soc Rel department in his condemnation. The department, he said, wants to maintain a "noble purity" in its research and doesn't seem to realize the importance of clinical work.

But he added, "if Harvard drops its clinical program, it will be a loss to the country."

Garmezy said in a letter to the CRIMSON last month that he decided not to come here because "the department was not committed to the development of a program that would bear Harvard's stamp of excellence."

In his speech Garmezy did recommend that departments which are not fully committed to clinical psychology should leave the field -- which is what Harvard's Soc Rel department plans eventually to do. A committee chaired by Theodore R. Sizer, dean of the School of Education, is studying how to continue the clinical psychology program under the auspices of several faculties instead of one department.

Garmezy also admitted that the prestige of clinical psychology is decreasing nationally. This is partly the result, he said, of the rising numbers of students inerested in the field who are of decreasing quality. The average I.Q. of the Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Minnesota has dropped from 160 to 130, he pointed out.

"We are attacked from within by those who would neglect clinical studies; we are attacked from without by psychiatrists who look down on us and we are attacked by our offspring, the psychologists who go into private practice," he said.