Thomas Scheff: Emotions and Politics

[dmokhtar]

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[whiff1962]

There remains the persistent ambiguity over the term "anti-psychiatry". At one point a member of the audience, no less a professional psychologist, makes the category mistake of lumping the psychiatric abolitionist Thomas Szasz, with such hucksters as Laing, and Cooper. Such an error, of assuming the latter figures as psychiatric "reformers", and kindred spirits of the Libertarian-Humanist Dr. Szasz, has been a source of considerable confusion over any meaningful critique of the MH profession.

[CocteauDalighari]

@whiff1962 The ambiguity remains because "anti-psychiatry" was never defined. Even Cooper's Psychiatry & Anti-Psychiatry never made clear whether anti-psychiatry was opposition to psychiatry or whether conventional psychiatry was anti-psychiatric, i.e., anti-soul healing, which is what psychiatry means: soul healing.

[whiff1962]

@CocteauDalighari First off, thanks for your thoughtful response. You make an interesting point and, I suppose, the various camps have seen fit to marshal to their respective sides. "He who holds the power of the discourse.", might seem a bit too Foucaultian, however, I think in the political sense, medicine (psychiatry) and state are fair game for the frustrated, lefty types: the pseudoliberals, like Laing, who said one thing and did another. These very renegade "reformers" were real Statists!

[CocteauDalighari]

@whiff1962 Actually, Laing receded from public political views after the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation conf. in London: sure, he was a "leftist," but his politics were very traditional. He wrote in his liner notes to The Facts of Life (a lame book; his literary output deteriorated after that) that he despised people that condemned scientific research while they took full advanatge of its results. He didn't see himself as a reformer as much as someone whose experience didn't match the theories.

[whiff1962]

I didn't mean to imply that Laing saw himself the renegade; the media were only too happy to oblige him that epithet. Are you asserting that R.D. Laing, a mediocre medical student and doctor, held such high esteem of the scientific method in his work? I might suggest you read Thomas Szasz's "Anti-psychiatry:quackery squared". Laing was a tragic clown, even within a profession of clowns. His was the Marxist, anti-western animus of the family and "society". But he knew who would foot the bill!

[CocteauDalighari]

@whiff1962 Laing was referring scientific research in general; not his own, for he knew that psychiatry was a branch of medicine only by virtue of a powerful lobby & some desperate early 20th-cent. psychiatrists. I know Laing's called a marxist, but he was political only in the sense that politics is the domain of the polis. But his former colleague Cooper was an 18-K marxist, & no one even remembers him.

[whiff1962]

@CocteauDalighari You seem to be missing an important ingredient throughout this historical account of psychiatry: that psychiatry and state are inextricably bound and mutually serve the other, as in that of extralegal punishment. What Laing might have set out to dismantle within institutional psychiatry, and reshape in his own image, he only managed to reassert, through his own conceit and hypocricy. I do, however, very much respect your input and insight.

[whiff1962]

@whiff1962 and I do mean "reshape into his own image", not to overlook a messianic complex he seems to have engendered in so many lefty do-gooders.

[CocteauDalighari]

@whiff1962 >>> psychiatry and state are inextricably bound and mutually serve the other,<<< This sorta thing is fairly recent, & it took, e.g., a good deal of arm twisting by medical & pharma lobbies to convince an otherwise inert FDA that it would act in the best interests of the populace to promote their clients' products. Otherwise, the "psychiatrization" of America really got going during WWII, when armed forces psychiatrists were allowed to weed out unfit conscripts, kinda willy-nilly.

[whiff1962]

@CocteauDalighari I beg to differ slightly on this "arm twisting" take. I think that there was certainly that, however, there is a great deal of complicity, at present, between the state and psychiatry, as it was with church and state of medieval Europe. Mutatis mutandis. Still, it seems to me that any meaningful critique of the coercive aspects of psychiatry are little discussed. All the real reformers of the 1960s are aging and dying off, and biopsychiatry is here to stay for the time being.

[CocteauDalighari]

@whiff1962 Once again, tho, this complicity did not happen overnight, & it took more than psychiatrists to establish it. I think the crux of the matter lies in what Dr. Szasz wrote in his Myth of Mental Illness: that physicians' focus on criteria for "illness" "moved" from bodily disordered structure or function to disability & suffering. Where there was no definitive pathology, observable suffering became the symptom of "something" within an individual.

[whiff1962]

@CocteauDalighari I am in accord with your take, on this, the alligning of state and medicine (psychiatry). However-and not to contradict the mainstay of your argument-modern psychiatry and state has been one marked by the steady accretion of power, certainly as reflected in the passing of mental hygiene laws, to the detriment of Constitutional guarantees of civil liberties. I think that the MH profession's insistence that mental illness is physical, is an expedient and rationalizing notion.

[CocteauDalighari]

@whiff1962 I may be wrong about the "overnight" thing. Whitaker wrote in his Mad in America that (I believe) JAMA sometime in the early 50s went "overnight" from carrying no drug ads to carrying almost exclusively drug ads. The APA's first DSM, c. 1953, was basically a reworking of categories drummed up by Army psychiatrists. Medical folks lobbied "the state"; "the state" in turn lobbied the medical (& drug) folks. I think they call it symbiosis. Sweet!

[whiff1962]

I must say, I have yet to come across someone as erudite and well-read as yourself on YT. I am duly impressed by the depth and scope of your understanding. Yeah, Robert Whitaker, Peter Breggin, et. al., are, in my estimation, the newly emergent "new-left". There are some noted differences between the "old" new left of Laing, Cooper, et.al., and of the former. However, both "camps" are in accord-generally at least-that mental illness is real and medical. However, both are apologetic, no less.

[whiff1962]

@CocteauDalighari I'd call that the Therapeutic state. I strongly suggest you read the book of the same title, by Thomas Szasz.

[CocteauDalighari]

@whiff1962 My experience with the therapeutic state was being labeled (diagnosed, I guess) with a lengthy title after a few minutes of innocuous questions & answers. There just wasn't something right about that. Another doctor might question the diagnosis, but nobody questioned the absurd manner by which a diagnosis was made & nobody questioned whether it was "medicine." Huxley was wrong: it's a cowardly new world.

[whiff1962]

@CocteauDalighari This "something" is the mind, a verbal, but no less strategic to the psych enterprise as "something" corporeal, as in mental illness, a disordering of thought (mind). The poverty of the science and the degree to which scientism informs the mainstay of the psych profession, my precepts concerning the myth of mental illness can be none other.

[haakavish]

This is a wonderful presentation that covers the mysterious world of shame and violence .Personal and emotional stories from the presenter's own life history make this presentation highly interesting moving and original. Highly recommended.I give it an A+

[whiff1962]

@haakavish What is so "mysterious" about shame and violence, unless of course, your assertion rests on the mystificatifations engendered by the reductiveness of biopsychiatry? I think that psychiatry is not a rational enterprise, no matter the pseudoscientific and quasi-medical blandishments. The "mechanisms

[khelben1979]

I found this video interesting.