Thomas Scheff: Emotions and Politics

Thomas Scheff, Emeritus professor of Sociology at UCSB, an expert on the sociology of emotions, discusses his research on male emotions and violence, as well as his thoughts on the role of shame and alienation in destructive conflict. Series: Voices [11/2005] [Humanities] [Show ID: 11251]

Category:

Education

Tags:

• emotions
• violence
• sociology
• UC
• Santa
• Barbara

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

[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 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.

[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]

@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 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 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 >>> 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]

@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.