Thursday 23 August 2007

A Human Concern

“Nothing of human concern is really outside psychiatry.” [1] In this universal purblindness, much of human concern is lost from sight, falling outside the scope of a professional morbidity that sees every kind of behaviour as an ailment, every belief as a delusion, and every attitude as a sickness to be cured.
.....
[1] Karl Menninger, quoted by Jeffrey Oliver, “The Myth of Thomas Szasz”, The New Atlantis, 13, Summer 2006. (Presumably psychiatry itself — as a human concern — is also a mental disorder to be treated. Cf., Karl Kraus’s saying: “Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.”)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Curmudgeon:
stop reading dumb books, then! :)
I'm sure you've come accross one of the two geniuses in century past, i.e. Wittgenstein. why don't you cull some wisdom therefrom, Joyful bastard, like I have.
I maintain: you are well liked.

Anonymous said...

Psychoanalysis is maligned because it purports to access non-observable, introspective thought patterns. Since these thoughts are not always exhibited in behavior, they are assumed by 21st century minds to be non-existent. But, if they are real mental processes, how else could they be known unless they are somehow exhibited through a patient's speech? Did I cull that visdom from Vittgenschtein? Vas Vittgy vell liked?

Anonymous said...

yes, he was, pancakeking. by homosexuals, and me, that makes two categories distinct. 2+2=4 is plainly not a posteriori synthetic, simply, its contrary doesn't pose logical contradiction [though it is neither 'can't be known a posteriori', etc., either---see kripke]---and the other of the two geniuses, could say that might make it categorically necessary also, heterodoxly [i.e. so---AT THE time] Kripke!, i.e. Numbnuts.
Nay, popper famously said freud was unscientific, because you could always point to some repressed material---so he alleged---to avoid falsification.
Thsi allegation is false. And much in freud still holds. Anyone who doesn't treat freud like darwinism is stupid: i.e., they are DESCRIPTIONS, not EXPLANATIONS. Ann Coulter is correct, if the latter: then they WOULD be tautologous. duh!
-thehollandluminary.com

Anonymous said...

sorry, "doesn't not pose"...etc..

Anonymous said...

What did Ann Coulter say?

Anonymous said...

she said what popper said, if I recall: namely, if darwinism [btw, 'survival of the fittest' is not a fraud, as pop oipinion says---i.e., supposedly he 'didn't say that'---read his fucking books, he "said" that] is an explanation, it is tautologous. obviously. it's not one, though, it's a description.
Incidentally, "evolution" as an explanation for the origins of species is as otiose as big bang, Aquinas' claptrap, or aything else fraudulently posing as valid. "BEst Explanation" is not a valid sci-hypoth. criterion.
but of course, everyoneknows this, I'm not very special.
-hollandluminary