Part 1:
Seminal figures of the Twentieth Century
The whole tendency of the
so-called treatment of so-called mental disorder, whether medical (psychiatric)
or psychological (psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic or
'cognitive-behavioural'), has been to cast emotional distress as an individual,
personal problem.
However, there have throughout been prominent dissenters. Most regarded with
suspicion by the orthodoxy of their day, all have remained more or less
marginal ever since.
| Alfred Adler (1870-1937) First of Freud's followers to break away from psychoanalysis and set up his own 'brand name' (Individual Psychology). Adler was quick to see the centrality of social power and the importance to the individual of getting as much as possible. | ||
Best known books
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| Understanding Human Nature The Science of Living The Education of Children What Life Should Mean to You The Neurotic Constitution |
The Practice and Theory of
Individual Psychology Problems of Neurosis The Pattern of Life Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind |
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Useful links
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| http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hstein/homepage.htm | ||
Karen Horney (1870-1937) American psychoanalyst who departed a long way from the orthodoxy of her training in her native Germany and wrote brilliantly on the effects of social organization on the individual's 'neurotic' difficulties. |
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Best known books
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| The Neurotic Personality of Our
Time New Ways in Psychoanalysis Self-Analysis |
Our Inner Conflicts Neurosis and Human Growth |
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Useful links
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| http://www.1w.net/karen/ | ||
| Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) Psychoanalytically trained American psychiatrist, influential in his day but rarely referred to in the mainstream now. Located the phenomena of 'mental illness' (including 'psychotic' disorders) in the person's social context: personality and 'symptoms' stem from the individual's experience of growing up in a social world. Brilliantly insightful and still well worth reading. | ||
Best known books
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| The Interpersonal Theory
of Psychiatry |
Clinical Studies in Psychiatry | |
| Erich Fromm (1900-1980) Another German emigré who departed a long way from his orthodox psychoanalytic roots. Heavily influenced by Marx's thought, he elaborated the ways in which individual personality and symptomatology are shaped by socio-economic conditions. | ||
Best known books
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| The Fear of Freedom Man for Himself The Sane Society The Art of Loving |
Beyond the Chains of
Illusion The Heart of Man To Have or to Be The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness |
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Useful links
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| http://homepages.uni-tuebingen.de/gerd.meyer/main.html | ||
| Thomas Szasz (1920- ) Libertarian American psychiatrist and most radical critic of the notion of 'mental illness', considered as the principal founder of 'anti-psychiatry'. Implacable and trenchant critic of all the nonsense resorted to by psychiatrists in trying to present their discipline as about anything other than social control. | ||
Best known books
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| The Myth of Mental Illness Law, Liberty and Psychiatry The Ethics of Psychoanalysis The Manufacture of Madness Ideology and Insanity |
The Second Sin The Myth of Psychotherapy Sex: Facts, Frauds and Follies Cruel Compassion |
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Useful links
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| http://www.szasz.com/ http://members.xoom.com/psych_books/szasz.htm http://rdz.stjohns.edu/~davede/szasz/intro.html |
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| R.D. Laing (1927-1989) Only British psychiatrist of any real intellectual stature, heavily influenced by Sartrian existentialism. Frequently dismissed by the psychiatric establishment as a 1960s hippy and drunk, Laing was an original 'anti-psychiatrist' who wrote profoundly and sometimes poetically of the influence on the individual of his or her, often tormented, social experience. Often and wrongly accused of 'blaming' parents for their children's 'schizophrenia', he did much to explicate the role of family life in the generation of madness. | ||
Best known books
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| The Divided Self The Self and Others Sanity, Madness, and the Family (with Aaron Esterson) The Politics of Experience |
The Politics ofthe Family
(essays) The Facts of Life The Voice of Experience Wisdom, Madness, and Folly (Autobiography) |
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Useful links
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| http://www.decaelo.com/rdlaing | ||
Part 2: Current
critiques
This section could go on for ever.
In making what is a very personal selection, my principal criterion has been
accessibility. Though not all the writings I indicate are easy, they are at
least not, like so many in this area, so enmired in academic convention that
they amount to little more than obscure squabbles between people needing to
gain a secure perch in the university industry. In other words, these are
people who care about what they're saying and deserve to have their voices
heard in a wider world than the merely academic.
| Psychiatry in a Nutshell |
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| Read Rich Winkel's definitive attack on psychiatry |
Peter Breggin is about the most fearless of the newer generation of critics of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry which supports it. See his website.
Lucy Johnstone's
classic book Users and
Abusers of Psychiatry (Routledge, 1989), one of the best and most
readable critiques of orthodox psychiatry, has recently (2000) been published
in a new edition.
Dorothy Rowe's widely
read books maintain a a constant, scathing exposure of the inadequacy of
psychiatry to deal with the phenomena of distress, in particular 'depression'.
See her
website for a comprehensive introduction to her
work.
Herb Kutchins and Stuart A.
Kirk
provide a trenchant critique of
the 'psychiatric bible' DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders which psychiatrists use almost exclusively in the US and widely
elsewhere to establish their diagnoses. In their book Making Us
Crazy (Simon & Schuster, 1997; Constable, 1999) Kutchins and
Kirk lay bare the scientifically bankrupt nature of psychiatry and itsinextricable involvement with politics,
drug companies and pragmatic social control.
PCCS
Books publish a series of works under the heading Critical
Psychology,
edited by Craig Newnes and Guy Holmes, several of which feature on
this website. They are all obtainable from the PCCS
website.
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Craig Newnes, Guy Holmes and Cailzie Dunn have edited two books that contain a wide-ranging critique of psychiatry, particularly though not exclusively in Britain: This is Madness and This is Madness Too, 1999 and 2001 respectively, PCCS Books. See their associated website.
Mary
Boyle expertly deconstructs the whole
notion of 'schizophrenia' in Schizophrenia: A Scientific
Delusion?, 2002, Routledge.
Terry Lynch is an Irish GP and psychotherapist
whose book Beyond Prozac, originally published in Ireland
in 2001 but now available (2004) through PCCS Books, is in my opinion far and
away the best of its kind so far. An unflagging and remorseless critic of drug-
and biology-based psychiatry, Terry Lynch uses his extensive experience as a
doctor and therapist to demonstrate how a balanced approach to emotional distress
of
all
kinds - including the most severe - should
look. His approach is deeply humane, utterly without pomposity or conceit, and
yet informing it is a razor-sharp critical mind and, in view of his uncompromising
rejection of the medical establishment, not a little courage. This book cannot
in my view be recommended too highly; every GP in the land should read it, and
many sufferers and survivors in and of the psychiatric system will draw comfort
from it.
Obtainable
from the PCCS
website!
Journal
of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy
Focuses on a compassionate critique of the worlds of psychology, counselling and psychotherapy. Interviews, special issues, leading critics and new writing combine to ask some fundamental questions of people and practices in the different fields. Like its predecessor Changes, JCPCP breaks new ground, asking along the way if all psychology is mere wishful thinking, how to nurture the political while respecting the personal, and above all, if therapy, psychology and psychiatry can remain human in the endeavour to help people. JCPCP questions and examines the assumptions inherent in therapeutic practices, explores the implications of making the person central to psychological enquiry, and invites discussion and comment between people who believe that there is more to counselling than meets the scientific eye. It does its utmost to remind us that people are more important than theories, and that what we do is more important than what we say we do. It speaks out when the need arises and gives a platform to new writers wanting to question the increasingly conservative worlds of psychology, counselling and psychotherapy. It might even make you laugh. For further information, please visit the PCCS Books website |
Critics of psychology
Tana Dineen's book Manufacturing Victims (1996) is the most radical critique available of the entire psychology industry. She has also assembled a very informative website.
Susan Hansen, Alec McHoul and
Mark Rapley: Beyond Help. A Consumers'
guide to psychology, (PCCS Books,
2003). An intelligent, deeply thoughtful book swimming powerfully and
courageously against the flood of marketed psychology that pollutes our
culture. The picture laid bare is of a rampant 'psy complex' so unscrupulously
saturated with self-interest as to have become simply shameful. Insights
and arguments are, however, put forward to support a reconstruction
of intellectual and ethical integrity in the field.
Critics of
psychotherapy
Ernest Gellner's
The Psychoanalytic
Movement (Paladin, 1985) probably does the most effective
intellectual demolition job extant on Freud's creation
Windy Dryden and Colin Feltham edited an excellent collection of contributions from various critics as well as proponents of psychotherapy which illustrates very clearly many of the principal critical issues: Psychotherapy and its Discontents, Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992.
Alex Howard's book Challenges to Counselling and Psychotherapy(Macmillan, 1996) is the best, and most balanced, critique I know of the whole counselling field. His latest book, Philosophy for Counselling and Psychotherapy (Macmillan, 2000), is a truly excellent account of Western philosophy from the broadly psychotherapeutic perspective, and one which goes a long way to counter the superficiality of so much writing in this area. His latest book (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) is Counselling and Identity - again an extremely rewarding read. His website gives information as well as offering professional advice.
Jeffrey Masson is probably the best known scourge of psychotherapy (in particular psychoanalysis) in recent times, though these days he appears to have other targets in his sights. His book Against Therapy is a classic. His website contains a list of all his books.
| Reading Psychotherapy |
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| A brief evaluation of the literature |
Richard Webster's compendious Why Freud was Wrong (Fontana, 1996) marshalls all the arguments against psychoanalysis and adds a few of its own. Just about the last word in the critique of Freud and his followers. Webster maintains a refreshingly critical website at http://www.richardwebster.net/
Anna Sands provides a critique of psychotherapy from the client's point of view in Falling for Therapy (Macmillan, 2000). Her experience of, in particular, psychoanalytic psychotherapy forms the basis of an account which is at least as intelligent, penetrating and instructive as any of the professional literature, and more so than most.
William Epstein has for quite a while been a trenchant critic of the scientific pretensions of psychotherapy, and his most recent book Psychotherapy as Religion. The Civil Divine in America (Univ. Nevada Press, 2006) is a tour de force. If I had to single out one book to represent the critical literature on psychotherapy, this would be it. Not only does Epstein demolish the more recent so-called scientific research supporting therapeutic practice, but he also offers a masterly critique of the theoretical bases and principal assumptions of the main approaches. His argument that therapy is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon - a central plank of US commitment to 'heroic individualism' - is constructed with such force as to be very nearly unanswerable. But of course, as Epstein well recognizes, it will hardly dent the sublime self-confidence of psychotherapy's researchers and practitioners, as their world is built on self-deception and interest, not reason - much more akin to magic and religion than to scientific truth.
Alternative - the
social context
Apart from my own modest
contribution, most of the writing in this area is restricted to the relatively
inaccessible academic field. Not that there isn't a lot of it (the field of
'community clinical psychology', for example, has an extensive literature on
the social causes of distress). Though for the most part still reflecting this
academic flavour, the following works are well worth reading, and will provide
a useful introduction to the wider field:-
John Mirowsky and Catherine E. Ross(1989), Social Causes
of Psychological Distress. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Philip Cushman
(1995) Constructing the Self, Constructing America.
Addison-Wesley PublishingCompany,
Inc.
| Keeping up with the literature |
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| Paul Moloney's book review page |
Richard Wilkinson
(1996) Unhealthy
Societies. The Afflictions of Inequality. London & New York:
Routledge.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) The Spirit Level:
Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Allen Lane. Accessibly written and extremely
persuasive, this book marshalls the scientific evidence showing how material
inequality damages social and individual health and well-being. The political
implications are obvious (what the authors suggest could be seen as 'evidence-based
politics'). A website advocating
equality has been founded on the book.
David Pilgrim
(1997), Psychotherapy
and Society. London, Thousand Oaks & New Delhi: Sage
Publications.
Nick Davies's (1998) Dark Heart.
The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain, Vintage, is in a class
all of its own. Journalism at its very best, this book is all about poverty in
Britain and its destructive effects on the lives, health and souls of those it
affects. One emerges from reading it as near shaken to the core as one can get
from a book - God knows what it took to write it. Not only does Davies get on
intimate terms with the effects of poverty in a way no academic or politician
ever would, he is also extremely well informed about its causes and deeply
reflecive about the nature of the society which gives rise to it.
Lynne Friedli (2009), Mental Health,
Resilience and Inequalities. World Health Organization Europe.
This important WHO report draws together much of the evidence to date for
the destructive socio-psychological effects of material inequality. Useful
companion reading with Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level (see above).
This page last updated 17.3.09
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