Quoted By:
From the myth of mental illness
>In this book I shall be concerned mainly with psychiatry as a discipline whose special method is, derisively but quite correctly, often said to be “only talking.” If we disregard the “only” as gratuitous condemnation before the facts, and if under the term “talking” we encompass communications of all sorts, we arrive at a formulation of a basic method of psychiatry to which, although it is accurate, surprisingly few psychiatrists really subscribe. There is, as I noted before, a serious discrepancy between what psychotherapists and psychoanalysts do and what they say they do. What they do, quite simply, is to communicate with other persons (often called “patients”) by means of language, nonverbal signs, and rules; they analyze—that is, discuss, explain, and speculate about—the communicative interactions which they observe and in which they themselves engage; and they often recommend engaging in some types of conduct and avoiding others. I believe that these phrases correctly describe the actual operations of psychoanalysts and psychosocially oriented psychiatrists. But what do these experts tell themselves and others concerning their work? They talk as if they were physicians, physiologists, biologists, or even physicists. We hear about “sick patients” and “treatments,” “diagnoses” and “hospitals,” “instincts” and “endocrine functions,” and, of course, “libido” and “psychic energies,” both “free” and “bound.” All this is fakery and pretense whose purpose is to “medicalize” certain aspects of the study and control of human behavior.
