As psychiatrists gather to enlarge the profession’s enormous diagnostic manual (bitterness, shyness, apathy, being online too much, having been traumatized in some way or other — all of these, and many more, are about to be billable), let’s consider once again the work of Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher who died a few days ago.
In a 1967 essay, “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Culture,” Kolakowski attacks what I’ll call psych-medicine (this term will cover the complex meld of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychotherapy).
Psych-medicine teaches, writes Kolakowski, that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” It “aims first and foremost at securing spiritual comfort, conditions of peace and forbearance, at protection from traumatic experiences, and, in particular, at removing … stresses.” The result, for the education of children, he continues, is disastrous: “An education thus planned leads them to expect that others will endlessly satisfy all their whims, thus exposing them to a considerably greater amount of frustration, trauma, and suffering in later life. [Psych-medicine] is effective, if one wants to deprive people of their sense of the responsibility for thinking about their own lives; it always recommends the path of least resistance, and it teaches one to be afraid of risk, chance, and competition. [Society] is [thus] exposed to the growing pressure of people who preserve the characteristics of capricious pre-school children – cowardly, selfish, and irresponsible.”
Kolakowski concludes: “A doctrine which teaches that we cannot truly be subjects is… discouraging – it teaches acquiescence in treating oneself and others as objects. And such acquiescence is what is helping to put civilization to sleep.”
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Why is the man of the American hour, maybe the man of the American century — to get at this point another way — Michael Jackson, a person who spent years scoring hospital-strength opioids so he didn’t have to exist?
Talk about putting civilization to sleep…
Half in love with easeful death?
The American dream is no longer to be Fuck-You Rich.
The dream is I’m-Dead-and-You’re-Not Rich.
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The ever-ramifying Diagnostic Manual is the bound meta-narrative of all the reasons we opiated ourselves.
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“I am only afraid,” wrote Goethe, “that the world will [eventually turn] into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.”
Not too sure, though, about the humane. This blog — and many other blogs — has followed the shocking inhumanity of psychiatrists who routinely give powerful drugs to three-year-olds.
“[G]iving major tranquilizers to children,” writes David Healy, “is little different from giving children cancer chemotherapy when they have a cold.”
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Anyway, can’t say Kolakowski didn’t warn us. Yet so sickening and out of our control is the situation that our only revenge is art, as Terrence Rafferty noted recently in the New York Times.
Decades ago, he points out, in talking about the portrayal of psych-medicine people in film (he could have added novels, like the postmodern classic Crying of Lot 49, whose character Dr Hilarius is a violently demented psychiatrist), psych-med people
were accorded a certain respect, as most doctors were: they were expected to perform miracles, and their patients were duly grateful. Not any more. Hollywood’s familiarity with psychiatrists — and our filmmakers are no strangers to the couch — has bred something more like contempt, to the point where a mumbling, depressive wreck like the hero of [the new film] “Shrink” seems more the norm than the exception.
Now the psychiatrists themselves — the mumbling depressive wreck is a wildly successful Los Angeles psychiatrist — number among the dead. Having helped put civilization to sleep, they’re self-sedating.
[The film’s psychiatrist is] pretty much permanently stoned on pot (sometimes enhanced with substantial quantities of alcohol). The blank stare he trains on his patients is not a therapeutic technique, a pose of studied indifference — it’s actual indifference. [His patients consider him] an eccentric genius, using his own emotional dishevelment and brazen boredom as a radical, innovative approach to the treatment of their neuroses.
Rafferty wonders about the many contemptuous representations of the contemporary psychiatrist.
… It’s tempting to speculate, at times, on filmmakers’ motives for treating psychiatrists so rudely, to suspect that there might be just the hint of a desire for revenge on the perpetrators of their own failed, ruinously expensive adventures in self-knowledge.
And again:
… You have to wonder, really, why psychiatrists come in for so much abuse in the movies these days. Is it merely a kind of natural resentment of people who presume to understand us?
This is Kolakowski’s point, isn’t it? Psych-medicine convinces us that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” Having created this dependency, having assured us that we cannot live an autonomous examined life, the profession both shows itself actually incapable of understanding us, and at the same time capable of drugging us out of the distress our epistemological misery prompts. Those drugs are where the money is. Andrew Scull quotes Healy:
With an ever-expanding array of problems being medicalized and added to psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, “diseases have all but become commodities and are as subject to fashions as other commodities, with the main determinant of the fashion cycle being the patent life of a drug”.
The shrink at the center of “Shrink” is really a kind of model for us, for his patients. Fuck the adventure of insight. It’ll make you sad and anxious, like Woody Allen. Just calm yourself.