So at the request of an anonymous commenter (thanks again!) in this blog, I went and read Bruce Levine’s “Commonsense Rebellion”. I saw, next to it on the shelf a book I’d picked up in 2000 but not really read, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s “Against Therapy”. It is good to discuss them together.
So at the request of an anonymous commenter (thanks again!) in this blog, I went and read Bruce Levine’s “Commonsense Rebellion”. I saw, next to it on the shelf a book I’d picked up in 2000 but not really read, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s “Against Therapy”. It is good to discuss them together.
Levine’s book is really excellent for all the links that it makes. He presents an analysis of the US that is based on an analogy to the internet, and called the “institutional illness web” – in which one unhealthy aspect of what he calls “institutional society” or “mass society” is linked to others, like websites link to one another. The fundamental problem with “mass society” and “institutional society” is that it is impersonal, indirect, denies the basic human needs of autonomy and community, and therefore dehumanizing. Worse, the problems that are caused by the expansion of this society are often solved by the further expansion of this society. For example, people are alienated and numb from meaningless jobs with no autonomy. They try to numb this with alcohol, or stimulate themselves with things like gambling. These are declared “illnesses”, and then institutionalized treatment programs are created, with professional “experts” dedicated to treating people with alcoholism or gambling addiction. These institutions also deny people autonomy and are based on hierarchical and bureaucratic relationships, not real relationships and not real community.
Levine’s book is very radical. He looks at all sorts of substance abuse problems, like gambling (did you know that $586 BILLION was legally gambled in the US in 1996?) and alcohol and illicit narcotics (and crime, and prisons). Then he looks at television, advertising, and all the dehumanizing aspects of mass culture and mass media. He looks at pornography and the alienation of sexual life in mass society. But most interesting, and most powerful, is his analysis of “mental illness” and psychotropic drugs. He presents two very powerful analogies and one very powerful story to make his point. The first is letting readers know that the analogy for psychotropic medication isn’t antibiotics. These are not medications the way a fever medication can bring your temperature down or an antibiotic can kill bacteria. The real comparison for psychotropic drugs is with alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and such drugs. By declaring them “treatment medications” for mental “illnesses”, a massive industry profits massively, and the “illness” ideology operates as an incredibly powerful means of control.
And that takes us to Levine’s second analogy, also very powerful – that psychiatry and psychotherapy aren’t fields of science so much as world views or ideologies. The real comparison isn’t with physics or chemistry but with christianity or hinduism. There are many articles of faith and much less scientific backing for, as Levine tells it, basically all of the claims in these fields. He shows this by analyzing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness (the DSM-IV), which is used to diagnose mental illnesses.
The story he tells to make the point is that in the 19th century, a US psychologist offered the diagnosis of “drapetomania”, a mental illness that caused slaves to want to flee from slavery! Levine shows how easy it would be to “prove” a “genetic link” for “drapetomania” (and, for that matter, I think it would be easy to show what parts of the brain “fired” in the drapetomaniac). Today we have “attention deficit disorder” for kids who don’t like to sit in boring rote classrooms with authoritarian teachers, and “compliance disorder” for kids who don’t follow authorities. These kids can then be drugged and “institutionalized”.
What do all these things – gambling, alcoholism, depression, anxiety, “mental illnesses” of all kinds – have in common? Levine argues they are basically problematic ways of rebelling against this dehumanizing society. And if you add up everyone who is ‘rebelling’ in some or other problematic way, you get pretty much everyone in this society. So the solution, Levine argues, is first to find ways of building genuine autonomy and community, as individuals and for others, at a human and not an institutional mass scale; and secondly, to redirect those problematic ways of rebellion into more constructive ways. Calling them “illnesses” only serves the powerful.
One of my favourite chapters was Levine’s critique of M. Scott Peck’s “Road Less Traveled”, which I read a couple of years ago because bell hooks mentioned it (whose work on these topics I also can’t seem to identify with) and found somewhat wrong for reasons I couldn’t figure out. Levine did figure it out, and his critique is delightful and perceptive.
As for Masson’s book, it shows how this has always been the case for psychiatry and psychotherapy. It has always been a tool for forcing people to accept the status quo. In the 19th century when it was developed and refined, it was a tool used against women, who could be used and abused in brutal ways, for their own good, because they were “hysterical”. All kinds of very good and healthy human reactions and emotions were labeled “illnesses”. Homosexuality was only removed as a mental illness from the DSM a few decades ago. Masson tells the story of Freud’s exploitation of a young woman, Dora, and the way he treated her rebellion against exploitation and abuse as signs of “illness” in order to fit his theories; how Jung collaborated with the Nazis; how several American psycho therapists, like Rosen and Honig, committed horrific abuses against people in their “care” (often forcibly confined), in several cases caring for them to death; and then how even the “good” therapists, like Carl Rogers, had these abilities to both ignore people’s real suffering and to draw people away from the real world and real problems into the inner world. Masson argues that these aren’t unusual abuses, but fundamental flaws in the whole idea, or ideology, of “therapy” – that one person can be a professional in this field and help “cure” someone’s “mental illnesses”. Masson doesn’t believe that they are “illnesses” and he doesn’t believe that the “professionals” have the knowledge or science to “cure” them. Masson, like Levine, goes back to genuine community. Friends, talking to each other, caring about each other, can do much better, and are much less dangerous, than “therapists”, who can suck you into their nightmare world of compulsory hospitalization or drugging based on what you tell them. Levine also makes this point, that going to a therapist in the US is a very dangerous thing indeed.
Masson isn’t dismissive of all of psychology though – he thinks the discovery of the unconscious was significant, for example. After my own readings I agree. And I also agree substantively with both Masson and Levine, but I think that someone who does care but who also knows a lot about psychology and the patterns of human behavior can help you understand your own patterns and why you might be doing them. For such a person to dedicate time to study in their field and perhaps to do research in the field – real research on the topics, which I think is possible, not just ideology – I think would be a good idea. So I guess I found myself not agreeing that therapy should be abolished, though I do think that abolishing it and starting over might be better than not (similar to arguments about prison reform – there might be some need to take antisocial people out of society against their will even in a good society, but that is so different from prisons now that it might not be right to use the same word, and so ‘prison abolition’ is an honest way of talking about what we want).
These writers are a good way to come back from psychology to politics, since they argue that psychology is used politically and for political ends. Now I find myself very interested to try to sift through and think carefully about what aspects of psychology are mere ideology (I think of much of the DSM here), what aspects are credible science (I think of Ogden’s “Trauma and the Body” here), and what aspects are useful ideas that can help a liberatory project (I think of Alice Miller here). Such a sifting would be really useful, I think.
