Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Working towards a liberatory psychiatry? Radicalizing the science of human psychology and behavior
- 2 Power, freedom, and mental health: a postpsychiatry perspective
- 3 Challenging risk: a critique of defensive practice
- 4 Democracy in psychiatry: or why psychiatry needs a new constitution
- 5 German critical psychology as emancipatory psychology
- 6 Psychopolitical validity in the helping professions: applications to research, interventions, case conceptualization, and therapy
- 7 Class exploitation and psychiatric disorders: from status syndrome to capitalist syndrome
- 8 Ecological, individual, ecological? Moving public health psychiatry into a new era
- 9 Children's mental health and the global market: an ecological analysis
- 10 Postcolonial psychiatry: the Empire strikes back? Or, the untapped promise of multiculturalism
- 11 A new psychiatry for a new world: postcolonialism, postmodernism, and the integration of premodern thought into psychiatry
- 12 Neoliberalism and biopsychiatry: a marriage of convenience
- 13 Psychoanalysis and social change: the Latin American experience
- 14 A new psychiatry?
- Index
- References
1 - Working towards a liberatory psychiatry? Radicalizing the science of human psychology and behavior
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Working towards a liberatory psychiatry? Radicalizing the science of human psychology and behavior
- 2 Power, freedom, and mental health: a postpsychiatry perspective
- 3 Challenging risk: a critique of defensive practice
- 4 Democracy in psychiatry: or why psychiatry needs a new constitution
- 5 German critical psychology as emancipatory psychology
- 6 Psychopolitical validity in the helping professions: applications to research, interventions, case conceptualization, and therapy
- 7 Class exploitation and psychiatric disorders: from status syndrome to capitalist syndrome
- 8 Ecological, individual, ecological? Moving public health psychiatry into a new era
- 9 Children's mental health and the global market: an ecological analysis
- 10 Postcolonial psychiatry: the Empire strikes back? Or, the untapped promise of multiculturalism
- 11 A new psychiatry for a new world: postcolonialism, postmodernism, and the integration of premodern thought into psychiatry
- 12 Neoliberalism and biopsychiatry: a marriage of convenience
- 13 Psychoanalysis and social change: the Latin American experience
- 14 A new psychiatry?
- Index
- References
Summary
My family has the revolution blues. My grandparents wondered why there were no radical political changes in the aftermath of World War I. My parents were certain that the Great Depression would spark political revolution. I believed that the 1960s would lead to dramatic transformations in society and culture. And my children wonder why there aren't progressive revolts throughout the developing world. Although radical political change is not easy, it seems that many times there were conditions that made change possible, but nothing happened. Moreover, when “revolutions” occurred, too often these systems reverted to another form of oppression, and the opportunity for liberation was lost. Woody Allen satirized this phenomenon in Bananas when, after the revolutionary leader assumed power, his first act was to require everyone to speak Swedish and to wear their underwear on the outside.
In the years after the end of World War I theorists began to examine more seriously whether psychological factors might impede revolutionary change. Specifically, they were interested in whether there were unconscious elements that worked against rational conscious thinking and perpetuated oppression and domination. Despite various problems with Freud's theory, including its conservative elements, many progressives turned to Freud, since at that time, his work provided the only systematic analysis of unconscious processes (Robinson, 1969; Wolfenstein, 1993). These theorists believed that psychoanalysis could be radicalized and that it provided a complement to Marx's analyses of the political and economic system.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Liberatory PsychiatryPhilosophy, Politics and Mental Health, pp. 9 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008