Archive for the ‘Therapists And Other Health Hazards’ Category

Euthanasia For Doctors Only

Sigmund Freud, who for decades had suffered from cancer of the mouth, refused analgesics until the end. He then had himself prescribed a lethal sedative. In the same way, I am informed that modern doctors afflicted with painful and terminal conditions regularly make their quietus with an overdose of morphine, without necessarily being willing to […]

Gynaecological Knowledge

The Catherine Breillat film Romance features a quite unerotic scene in which a patient is used to train medical students in gynaecological examination. Because the scene is not faked, and the half-dozen actors really do insert their hands, up to the wrists, into Caroline Ducey’s vagina, male audiences may acquire their first notion of what […]

Sanity And Income

It is often said that mental ill-health is correlated with poverty. In one way this is true by definition. The old inflection, “I am firm, thou art obstinate, he is pig-headed” has its equivalent in the field of mental health: “I am rich and eccentric, thou art middle-income and troubled, he is poor and insane.” […]

The Invention Of Memory

There was once a young lady who was enabled, through the technique of repressed-memory recovery, to recall regular rape by her father, resulting in two coathanger abortions. Funnily enough, somatic examination demonstrated not only that she had never been pregnant, but that she was virgo intacta. I do not know how she herself reconciled the […]

Posted on December 28, 2009 at 23:00 by Hugo Grinebiter · Permalink · One Comment
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, Therapists And Other Health Hazards

You Still Need To Do The Right Thing

Arthur Koestler wrote a novel called Arrival and Departure about a young man who undergoes classical psychotherapy, resulting in the discovery that his rage at the dictator of his country is a displacement emotion related to a childhood neurosis. It is something to do with the “family romance”, a rabbit and a flowerpot. He is […]

It Does SO Apply To Us

Kant’s Categorical Imperative, “Act as if the maxim of your action were, through your will, to become a universal law”, reads like a reformulation of the Golden Rule, “Do as you would be done by”. Unkind things are sometimes said about Teutonic long-windedness. But this is unfair; “Do as you would be done by” does […]

Bad Metaphors In Psychotherapy

Several pseudo-sciences, especially economics and popular psychology, borrow the mechanical and thermodynamic concept of “equilibrium”, assuming with no further ado that this must always be a Good Thing. Now, unlike the Terran atmosphere, the Martian atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium with the surface. The result is that the planet possesses no motor for life. Equilibrium […]

Self-Respect And Self-Esteem

The other day someone mentioned in passing that self-esteem and self-respect were not the same things. The difference was not unpacked, but the challenge stuck in my mind. So how would we distinguish the two? Without consulting anyone or anything, just off the top of my head, I will give it a brief shot. I […]

All Have Fallen Short Of The Glory Of The DSM

A useful discipline of self-defence against intellectually phony assertions is to ask, “How could it be otherwise?” or “What would the contrary situation actually look like?” We should use this one on the lists of Personality Disorders in the America psychiatric handbook. Our question would then be, Who might have none of the Disorders? The […]

The Universal Stigmatisation Personality Disorder

We are all comfortable with saying, “I have a pain in my foot”, because everyone thinks of “I” as something separate from, and possessing, a foot. Having become accustomed to speaking of disease and malfunction of the body as something separate from the “I”, however, we proceed to talk of someone “having” a mental illness […]

Posted on January 1, 2010 at 11:56 by Hugo Grinebiter · Permalink · 2 Comments
In: MONKEY BUSINESS, Therapists And Other Health Hazards