Cleansing the modern heart

Abstract

J ohn Selden, a seventeenth-century English jurist and scholar, warned: "The reason of a thing Is not to be inquired after, till you are sure the thing itself be so. We commonly are at, what's the reason for it? before we are sure of the thing" (cited in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 435). We know what physics is: the study of matter and energy. What biology is: the study of living things. But what is psychoanalysis? Who speaks for psychoanalysis? We are familiar with Freud's many contradictory teachings and the diverse practices he engaged in, calling them all "psychoanalysis." We know that the term is used to refer to a method of diagnosing and treating mental illnesses, detecting mental illness in famous dead persons and in characters invented by poets and writers, explaining and influencing human behavior, and interpreting the "meaning" of works of art. Here are two current examples of what persons officially authorized to speak for psychoanalysis say about it. In an essay titled, "Will the real psychoanalyst please stand up?" Richard Fox, president of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2001, declares: "Psychoanalysis today is a far cry from what it was thirty to forty years ago .... We lobby in Washington .... We work with other groups such as the ACLU to further our goals" (The American Psychoanalyst, 2001, p. 27). Are these activities we ought to applaud? At present, the ACLU is engaged in formulating commitment laws, the better to justify incarcerating innocent Americans accused of mental illness. During World War II, it was engaged in supporting and justifying the incarceration of innocent Americans of Japanese ancestry (see Charles L. Markmann, 1965, and Thomas Szasz, The Therapeutic State, 1984, pp. 58-66). The American Psychoanalytic Association, Fox proudly reports, no longer bars psychologists from membership: "We have extended our membership .... We have shed our medical orthodoxy and have become more egalitarian." This is not good enough. For its past policies, the American Psychoanalytic Association owes a collective apology to psychologists and homosexuals as well. It would be a mistake to conclude that psychoanalysts have finally acknowledged that they do not treat diseases, because problems in living are not diseases and because listening-and-talking is not a medical procedure. On the contrary, analysts join psychiatrists in expanding the concepts of disease and t r e a t m e n t , assert tha t "psychotherapy changes the brain," and then use that claim to prove that they treat brain diseases. According to Glenn Gabbard, M.D. , professor o f p sych i a t ry and director, Baylor Psychiatry Clinic and editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, "behavior therapy and drug therapy [ate] affecting the same brain areas and in the same manner . . . . Psychotherapy seems capable of favorably influencing the minds and bodies of persons with bodily diseases and perhaps is even capable o f c o u n t e r i n g those diseases .... l i t is important] to get scientific results that lend credibility to psychotherapy as a real treatment" (cited in Joan Arehart-Treichel, "Evidence is in: Psychotherapy changes the brain," Psychiatric News 2001, 36 (July 6), p. 33). Why is it important to claim that conversation with a psychoanalyst changes the client 's--but presumably not the analyst's--brain? In order to qualify as loyal agents of the therapeutic state and be paid by the state for one's services to it.