[Chris] It is not as if I'm some sort of hippie-anti-psychiatry-guy from the 60's. =)
[Krimel] Then stop talking like one. [Chris] What exactly is it that you don't agree with? I mean, I don't think it's very strange or radical to point out (especially on this forum) that the basis that Psychiatry/Psychology rests on is an unstable one. The Mind/Matter paradox is ever present in the areas of Psychiatry/Psychology, and it continues to create huge problems. [Krimel] I am not sure which of the disagreements I have expressed is unclear to you but among them, I disagree with the / between Psychiatry and Psychology. Psychiatry is a medical specialty. Psychiatrists are medical doctors. They can prescribe medicines and cut you open if they want. Clinical psychology is an attempt to render scientific psychology into a technology. Clinical psychologists do counseling and attempt to help people resolve inner conflicts. Both disciplines are hampered by the fact that the subject of their study is far more complicated and difficult to study than anything found in physics or biology for example. Psychology as a science separated from philosophy in 1879 as Wundt, James and others began to quit speculating about the mind body problem and to actually look at what people do and how they think. Has this science provided all of the answers? No, but it has produced some and it is a young science. It is young because the tools needed to study it, both the intellectual and the physical instruments, were only recently available. But I would say that the mind/matter paradox has resolved into a consensus that mind states are in fact brain states. There maybe pockets of resistance to this but I think it is a stretch to say that the science of psychology is onshaky ground because of some philosophical paradox. [Chris] I base my criticism on having read about the history of "madness" and Psychiatry, and about what problems have been facing the area, and what problems is facing it. The are almost all of the based on this paradox, and the problems is the same now as it was when Descartes made everyone pissed of by pointing to it - and long before then. [Krimel] The history of madness like the history of any intractable problem from crime to poverty, is fraught with examples of injustice, ineptness and cruelty. Cartesian duality is no more a culprit here than Jewish monotheists blaming madness on demon possession. What I am saying is that you are over simplifying and that is not something one should expect from a historian. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
