Date: Wed, 11 Mar 1998 18:58:12 -0500 (EST) From: "M.A. King" <kingma-AT-mcmail.CIS.McMaster.CA> Subject: Re: madness On Thu, 12 Mar 1998, colin holmes wrote: > Sorry if this is inappropriate for the Foucault list but..... I don't think it is.... > In any case, I don't buy monocular, all-explanatory, all-sufficient easily > expressed causes for complex human events. If you want an explanation for > the rise of biological psychiatry, the first place to look is at the > profits of the drug companies and the need for psychiatrists to maintain > their own status! Indeed--but how is it that just now there is such a market for psychopharmaceuticals and psychotherapy in general? How did psychiatrists come to achieve their status? How did pharmaceutical companies get so wealthy? > Then look at the politics of the alternatives. I think > that is more likely to yield a persuasive account than any Heideggerian > 'formula'. I don't think he offers a causal formula for so much as a description of what is going on in modernity. Saying that modernity turns everything into standing reserve doesn't explain anything; it doesn't tell you why psychology has taken the direction it has--rather it gives you a way of describing that direction. (It's like what Habermas says about "the colonization of the lifeworld"--saying that, e.g., a state bureaucracy's usurpation of the responsibilities of a local school board is an example of the colonization of the lifeworld doesn't explain *why* it's happening, but it identifies it as part of a larger (ominous) trend--not a trend inherent in History itself, necessarily, but just the way things happen to be going).
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