Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 13:01:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re: Heidegger and Psychiatry


On Mon, 22 Jun 1998 PhilSin-AT-aol.com wrote:

>      That's all the qualification you need. The current diagnostic system in
> psychiatry requires only a lumping and counting of "symptoms" to make a
> diagnosis of a brain disorder. Forget precipitants, they don't count. Forget
> phenomenological considerations or inquiries into meaning and significance.

> Too unscientific. 

> Forget the role of the media, marketing, and the American
> vulnerability to promises of simple solutions to complex problems (that
> previously fueled the widespread prescription of opiates, amphetamines, and
> benzodiazepines for human distress, and most recently the prescribing of new
> drugs for obesity, all by those "qualified" to make medical diagnoses). Not
> relevant.

(respaced for emphasis by TMB)

There is nothing "scientific" about such travesty. It has been shown,
using fully scientific methods, contra the biochemical theory being
fascistictally foisted on desperate, anguished, terrified and much
suffering people, that about one half of all those in sustained, "live-in"
"mental healh" settings have been aboused and otherwise traumatised,
sexually or otherwise, as children.



> 
>  Get the point?
> 
> 
>        You mentioned:
> 
>   If we take the case that "Language is the
>  House of Being", when one says, "I am depressed",
> 
> 
>      I think one of the most fascinating aspects of watching the growth of the
> medical model in psychiatry has been the opportunity to watch language at
> work. I have witnessed a change in the signifier "depression" from a term used
> to try to describe a state of emotion to a word that describes an illness. Not
> just in the minds of "experts", but throughout the culture. That gets me
> thinking about babies being born today. They will be shaped into beings who
> conceive of negative emotions as a technical issue. They will have a hard time
> ever getting behind this background intelligibility. Will they become the
> brain-tissue-based beings we are intent on creating? What will that world be
> like?


These are extremely important issues. The problem with Heidegger is, and I
don't mean to be rude, that his orientation is utterly, well, *something*
(theological?), and hence every single language-as-world, as "house of
being", issue, expression issue, etc., on the order or register you speak
of is likely to be shoved aside or down into the earth/dirt of "idle talk"
while all that is "important" is to occur elsewhere, well beyond, or
before, I should say, love, and rather into the *highly abstractive* space
of *anxiety* and *guilt* as the non plus ultra experience of, by and for
Beying. It is, frankly, heartbreaking to see this fragile moment you
invoke, seeing the report of depression as meaningful, etc., when it is
brought into the vicinity of a Heiderrian mill and *will* whose inexorable
intent, comportment, oreintation, mobilization is such that it will and
must, apparently, always surge right past such a fragile moment in a truly
extrodinary way. I find it worrisome that you might not recogize this
possibility. I am usually dissed on this list. However, these issues do
appear to obtain, as far as I can see. As much as it would seem that
Heideggrian thought could provide critique of techno-reductionism,
unfortunately, it is not that simple at all, though some passage through
Heidegger, on the basis of some much broader trajectory, may be
adviseable. Heidegger's own discourse is, itself, a certain kind of
techno-reduction, on the highest possible order; it is *highly reductive
and abstractive*, while the figure of technocracy/technology haunts and
pervades *Heidegger's* world like a pandemic psychological projection and
hidden guilt. It is, indeed, the nearly perfect *philosophical/existential
parallel* to what you bemoan as taking place in "psychiatry". Far from
providing an opening for recognition of "negative emotions", and *not just
negative emotions*, the Heiderrian corpus, if taken uncritically, has the
lamentable capacity to obviate such reports and issues all the more, to
use a phrase well-loved by Heidegger, *decisively*. This seems impossible,
I realize, but it appears, at least to me, to be the case. I'm not trying
to attack Heidegger, though this is, I admit, a *very* critical stance. I
can explain in much greater detail, though I'm not too welcome on this
list, I think. 

Where the danger grows...

Yours as well,

TMB




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