Ken has NOT in any way, shape, or form tried to hurt someone by calling them psychotic, he never called anyone psychotic, or suggested a person had psychoses. You are demonizing Ken here in the most deplorable way possible because you aren't carefully reading what he says. Nor are you bothering to go out and read a little bit in order to understand it more.
What he said was NO different than when Yoshie told Eric and Steve Perry that they were actually agonizing over abortion b/c they were, at root, still enamored of religious beliefs about the sanctity of life. Ken was expressing the same idea Yoshie did -- think back to what led to this debate, Ken's statement: "Beware thy God. We'd be foolin' ourselves to think that the antiabortion arguments aren't driven by an incoherent theological imperative..."
Ken happens to call this form of religious thinking, psychotic, not in the sense that it's symptomatic of some mental disorder but, rather, symptomatic of social conditions which make it seem as if there are only certain choices available [e.g., abortion framed as an issue of rights, as an issue of the life of the mother v. child]
When someone experiences the world through choices delimited in this way and when they must make a decision in a context in which they've come to believe that these are the choices, they sometimes revert to a form of psychotic reasoning, particularly if this is already available to them, which allows them to unburden themselves of responsibility: I won't have an abortion because it is against my religious beliefs, etc. i really shouldn't have this child because _____but i have no choice, it's god's will. Their decision is made for them. having recourse to this form of reasoning enables them to ignore OTHER issues, to avoid asking OTHER questions: like why is this world a hell hole in which these are my fucking choices, in which abortion is portrayed this way.
To use another, perhaps more fruitful example that might have gotten missed: why do glbt activists feel compelled to frame their sexuality in what is, utimately, a hetoresexist frame in which one's sexuality is natural, biological, given, outside of the social? Why do they feel that this is the only way to present the issue on the lit they write--especially for PFLAG, an organization addressing itself to people who aren't glbt, who they think they have to convince of the "okay-ness" of their loved one's "sexuality" because, by gum, it's the only way they can be?
Why is this? Why this political strategy that asks for 'acceptance' and tolerance rather than a fucking change in a social system that demands that sexuality be framed in this way, as either/or. You're either het or you're not; you're sexual desires are driven by natural biologically given demands that you must succumb to, it's beyond all reason. etc and so on [which doesn't sound a whole lot different than the rape/biology argument does it?]
For ken, and lacan, psychosis is symptomatic of a social situation, NOT the incompetence of the individual and some brain disorder.
Symptomatic, get it?
Btw, Dace when I typed that psychoanalytic categories are "individualizing" and "psychologizing" I was complaining that, without understanding the social analysis contained in some variants of psychanalytic theory, the above kind of analysis gets left behind. people come to imagine that the determinative cause of pychosotic phenom is located *in* the individual, *in* the distorted relations of the group or *in* the messed up culture of a nation. e.g., in the case of individuals they look to things like childhood abuse, history of mental illness, exposure to dangerous chemicals, whathaveyou. this isn't wrong per se when talking just about individuals. But when doing social analysis, as ken is , because psychoanalysis is so often framed as a discourse *about* individuals, then using the language of psychoanalysis is problematic because it gets misread as not examining the *social structural* mechanisms that shape the context within which people exhibit psychotic symptoms, etc.
Oh and Carrol, as to neuroscience: check out neuroscientists efforts to examine the relationship between the brain and the social context within which we become socialized as competent people. Because one thing the neuroscientists insist on is that brains work in social contexts. They are trying very hard to avoid reductionism here to the physical processes of brain functions. Guess what? The fundamental concepts are heavily indebted to Freud!
what a hoot.
kelley