i was attempting a bit of political humor that may have gone awry -- and was not an attempt to expand on winnicott's point, psychology, or anything else.
i understand the uses of psychotherapy. and i believe i understand the often anti-female bias of the early psychiatrists -- which reflected their societal background, a factor often ignored in psychiatry with its tendency to take individuals out of context, focusing on their psyches as though our psyches develop in a vacuum, and treating people as objects (as in "object relations") rather than people. and which persists in some to this day.
the mother-child bond is very significant, yet i doubt winnicott had anything to say about why fathers don't like their babies, and the deleterious impact this has on the child, the mother and the father.
regarding your last paragraph, i suppose you know that electroshock "therapy" has been "in" again for quite a few years. i've seen it administered. and for the truly desperate, it works. but only temporarily. drugs like prozac, zoloft, et al, are highly preferable memory killers to shock treatment. the best "treatment" is to be born lucky enough not to suffer from any long term emotional disabilities.
all people (including psychiatrists like winnicott as well as mothers, et al) need to take a look at their permanent shit side (as Jung put it "the shadow") and learn to deal with it if humanity is to have any hope of survival.
that's my bias; take it or leave it. ;-)
R
----- Original Message ----- From: Doug Henwood To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 2:24 PM Subject: Re: a list
R wrote:
>if anyone was wondering how people like ayn rand, shrub, chairman
>greenspan, richard nixon or henry kissinger, get that way ....
Not sure what you mean by that, but if it's that those folks had mothers who felt like the mother in Winnicott's list, well that's not his point. His point is that even good mothers (or what he called elsewhere good-enough mothers) feel those hateful things, and the failure to recognize that in the context of what is an affectionate relationship overall can cause problems.
The larger point of the article is that psychiatrists hate their psychotic patients, which is why they shocked them and cut up their brains in 1949 and earlier.
Doug
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