> Nurses Top List of Most Honest and Ethical Professions
> Integrity of most medical professionals also highly rated
Like many other public perceptions, this one isn't realistic. The most detailed and significant of Isabel Menzies Lyth's psychoanalytic studies of institutions as containers of anxiety is her study of hospital nursing (Isabel Menzies Lyth, "The Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence against Anxiety", in Containing Anxiety in Institutions, Free Associations, London, 1988. pp 43-85 - a summary of it is available here <http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/ Anxiety/work.asp>). Many of the practices that defend against the psychotic anxiety provoked in that context, and in medical contexts generally, work by dehumanizing the patients.
This will also explain the association between psychotic psychopathology and the misidentification of "science" with "anti- humanism" as in Althusser.
It points to a major defect in Marx's account of human development. The account ignores the fact of psychopathology and the very serious obstacles it puts in the way of the kind of human development Marx's "humanist" philosophy of history envisages.
For instance, psychotic psychopathogy involves lack of consciousness of, and inability to comprehend the idea of, "free self- determination." It also involves an inability to experience any rational basis for value judgments and, hence, for any claim about what intellectuals or anyone else "ought" to "choose" to do. From this, we get, as a defining feature of the thinking dominant in "modernity," an "anti-humanist" ontology that self-contradictorily excludes any role for "free self-determination" and "final causation" (purpose). This doesn't prevent the individuals embracing it from making self-contradictory moralistic claims about what intellectuals and others ought to choose to believe, will and do.
Though the psychopathology at issue involves a mistaken identification of "reason" with formal logic, it's immune to criticisms that point to self-contradictions such as these. It's also immune to reductio ad absurdum arguments.
Other features consistent with this way of understanding it are: its inability to understand the ontological idea of "internal relations"; its experience and conception of self and reality as fragmented; its experience of consciousness as excluding direct awareness of anything real (from which derives radical skepticism); and, in some of its forms, its identification of human being with instinctive self- destructive violence combined with gleeful anticipation of humanity finally through the capabilities created by the development of "science" (self-contradictorily conceived in this "anti-humanist" way) ending in the "fire and light" of a final successful act of literal "anti-humanism", i.e. of "humanity sacrificing itself".
"The scientist whose investigations include the stuff of life itself finds himself in a situation that has a parallel in that of the patients I am describing. The breakdown in the patient's equipment for thinking leads to dominance by a mental life in which his universe is populated by inanimate objects. The inability of even the most advanced human beings to make use of their thoughts, because the capacity to think is rudimentary in all of us, means that the field for investigation, all investigation being ultimately scientific, is limited, by human inadequacy, to those phenomena that have the characteristics of the inanimate. We assume that the psychotic limitation is due to an illness: but that that of the scientist is not. Investigation of the assumption illuminates disease on the one hand and scientific method on the other. It appears that our rudimentary equipment for 'thinking' thoughts is adequate when the problems are associated with the inanimate, but not when the object for investigation is the phenomenon of life itself. Confronted with the complexities of the human mind the analyst must be circumspect in following even accepted scientific method; its weakness may be closer to the weakness of psychotic thinking than superficial scrutiny would admit." Wilfred Bion, "Learning from Experience" in Seven Servants, p. 14
Ted
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061216/30a90b0b/attachment.htm>