[lbo-talk] rating the professions

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Sat Dec 16 15:39:36 PST 2006


On 12/16/06, Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> 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.

Just think a little. Nurses were liked and respected among the people I knew in my Schnectady childhood mostly because they were the only "profession" the General Electric workers and the shopkeepers could relate to. The nurses were all from the same social background as my family people where-as the doctors were often respected and feared but were obviously educated and from a different class. Friends of my mother often aspired to be nurses as the one "profession" truly open to them, which could provide them with independence. In many ways nursing was considered a "working class profession.

Further, it was nurses that did most of the caring, that actually talked to patients about what the doctors said. The attitude of my mother and my family toward nurses remained just about the same for many years.

Anecdotal for sure, but where does any of what Ted presents fit into any of this?


>
> This will also explain the association between psychotic psychopathology and
> the misidentification of "science" with "anti-humanism" as in Althusser.
>

Oh, yes you are so silly, my dear boy.



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