Making Minds and Madness: From Hysteria to Depression
Cambridge University Press, 5/28/2009
EAN 9780521888639, ISBN10: 0521888638
Hardcover, 276 pages, 25.4 x 17.8 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Why do 'maladies of the soul' such as hysteria, anxiety disorders, or depression wax and wane over time? Through a study of the history of psychiatry, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen provocatively argues that most mental illnesses are not, in fact, diseases but the product of varying expectations shared and negotiated by therapists and patients. With a series of fascinating historical vignettes, stretching from Freud's creation of false memories of sexual abuse in his early hysterical patients to today's promotion and marketing of depression by drug companies, Making Minds and Madness offers a powerful critique of all the theories, such as psychoanalysis and biomedical psychiatry, that claim to discover facts about the human psyche while, in reality, producing them. Borch-Jacobsen proposes such objectivizing approaches should be abandoned in favor of a constructionist and relativist psychology that recognizes the artifactual and interactive character of psychic productions instead of attempting to deny or control it.
Introduction
making psychiatric history (questions of method)
Part I. Microhistories of Trauma
1. How to predict the past
from trauma to repression
2. Neurotica
Freud and the seduction theory
3. A black box named 'Sybil'
Part II. Fragments of a Theory of Generalized Artifact
4. What made Albert run?
5. The Bernheim effect
6. Simulating the unconscious
Part III. The Freudian Century
7. Is psychoanalysis a fairy-tale?
8. Interprefactions
Freud's legendary science (in collaboration with Sonu Shamdasani)
9. Portrait of the psychoanalyst as a chameleon
Part IV. Market Psychiatry
10. Science of madness, madness of science
11. The great depression
12. Psychotherapy today
13. Therapy users and disease mongers.