Product desciption
Madness On The Couch Blaming The Victim In The Heyday Of Psychoanalysis Edward Dolnick by Edward Dolnick 9781416577942, 1416577947 instant download after payment.
In the golden age of "talk therapy," the 1950s and 1960s,
psychotherapists saw no limit to what they could do. Believing they had
already explained the origins of war, homosexuality, anti-Semitism, and a
host of neurotic ailments, they set out to conquer one of mankind's
oldest and fiercest foes, mental illness. InMadness on the Couch,veteran science writer Edward Dolnick tells the tragic story of that confrontation.
It
is a vivid, compelling tale that is told here for the first time.
Dolnick focuses on three battles in an epic war: against schizophrenia,
autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schizophrenia, the most
dreaded mental illness, strikes its young victims without warning and
torments them with hallucinations and mocking voices. Autism claims its
victims even younger, at age one or two, and locks them away, cut off
from the rest of us by invisible walls. Obsessive-compulsive disorder
strikes at any age and entraps its hapless victims in endless rituals.
Inspired
by their hero, Freud, but bolder even than he, psychoanalysts set out
to vanquish those enemies. Armed with only words and the best of
intentions, they achieved the worst of outcomes. The symptoms of disease
were symbols, these therapists believed, and diseases could be
interpreted, like dreams. The ranting of a schizophrenic on a street
corner, the retreat of an autistic child from human contact, the endless
hand-washing of an obsessive-compulsive were not simply acts but
messages. And the message psychoanalysts decoded and delivered to
countless families was that parents themselves -- through their subtle
hostility -- had driven their children mad. That verdict was not
overturned for more than a generation.
