Posted by dj on February 17, 2001, at 15:03:38
In reply to Re: getting the message out, posted by ksvt on February 17, 2001, at 11:47:55
From today's NY Times & backing up some of the thrust of "Undoing Depresion"'s message:
February 17, 2001
THINK TANK
Freud, Influential Yet Unloved
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
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"Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine, argues that only two scientists in the last 200 years can justifiably be called irreplaceable: Freud and Darwin. In an essay in the February issue of Natural History magazine, he tries to explain why Darwin is so revered and Freud so often reviled. Here are excerpts:< deleted >
I acknowledge a legitimate moral base underlying such Freud-bashing: the human consequences of his scientific errors, and his often ugly interpersonal relations. But there are two other types of Freud-bashing that are not defensible. One consists of pointing out all the new things learned and all the new therapies devised since Freud, as if these represent his failures or demonstrate the uselessness of his work. . . .
The other type of Freud-bashing — much more damaging because it hurts patients — comes from a too-narrow focus on biological psychiatry. I fully accept the importance of biological psychiatry, having devoted some of my own research to problems in that area (neurotransmitters and manic-depressive illness). . . . But now the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme: psychiatry departments have become bastions of molecular biology, at which much more time is devoted to studying and teaching psychopharmacology than to what are called talk therapies. . . .
To my mind, academe's swing away from talk therapies is tragic. Major advances are still being made in this field — for instance, in crisis counseling and in child and family therapy. . . .
Even specialists in biological psychiatry need thorough training in talk therapies, because it can be difficult to figure out whether a patient's problems have a primarily biological or a primarily nonbiological basis. Even clients whose problems are probably fundamentally biological (such as in manic-depressive illness) tend to have associated psychological issues that need attention. Physicians who rely heavily on prescribing drugs often don't take time to establish a relationship with a patient, regularly forget that the patient and physician are locked in an emotionally charged relationship, and then are surprised at how often patients fail to take the drugs prescribed for them. Understanding that unique two-way relationship was one of the many deep and far-reaching insights that put Freud right up there with Darwin."
For more: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/17/arts/17TANK.html?pagewanted=all
poster:dj
thread:4715
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010209/msgs/4735.html