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Cargando... The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern Americapor Elizabeth Lunbeck
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In the years between 1900 and 1930, American psychiatrists transformed their profession from a marginal science focused primarily on the care of the mentally ill into a powerful discipline concerned with analyzing the common difficulties of everyday life. How did psychiatrists effect such a dramatic change in their profession's fortunes and aims? Here, Elizabeth Lunbeck examines how psychiatry grew to take the whole world of human endeavor as its object. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Lunbeck argues, “The sources of psychiatry’s widely noted dominance lie neither in its long-overdue embrace of science, as those writing from within the discipline have argued, nor in its enduring commitment to social control, as many critics of psychiatry have proposed, but here, in psychiatrists’ delineation of a realm of everyday concerns – sex, marriage, womanhood, and manhood; work, ambition, worldly failure; habits, desires, inclinations – as properly psychiatric” (pg. 47). She further argues, “Any normalizing power the discipline enjoys today is premised not on psychiatrists’ authority over insanity, for most are willing to cede them that, but on their turn-of-the-century forebears’ bold appropriation of day-to-day life and their subtle weaving of a psychiatric point of view into its many aspects” (pg. 47). Discussing the rise of testing and statistics, such as the Stanford Binet IQ test, Lunbeck writes, “Constantly invoking the authority of science, with which they claimed their discipline was now allied, they outlined an ambitious professional program aimed at securing them the formal institutional and political power that had eluded their predecessors’ grasp” (pg. 61). As part of this, they sought to secure “a broad, respected role in the public sphere” while also claiming authority over the private sphere (pg. 61). To this end, “nationwide, psychiatrists campaigned successfully for the passage of laws that brought commitment from the legal into the medical arena, transforming it, in their estimation, from a highly charged question of law into a straightforward question of medical judgment” (pg. 82). Discussing psychiatrists’ interests in pathologizing the home life, Lunbeck writes, “Behavioral policing, however, was a function of the family as much as of any other institution” (pg. 107). That said, early psychiatrists focused more on aberrant behavior that was due to ethnic differences, thereby contributing to homogenizing efforts [pg. 101], while ignoring violence within families, such as husbands beating their wives and children (pg. 106). ( )