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(by
Sherrie
Turkle
) Three features
make French anti-psychiatry very different from its Anglo-Saxon
counterpart:
its links with psychoanalysis, its links with
Marxism and its grass roots base
. Thus, we stress French
anti-psychiatry's relationship to French psychoanalysis, to
other currents in French radical politics and to the student
revolt of May-June 1968 whose aftermath seems to have conditioned
a milieu receptive to antipsychiatric ideas, particularly
on the French Left
.
In Freud's work are formulations of
psychoanalysis as a radical
doctrine with an implicit critique of social repression
.
In America, medical professionalization contributed to defusing
much of what was most radical in his vision. The wedding of
American psychoanaiysis and psychiatry began as
a marriage
of convenience
. When Freud's ideas appeared on the scene,
American psychiatrists were in need of a new paradigm, and the
first psychoanalysts wanted to use a medical affiliation to
increase the legitimacy of the new doctrine. American psychoanalysis
may well have paid a price for such expediencies.
Torn from its base in the cultural sciences by an early (1927)
decision
by the American Psychoanalytic Association to limit
the practice of psychoanalysis to medical doctors, American
psychoanalysis became a psychiatric, medical and even corporate
Insider'. In its theoretical development it favored a psychoanalytic
ego psychology where the predominant model is of a therapeutic
alliance between the egos of analyst and patient in the service
of a better adaptation to reality.
American psychoanalysis
was socialized or, perhaps, domesticated by American institutions
and values
. Although some analysts did use psycho-analytic
insights as part of a critique of American life, they were exceptions
to the general trend. (from
French
Anti-Psychiatry, in
Critical Psychiatry
, p150
.)
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