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Essay on Psychopathology Deconstructed
Psychopathology Deconstructed: A Critical Review
Not only are psychology's claims to an dispassionately convincing perception of and a therapeutically valuable concern with the problems which plagued us false, however it is more than possible that psychology, far from minimizing, in fact compounds our difficulties. It serves the interests not only of its practitioners, but also more significantly of those who have actually achieved power within society and constructed an apparatus to maintain it (Smail, 1987: 45, 47, original emphases).
It is insisted that psychology is still a pre-paradigmatic science with no agreed methodology; therefore its ability to provide a secure basis for a practitioner remains suspect. (Pilgrim and Treacher, 1992: 66)
Since Freud, the abnormal voice has been raised occasionally against the conventional taken-for-granted notions of the 'psychopathologising mentality'. Sandor Ferenczi was one such voice in the early development of psychoanalysis (Dupont 1985, Masson, 1988); and more lately, Ronald Laing and Thomas Szasz have produced intense and well-documented criticism of the theory and practice of the modern psychiatric treatment system and its medical-model philosophy. However those practices, and the ideological assumptions that support them, remain mostly in place, it seems that rather unyielding to the devastating criticism to which they have been subjected over the years.
Such condemnation is fundamentally distinctive in the broad field of the 'psychological treatments', shows an assumptive ontology about the nature of the 'necessary pain of living' (Peck, 1993) and the 'therapeutic process' which is, according to a latest book by Ian Parker and others (1995), philosophically unacceptable and quite untenable. It seems that a kind of obstinate alchemy takes place, through which process the ordinary everyday difficulties and problems of living are covertly transformed into a mechanistic, professionalised lexicon of quasi-medical terminology that has the effect of legitimating a professional ideology that self-fulfilling, becomes the guarantee of its own existence.....................
