Among the Intellectualoids / Learned Psychotics
Szasz, Thomas S.
AMONG THE 1NTELLEC.TUALOlDS LEARNED PSYCHOTICS Perhaps because he does not have enough self-confidence, the ordinary person is likely to assume that when he cannot understand what someone in...
...Presumably, Freedman means that he will not review or repeat whatever it is that he is referring to...
...Authorities have always known this and have always exploited it by awing and bullying the plebes with Greek or Latin, with technical jargon, or, if need be, with gibberish...
...Fox's publications...
...Ever since schizophrenia-the most dreaded and mysterious of so-called mental illnesses-was invented by the great Eugen Bleuler in 1911, it was supposedly charac 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...May 1982...
...Foxlecture," this time given for real by a really distinguished psychiatrist before a really distinguished au thence...
...Thomas S. Szasz is Professor of Psychiatry at the State University of New York in Syracuse...
...That this was the idea of a group of mental health experts about how to fake a psychiatric presentation is itself wonderfully revealing...
...George Orwell was not, but he might as well have been, writing about psychiatrists when he observed that "the great enemy of clear language is insincerity...
...Freedman begins his address with these words: "I will not reprise [sic] this past active APA year, but wherever we have worked, members of APA have engaged in lively discussion and useful action on critical topics...
...The tape was then shown to another similar group and finally to a group of educators and administrators taking a graduate course in educational philosophy...
...But what is it that Freedman can't "reprise" here...
...In 1982, 1 discovered another "Dr...
...Fox's" deliberately staged gibberish was delivered in 1972...
...Freedman evidently believes that "reprise" is a very serviceable word, because he uses it again, toward the middle of his address, where he writes: "The remarkable advent of pharmacotherapies has of course profoundly affected both basic science and clinical practice, and-more than I can here reprise [sic] itcomplexly affected professional and public orientation to psychiatry...
...That is indeed the most constant and most frequent thing psychiatrists do, in speech as well as in print...
...Fox" was such a success...
...Fox" addressed a group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social-work educators and his lecture was videotaped...
...That is surely an odd way of saying that the currently fashionable use of drugs in psychiatry has profoundly affected both the profession and the public...
...It need not be, and indeed cannot be, reviewed...
...When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a scuttlefish squirting out ink...
...Myron L. Fox, bestowing upon him the persona of "an authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior," and coaching him to teach "charismatically and non-substantively on a topic about which he knew nothing...
...AMONG THE 1NTELLEC.TUALOlDS LEARNED PSYCHOTICS Perhaps because he does not have enough self-confidence, the ordinary person is likely to assume that when he cannot understand what someone in authority is saying, it is because he is too stupid or too uneducated...
...The result: "All respondents had significantly more favorable than unfavorable responses...
...Dr...
...In all there were 55 subjects tested...
...Among the specific .responses quoted by the investigators were the following: "Excellent presentation . . . Good analysis of the subject . . . Knowledgeable...
...when that psychiatrist occupies an endowed chair at one of America's great universities and is the presi dent of the American Psychiatric Association...
...Where policy seeks formulas for determining choice and guiding treatment, science understands the fundamental basis for variability in disease and response and the method for sequentially approximating precision in the clinical process...
...When a prominent American psychiatrist writes such gibberish...
...Since no "uncontroversial psychiatrist" would dare to say that a psychiatric emperor is naked, especially when the emperor insists he is sporting the most splendid garments, I volunteer my services as a "controversial psychiatrist" (which is the least offensive diagnosis my colleagues like to pin on me) to bring this piece of psychiatric skullduggery to the attention of the public...
...The lines quoted are from his presidential address delivered at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in...
...But the best part of this experiment is, of course, that "Dr...
...In retrospect, the actual gains for health might render such poor prophets a loss...
...The experiment consisted of the investigators' hiring a professional actor "who looked distinguished and sounded authoritative," naming him Dr...
...Dr...
...Since they obviously cannot bring this about by discovering the causes and cures of mental diseases whichtragically for psychiatrists no less than for patients-do not exist, they have to do it by producing great quantities of gibberish...
...The author of this luminous passage, Daniel X. Freedman, is chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of Chicago...
...He says it is the "remarkable advent of pharmacotherapies...
...Since this address was published, I may quote from it, and I shall: Recall that clinical experience and science do incrementally define the selective use of innovations, while policy reflexly greets innovation with prophecies of fiscal doom...
...But the introduction of certain drugs into psychiatry is simply a fact or occurrence...
...One even believed he [had] read Dr...
...and when the American Journal of Psychiatry publishes said gibberish as if it were in English and made sensethen we face a situation about which somebody ought to say something...
...Since psychiatry is a pseudoscience, it is not surprising that psychiatrists are especially eager to be accepted as scientific experts...
...Although this was the.furthest thing from what they had in mind, some years ago a group of mentalhealth educators conducted an experiment that demonstrated rather impressively the validity of my foregoing contention...
...when the gibberish is the published text of his presidential address delivered before the Ameri by Thomas S. Szasz can Psychiatric Association...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
