Informal Fallacy
Galvin, Martin
Informal Fallacy Brought to sentences by his sister's birth, the boy who had decided to be laconic decided if he wanted food he better talk—and fast—or she would own the kitchen. First, he tried...
...A tragedy," he said...
...In psychiatric circles it was, until recently, traditionally believed that psychic healing took place through a relation-ship with the therapist...
...Freud argued that our belief in God was simply the expression of a wish...
...Coles literally moaned, "It is a tragedy...
...In psychological healing today, patients are attached no longer to their therapists but to their medication...
...or what...
...And yet that is the attitude toward our emotions that many in the medical/priest class adopt today...
...Martin Galvin self-examination and self-recrimination as well as arduous attempts to change the way he lives...
...Now, however, you can transform yourself in the comfort and privacy of your own home...
...This attachment may speak to the puzzling fact that the placebo effect of Prozac is a whopping 39 percent...
...A boy adept already at the tyranny of either/or...
...Such dictums read quaint and hyperbolic today...
...According to current dogma, anxiety and depression are simply symptoms that impede our ability to function...
...It is the kind of thing that [Erik] Erickson used to say that we can only pray about and rebel against...
...Should I, Sweet Mother, eat the skin of the green cantaloupe...
...Kierkegaard once remarked that there is "nothing worse than thinking of your own emotions as twaddle," that is, as psychic perturbations devoid of meaning...
...Commonweal I 0 May 21, 2004...
...And then of course, how could he not, imperatives: Laugh, sister, or I'll cry out loud and Feed me, Cookie jar, or I'll break your empty heart in two and Allow me passage, Stairs, or I'll fall down and break my crown...
...The medicalization of emotional malaise invites us to imagine that chemistry can do the same work as reflection, just more quickly and efficaciously...
...Then, interrogatives: Father dear, what is your favorite candy...
...Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota...
...Coles fumed, "We are linguistic creatures and anything that cures us has to involve language and making connections...
...For one receives sadness as sickness only by emptying it of psychic or spiritual significance...
...Psychiatry has become a vehicle for the repression of the Socratic imperative...
...Whatever else can be said about the various forms of talk therapy, they all abided by the Socratic dictum "Know thyself...
...He can take mood brighteners without guilt or without any sense that he is missing something...
...A few weeks after the president's council published its concerns about "the medicalization of self-understanding," Robin Hening wrote a New York Times Magazine piece on drugs being developed that aim at obliterating traumatic memories...
...Once again, the common view is that the best way to deal with disruptive experience is to alter our underlying chemistry...
...The old orthodoxy was that medication was taken to facilitate talk therapy, not to replace it...
...it was with my pill...
...In practice, though, 80 percent of the psychotropic drugs prescribed today are doled out by general practitioners...
...and how do you spell souffle...
...Like a de-pressed person, you let yourself go...you just say yes...
...But this benefit, if it is that, may well come at a considerable cost...
...In other words, bring on the lethean elixirs...
...I fell in love one day, only it was not with a person...
...I recently chatted with Robert Coles about the overwhelming American passion for pills...
...Informal Fallacy Brought to sentences by his sister's birth, the boy who had decided to be laconic decided if he wanted food he better talk—and fast—or she would own the kitchen...
...Of course, there aremany who will wince at the puritanical connection between pain and human flourishing...
...Maybe so, but the same could be said about the current faith in pharmaceutical engineering...
...Yet, I think, it would be hard to argue against the notion that the individual who works to understand why he hates himself will end up with a different character from the person who quiets his carking inner voices with chemical cocktails...
...More to the point, you can do it without ever making yourself vulnerable to another human being or threatening your sense of being in control...
...First, he tried the old declaratives...
...According to the old syllabus for our sentimental education, psychic pain is part of the material that must be mastered for human growth to take place...
...I suspect that only a small percentage of patients who get their meds from family doctors are also in talk therapy, which is to say, that the notion of taking medication in order to facilitate a therapeutic relationship and emotional reflection is largely passe...
...In reply to the concerns expressed by the council, Hening wrote, "If we as a society decide it is better to keep people locked in their anguish because of some idealized view of what it means to be human, we might be revealing ourselves to be a society with a twisted notion of what it means to be human...
...I boy, I eat and I love you, Mother Mine, Daddy-O, every-body...
...And some people in the mental-health business continue to acknowledge this piety...
...Gordon Marino is Boldt Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and curator of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St...
...Bring on the soma...
...Most people would prefer to avoid sorting through the basements of their past, much less doing it with a stranger...
...In her candid Prozac Diary, Lauren Slater coos, "Falling in love is a state of surrender, not necessarily pleasant...
Vol. 131 • May 2004 • No. 10
