“Is it convincing to claim that, shorn of the myth, the poverty or the plain ordinariness of psychoanalysis will be plain for all to see?”
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Simon Blackburn on dignity: its history and meaning
We all have a special dignity because we are all, alike, children of God and equal in His eyes. This is a divinely ordained, supernaturally guaranteed L’Oréal advertisement.
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L’Express: “The psychoanalysts fight back”
“We will resist, by continuing to strongly defend our beliefs. French psychiatry, which is admired throughout the world, must not be swept aside using evaluation criteria as the means.”
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Why are the French still blaming mothers for autism?
A controversial new film by French documentary filmmaker Sophie Robert reminds the world that in France these discredited and dangerous ideas still hold considerable sway.
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Just say a spell over them
In France people are still medically treated on the basis of the four humors.
No they’re not, that’s a bitter joke, because the truth is almost as horrifying – children with autism are treated with psychoanalysis.
In many countries, the standard way of treating autistic children is with behavioural therapy – stimulating and rewarding them to develop the skills they need to function in society – but France still puts its faith in psychoanalysis. And an increasing number of parents are now demanding change.
For autism campaigners, it is one of the most serious health scandals of our times.
How for decades France turned its back on the latest scientific thinking, and treated autism as a form of psychosis.
How, as a result, tens of thousands of children were misdiagnosed – or not diagnosed at all – and consigned to lives of misery.
And how, to this day, in its approach to autism, the French medical establishment continues to believe in the powers of psychiatry and psychoanalysis – long after the rest of the world has switched to alternative methods of treatment.
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The blame – Fasquelle and autism associations argue – lies with a medical establishment that remains fixated with Freud.
“Today everyone knows that autism is a neuro-developmental problem. It is not a psychosis or mental disorder,” says Muhamed Sajidi, president of the association Conquer Autism.
“But in France it is the psychiatrists – heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis – who remain in charge. And they have shut themselves off from all the changes in our knowledge of autism.”
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Critics say this emphasis on psychoanalysis and relationships meant that autistic children were not spotted till far too late. And that, in turn, meant that their chances of effective treatment were sharply reduced.
Some 60% of autistic children in Sweden attend school, Sajidi says.
“Today only 20% of autistic children in France are in school, and often only part-time. The rest are either in psychiatric hospitals, or in medico-social centres, or living at home…”
Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari…the French seem to have a thing for deepities. What a mess.
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Well it was dark. Ish.
Here’s a funny thing – Geoff posted some photos from QED at Facebook today, including this one
It turns out that the guy at the mic asking a question is David Aaronovitch. I hadn’t even known he was at the talk, let alone that he’d asked a question! This is all the funnier since I’d gone to his talk three hours earlier, and been informed and entertained by it.
I guess while talking I was so focused on content that I didn’t register faces. Or something. Mind you, people were instructed to say their names when they asked their question…I’m hoping he didn’t actually say, firmly and distinctly, “I’m David Aaronovitch.” I’m hoping he just said “I’m David.” I’m hoping I have that much excuse.
I always recognized Rhys when I saw him though. That’s a big advantage of neon hair.
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India: historian denied visa renewal
Peter Heehs is a scholar of Sri Aurobindo, but some devotees consider his book “blasphemous” and sued to get his visa canceled.
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In France autism is treated with psychoanalysis
“In France it is the psychiatrists – heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis – who remain in charge. And they have shut themselves off from all the changes in our knowledge of autism.”
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Hire a bully to end bullying
He calls himself The Scary Guy, and his price tag can run as much as $6,500 a day.
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India: parents ditch their newborn daughter
The couple refused to accept the girl after accidentally being given the boy, who belongs to another couple, the hospital says.
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What “everybody knows”
Eric MacDonald has a very good piece on Julian’s humanist manifesto. He makes the same point I kept making (and really, it’s hard not to – it’s so obvious):
Julian Baggini has now published his Heathen’s Manifesto, which he begs atheists to read. I wish I could understand the motivation behind it. It seems to be based on the premise that atheists, and new atheists in particular — an unidentified assemblage of nonbelievers who are, it seems, strident, obtuse, impolite, and seek to banish religion from the world — need to grow up, be sensible and kind, and ally themselves with their allies amongst religious believers, something that, so far, they seem disinclined to do. I sometimes simply despair when I read Baggini, because he never really identifies any of these supposedly rude, self-centred, self-praising atheists, nor does he provide an example of the kind of thing that he seems to object to so much. In order to say that we need a change in attitude, he has to show who is exhibiting the attitude he so much deplores, and the entire series on Heathen’s progress over the last six months or so never identifies any particular person as the kind of unbeliever who needs to change his or her attitude. What Baggini seems to have done is to accept that the strident responses of religious believers to the so-called “new” atheism are unquestionably justified. However, in my own reading on both sides of this divide, I have to say that the most caustic voices, the shrillest and most strident condemnations have come from the religious side of this particular divide, and Baggini has yet to show that this is not so.
What Baggini seems to have done is to accept that the strident responses of religious believers to the so-called “new” atheism are unquestionably justified.
Exactly. His way of talking about the so-called “new” atheism simply assumed that everybody knows what it is and what is so terrible about it. That’s a very odd thing for a philosopher to do. Philosophers are generally very familiar with the idea that what “everybody knows” may well be wrong. Things that “everybody knows” can be drastic simplifications, or empty banalities, or uninformed prejudice, or based on misunderstanding, or confused, or incoherent, or propped up by nothing but long habit, or gut-level hatreds dressed up as knowledge.
The much-circulated hatred of outspoken atheists relies on a huge amount of dressing up mindless loathing as something more respectable, and once again it’s odd to see a philosopher playing along. It’s odd for a philosopher not to recognize the sheer banality of the hatred and thus avoid adding to it by producing more of the same.
There’s a lot of that kind of “everybody knows” floating around, after all. “Everybody knows” things about women, and immigrants, and poor people, and gays, and blacks, and Jews, and intellectuals, and liberals. The stuff that “everybody knows” about atheists is just more of the same old bigotry-masquerading-as-facts. It never fails to surprise me when even some atheists engage in it.
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Activists persecuted for promoting women’s rights
Many British Asian women report hate mail and death threats for dealing with issues such as forced marriage and honour-based violence.
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Priest accidentally shows naughty slides at primary school
He projected the images onto a screen during a meeting for parents preparing for First Holy Communion. They were naughty pics of [gasp] men.
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The debut of the Heresy Club
The Heresy Club is a group blog of young heretical bloggers – Alex Gabriel, Siana Bangura, Rhys Morgan, Richard Nicholl and Hayley Stevens. You’re already familiar with Alex and Rhys if you’ve been reading B&W for awhile: they were starring daily back in January. I met both of them at QED, and Hayley as well. Check them out and if you like the blog, spread the word!
To be young and heretical in 2012 is to experience the intense realities of superstitious thought.
In our schools, we see science teachers treat Genesis with kid gloves. We see intereference in students’ private lives who blaspheme online. We see religious worship in British classrooms, and prayer creeping unconstitutionally back into American schools. Those of us at religious schools see indoctrination and sectarianism first hand, often with sex-negativity, misogyny and heterosexism in tow.
On campus, we’re targeted by evangelists from day one. We get threats of violence at atheist events, face censorship attempts from student unions, witness fellow students walking out of lectures on Darwin. Our universities still frequently make Christian chaplains central to pastoral care, and cling to Christian prayers and mottos from their Latin-speaking pasts.
They’re clearly paying attention, and the right kind of attention.
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Another diocese heard from
It seems odd that the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne publishes an article by an Anglican minister, but I guess it’s just the usual ecumenical – interfaith – he hates Them so we love him – any port in a storm deal. Catlicks and Prods join hands to fight the real enemy, Teh Atheists.
the sad atheists are those who do take the God question seriously. They know that the stakes are high and that without God it is notoriously difficult to make sense of the world or of human life or death or joy or pain or love-making or justice or even, at the philosophical end of the spectrum, of truth itself.
Do they? You sure about that?
I ask because it’s also notoriously difficult to make sense of the world with “God.” I claim it’s a good deal more difficult. Since god is generally defined as perfectly good, there is a huge difficulty in making sense of such an entity creating a world in which living organisms develop via natural selection. Natural selection is not the creation of a being who is “good” in any sense we can understand (which is, after all, the one we’re talking about).
Our minister was disappointed by the quality of the last GAC. No thinking, you see.
Where I hope for serious engagement with the issues of atheism and the nature of science, the convention is more like a Christian revival meeting: a rally for the faithful with abundant noise, laughter and loud affirmation. Only the songs and the interjected ‘amens’ are missing. In 2010 it was quickly clear that the gathering was not about debating issues of faith and (non-)belief nor to defend the assumption that science is the only source of truth. The overwhelming and simplistic dogma was that religious people are misguided and unwilling to accept the clear evidence of the natural sciences.
But then he doesn’t do any of that kind of thinking himself, in this piece. He just talks some waffle that’s basically a demand for more deference please.
We need to examine the implications of living in an increasingly secular society where a harmonious future will only be forged through mutual tolerance. Trust can be built, but only when beliefs and values are clear, and when all parties accept the limitations imposed by living in a multicultural democratic state. As Christians we ought to preach the Gospel in word and deed, we ought to persuade others, offering good reasons for our hope. But coercion and manipulation are ungodly and will bring disrepute to the Church and its Lord.
In other words, if we just preach and nag and pressure, but don’t actually kick or hit, please demonstrate mutual tolerance by shutting the fuck up about us, amen.
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The entirely parochial judgment of Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish is doing his Brendan O’Neill act. There is no view from nowhere, therefore no claim is better founded than any other claim, it’s all just likes and dislikes.
[D]espite invocations of fairness and equality and giving every voice a chance, classical liberals, like any other ideologues (and ideologues we all are), divide the world into “us” and “them.” It’s just that rather than “us” being Christians and “them” Jews or vice-versa, “us” are those who subscribe to the tenets of materialist scientific inquiry and “them” are those who don’t, those who, in the entirely parochial judgment of liberal rationalists, subscribe to nonsense and superstition.
“Entirely parochial” is it. So it’s entirely parochial to prefer evidence-based engineering to the magic kind?
I’m not criticizing liberals for standing up for, and with, their own, only for pretending that they are, or could be, doing something else. Liberals know, without having to think further about it, that those who oppose global warming on religious grounds are just ignorant nuts; and they know that those who deny the Holocaust, no matter what so-called facts and statistics they marshal, are just bad people; and they know that those who want creationism taught in the schools are just using the vocabulary of open inquiry as a Trojan horse.
That’s shockingly ignorant as well as smug. I’d like to see him tell Richard Evans that nonsense about the Holocaust; I’d like to see him tell Barbara Forrest that nonsense about creationism.
But the desire of classical liberals to think of themselves as above the fray, as facilitating inquiry rather than steering it in a favored direction, makes them unable to be content with just saying, You guys are wrong, we’re right, and we’re not going to listen to you or give you an even break. Instead they labor mightily to ground their judgments in impersonal standards and impartial procedures (there are none) so that they can pronounce their excommunications with clean hands and pure — non-partisan, and non-tribal — hearts.
Not for the first time, I have a strong desire to see Stanley Fish in a situation where this kind of irresponsible coat-trailing would be an unaffordable luxury because he depended on the findings of properly conducted inquiry for his very life.
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Girl, boy killed in Afghan acid attack ‘over friendship’
No one has claimed the bodies, which are still in Ghazni hospital, police said.
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Ecclesiastical interlude
PZ is at this very moment in a church. Not a joke this time, he really is – he’s there to observe Chris Stedman in action. His tweets sound very…restless.
- You know what would be a crappy April fools joke? If I said I found Chris Stedman persuasive. So I won’t.
- It’s a very *nice* room, with very *nice* people. Jeez, but I detest “nice”.
- I learned that Stedman did good rewarding work in assisted living home. How NICE!
- Stedman: religion studies major. Seminarian. Pro-religion advocate. Atheist? Not one word for atheism today. Weird.
Not weird; typical.
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Andrew Copson on getting the bishops out
The arguments for keeping them in are all terrible.
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Anti-abortion campaigners target women at Brighton clinic
Virtually every woman, including staff, is accosted by opinionated protesters as she walks through the gates of the clinic.