Author: Ophelia Benson

So someone has finally told France – psst, Freud kind of got things wrong. Tiens! Sans blague?

A war of words has erupted among French psychiatrists after the publication of a “black book” that lambasts the teaching of Sigmund Freud and blames his followers for setting back mental health care in France by decades. In a country that is one of the last redoubts of pure Freudian psychoanalysis, the book has been like shock treatment for many in the white-coat establishment who accuse the authors of grovelling to the “Anglo-Saxon” trend towards behaviour-based mental therapy. The news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, which published extracts of the 800-page work last month, was bombarded with letters charging it with “fascist rhetoric” and leading a “communist-style” propaganda campaign. One leading psychoanalyst described the book as a “fanatical chargesheet placed firmly in the camp of the revisionists”, while another accused its authors of “scientism” – an excessive belief in the power of science.

Scientism! Oh no! Anything but that. Guesswork, intuition, aura-manipulation, healing touch – anything.

In France, around 70% of French psychiatrists base their treatment of depression, phobias and other mental ailments on Freudian theory. Most countries now use of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) – which works by helping a patient understand and overcome patterns of behaviour. Pure French Freudians see this as a superficial mechanism designed to return patients to usefulness in the results-based societies of “le monde Anglo-Saxon”.

Results-based! God, is that philistine or what. Those stupid empirical pragmatic Anglo-Saxons, actually wanting results when they’re mentally ill – actually wanting to get better and not feel depressed or phobic. How superficial. How trivial. How shallow. How utilitarian, returning patients to ‘usefulness’ – so much better and more authentic for them to be miserable and unable to function. Imagine, wanting to be useful – for instance to your children if you have them, to your friends, to the people you work with and for – if you’re a teacher, for instance, or a doctor, or a scholar, or a poet. Why would people like that want to be useful? So much better for them to curl up in a corner whimpering.

France is the world’s biggest per capita consumer of anti-depressants and tranquillisers as the result, the authors claim, of the failures of the couch-and-notebook school and the lack of any alternative. One section of the book entitled “Victims Of Psychoanalysis” contains painful accounts from French mothers of autistic children. Freudian theory had it that autism was caused by the mother’s “unconscious wish that the child should not exist”. A Swiss doctor accuses the French mental health authorities of being responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 heroin addicts up to the mid-1990s by refusing to countenance methadone treatment. This was deemed by Freudians as a crude way of suppressing the symptoms of the problem, rather than addressing the inner cause.

Oh dear. So they kept addressing the inner cause until…oh dear.

According to the book, only last year Freudians persuaded the health ministry to suppress a report from the National Medical Research Institute which attested to the effectiveness of cognitive behaviour therapy. In the view of the critics, Freudian psychoanalysis is not a science but a hermetic cult “immunised against proof” which has inflicted untold damage on the nation’s mental health by opposing treatments that are known to work and by enforcing a politically correct “pensee unique” across the country.

Pensée unique. I like that – good phrase.

But the Freudians see the book as an attempt to introduce new-fangled American theories into France. Treatments such as cognitive behaviour therapy – they say – are dehumanising, merely conditioning the patient to overcome his symptoms and render him “productive” again. Freud, they argue, recognises human complexity.

But even if not feeling miserable does make one ‘productive’ again, which no doubt it does, one, that’s not the only thing it does, and two, being productive is not necessarily a bad thing, is it. It’s not just being Charlie Chaplin in ‘Modern Times’ or Dilbert. It could mean being an effective mental health doctor, for one thing. An artist, a dancer, a singer, a dentist, a gardener, a farmer. Furthermore, even if Freud does recognise human complexity, here’s a news flash: he’s not the only one who does. And a lot of the ‘complexity’ he recognises is his own invention. I’d rather just treat the symptoms, thanks.

Some more bottom.

Belatedly reading the comments on Michael’s piece on Bush’s swell money-saving plan I see that I’m not the only one who experienced genre-confusion. I thought it was all sarcasm, other people thought it was all news. One commenter objected to the mix and to the sarcasm, saying the news is so disgusting that jokes don’t quite play. Michael’s answer is interesting.

OK. I’m sorry to be so expository, but here’s the deal. First: I don’t think this post is funny. It wasn’t meant to be funny, and I honestly didn’t imagine that anyone would laugh at it. I did not laugh while I was writing it, for what that’s worth; I wrote it in a cold gray fury. Second: the reason I embedded real quotes in the second, “satirical” half of this post – George Bush’s, Barbara Bush’s, Tom DeLay’s – is that I think the (obviously) racialized subtext of those remarks is worth calling attention to in precisely this way. Third: the suspension of Davis-Bacon is obscene. And in the context of the Gulf Coast, it goes well beyond the ordinary screw-the-unions policy of the Bush GOP. It verges on a kind of local/national colonialism which, I think, has everything to do with race, poverty, and the question of who gets to sit on Trent Lott’s porch. I hoped that would be clear.

For the record, I don’t think humans have yet invented a prose genre adequate to this moment in US history.

Just so. I certainly went into a hot red fury when I read the real news stories. I would not have thought it possible. Which just shows what a chump I am. I find it hard to believe I could think any worse of the rodent in the White House than I already did, and yet I would not have thought it possible. How wrong can you be.

And he’ll get away with it. A serious tone and some Biblical-sounding language (this city shall rise again – the word ‘shall’ goes a long way, you know) and he’ll get away with further impoverishing people who’ve already been quite impoverished enough, one would have thought. While he and his friends get richer than ever. In full view of everyone. It’s unbelievable – but there it is.

From the CNN Money story Michael linked to.

President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage…The Davis-Bacon law requires federal contractors to pay workers at least the prevailing wages in the area where the work is conducted. It applies to federally funded construction projects such as highways and bridges. Bush’s executive order suspends the requirements of the Davis-Bacon law for designated areas hit by the storm…”The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities,” [California Rep. George] Miller said. “President Bush should immediately realize the colossal mistake he has made in signing this order and rescind it and ensure that America puts its people back to work in the wake of Katrina at wages that will get them and their families back on their feet,” Miller said.

No, see, because if they were responsible people they would have jumped in the SUV on August 28 and driven like a bat out of hell to Idaho or someplace like that. If they’re still in the area, that means they were irresponsible and shif’less and dependent on the federal gummint and expecting a handout and feeling a sense of entitlement. Some nice healthy outdoor work for substandard wages is just the ticket for people like that – teaches them to quit messing around and get jobs managing federal agencies so they can buy an SUV to get out of town in whenever there’s a big storm. See? It all works out. God planned it that way. And Barbara Bush is pleased for them.

There’s an interesting news article at Michael Bérubé’s place.

The President’s mother, Barbara Bush, pointed out that no-wage contracts can be extremely popular for people devastated by Hurricane Katrina: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary,” she remarked on National Public Radio, “is that some of them are singing with happiness. And many of them were idle anyway, so this could work out very well for them.”

President Bush did not say which industries would be eligible for the contracts, but one White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, remarked that the affected areas were ideal for growing cotton, and “cotton is a really great fabric in all kinds of weather—light, comfortable, versatile. I think we’ll need a lot of it in the next few years, particularly in the regions most vulnerable to hurricanes.”

Tom DeLay (R- Tx.) agreed, quickly rounding up a group of evacuees for emergency planting. With the help of law enforcement officials from Gretna, Louisiana, who surrounded the evacuees and began to march them to the fields at gunpoint, DeLay pulled aside three of them and asked, “Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?”

I thought the whole article was a surrealistic joke, until I looked at the first link and realized it was to an actual news story. Uhhhh – wait. What was all that bullshit on Thursday then? That had conservative commentators in such a panic that Bush might actually decide gross inequality is not such a good idea? Was that all just camouflage? Well what a fucking stupid question – of course it damn well was.

That miserable loathsome overpaid his entire talentless privileged cronyist life bastard. There’s just no low too low, is there.