Culture and psychology

Sure there is a cultural bias. When Freud started out hysteria was the fashionable mental condition, today it's depression.

Magnus wrote: »

Sure there is a cultural bias. When Freud started out hysteria was the fashionable mental condition, today it's depression.

Interesting you say that. That was the topic of this years APPI [ Psycchoanalytic professional body] congress.

SLUSK wrote: »

So it does not seem to be that mental illness is considered the same among different cultures. So which cultures are right and which cultures are wrong when it comes to mental illness?

It depends on whether the person can fit into the nook that the society affords them.

SLUSK wrote: »

There seems to be a cultural bias towards what is considered mental illness. In some tribal cultures people who we label schizophrenic would be considered to be holy men such as a "medicine man".

Buddha renounced all material wealth and started living like a beggar. This is something that would probably give a person a psychiatric diagnosis today.

So it does not seem to be that mental illness is considered the same among different cultures. So which cultures are right and which cultures are wrong when it comes to mental illness?

Post-structuralism makes various criticisms of scientific disciplines based on cultural differences. So, someone like Foucault makes the arguement in History of Madness that psychology creates what it comes to represent. There isn't a universal, hidden truth of madness, there is no right or wrong way to treat madness, but rather cultures come to create and then treat (or hide, or glorify) the mad based on their construction of madness.

That idea is drawn from his larger body of work. Very bascially, he argues that subjects (individuals) are not constituted prior to discourse (language), but rather constituted in discourse, which means that an individuals identity/ies, like madness, like sexuality, is not a matter of a pre-discursive natural fact, but rather a result of cultural and socialy constructed norms. So, and this is probably not going to find much agreement here, mental illness, as it's treated within our culture, is neither treated rightly or wrongly, but rather is a result of the specific scientific discourses which produce it and then come to treat it.

Post-structuralist theory in general is open to a lot of criticism, but for a (cultural) question like this it gives some interesting answers. It would also, in general, be opposed to some like Freud for reducing psychoanalysis to universals through the Oedipus complex, not to mention that he is a great example of how a psychoanalytic discourse comes to produce the subject which psychoanalysts would then come to treat, rather then those subjects pre-existing psychoanalysis.

Odysseus wrote: »

I a tad rusty on my Foucault so forgive me if I'm off track. As a side I was attacked here recently for recommendating history of madness, a excellent read.

It is excellent, but it needs to be put in to the context of his larger project to make sense I think, and a lot of the criticism directed at it doesn't put it in to that context.

Odysseus wrote:

I was wondering if you could expand your thoughts on the last paragraph, especially if you read Freud through Lacan, in terms that the Oedipus Complex is the constitution of the subject in language, in that light would you still see it as a reduction to a universal, in terms that as subjects we are all constituted in the world of language. I know Foucault used to attend Lacan's seminars at one stage.

I can't through Lacan unfortunately, I'm still trying to get to grips with him so I don't yet fully recognise his influence on the post-structuralists.

I can say, and I do know they were influenced by Lacan, that Deleuze and Guattari attacked Freud in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In Anti Oedipus they attacked him for esthablishing the familial triad (Father, Mother, Child) as the organising cell of society, which enforces neurosis that in turn help to prop up the capitalist system. In A Thousand Plateaus they attack him for being reductionist, but that is in the context of their own work, which is an attempt to get away from hierarchal ways of thinking based on unitys, dualisms, and universals. They call it multiplicities, and use an example of "The Rhizome", which I don't know how to explain without at least a 1,000 words, so I'm not going to try, sorry.

I'm not massively impressed by Deleuze and Guattari, but, as far as I know, they're probably the most explicit critics of Freud in the post-structuralist movement. I do know there's been a move in social theory to try and combine some of the post-structuralist work with psychoanalysis, to try and get away from the self being constituted without (within discursive regimes of power) and recognizing the importance of the 'inner' self as it were, and the unconscious. How much of that stems from Lacan I'm not sure, and how successful that will be I'm not sure either. Post-structuralism is very interesting in my opinion, but I'm not convinced of its use. Or maybe its sanity.

hotspur wrote: »

Cannibal you may be interested in the work of Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek in relation to some of this subject matter. Here is a link of a wikipedia type site devoted to him and Lacan:
http://nosubject.com/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek:Articles

Also, I can't be the only regular here to laugh at what SLUSK must be making of how this thread accidentally turned into a real discussion.

I saw him give a lecture a month or two ago, though I've never read any of his stuff. He was great though, a hell of a performer and quite funny. I don't know how much I'd agree with what he was saying, but he definitely struck me as someone who has dedicated themselves body, mind, and soul to their work. His commitment to what he's doing seemed absolutely complete. Possibly too completley :pac: I can't imagine how he manages to get himself up in the morning and walk down to the shops to get some sugar and tea bags without falling in to some kind of prolonged existential quandry over the meaning of a traffic light.