Making Minds and Madness (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780521888639)

Why do "maladies of the soul" such as hysteria, anxiety disorders, or depression wax and wane over time? Through a study of the history of psychiatry, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen provocatively argues that most mental illnesses are not, in fact, diseases but the product of varying expectations shared and negotiated by therapists and patients. With a series of fascinating historical vignettes, stretching from Freud's creation of false memories of sexual abuse in his early hysterical patients to today's promotion and marketing of depression by drug companies, Making Minds and Madness offers a powerful critique of all the theories, such as psychoanalysis and biomedical psychiatry, that claim to discover facts about the human psyche while, in reality, producing them. Borch-Jacobsen proposes such objectivizing approaches should be abandoned in favor of a constructionist and relativist psychology that recognizes the artifactual and interactive character of psychic productions instead of attempting to deny or control it.

Author: Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
ISBN-10: 0521888638
ISBN-13: 9780521888639
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/28/2009
Pages: 276
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.70h x 7.00w x 0.70d