Medicine: Supermen Under Fire

• Share

In modern times, practitioners who set out to cure the ills of the mind tend to be looked up to as supermen who may not be denied or defied. As such, they have taken over many of the attributes of power once vested in priests and kings, shamans and devil doctors. How are they using their powers over the minds of men?

Badly, says Sebastian de Grazia, a layman, in Errors of Psychotherapy (Doubleday; $3). His complaint: the psychotherapists are ignoring moral values and man's "communal nature." Badly, says Psychologist Robert Lindner in Prescription for Rebellion, out this week (Rinehart; $3.50). His complaint: the psychotherapists are still hogtied by old ideas about moral values and the need for men to be like each other to live together.

Thunder from the Right. De Grazia, a social science researcher at George Washington University, is not choosy about the targets for his scattergun shots. Most of the time he lumps together all schools of mind-healing, from the Freudians to the Adlerians, Jungians, Rankians, psychobiologists and hypnotists. Perhaps, he says, the trouble is that they simply do not know how to heal a sick mind. Indeed: "They may even aggravate the disorders they seek to cure."

For one thing, De Grazia complains, modern mind-healers take a pride in passing no "moral" judgments. But, he argues, their very silence while a patient dredges filthy misdeeds from a murky past is a form of moral judgment—acquiescence. And though most psychotherapists deny that they tell their patients what to do, De Grazia contends that they do it all the time—and if they do not, they are short-changing sufferers who have gone to them for help.

De Grazia's panacea for mental ills has three parts: 1) recognition of the moral nature of the neurotic problem, 2) an institution to give moral assistance promptly wherever needed, and 3) a model man of ideal character, in whose image patients would be remade.

Thunder from the Left. Lindner, dubbed a "lay analyst" by the Brahmins of psychiatry because he is a Ph.D. but no M.D., is a practicing analyst in Baltimore. He has a horror of conformity. The idea that each man must adjust himself to the mass of his fellows means slavery, he cries: "Partisans of causes, criers of ideologies, makers of philosophies and servitors of religion ... all of them aim, by exploiting the adjustment fallacy, to enslave man."

He goes on: "Most of the magic advertised by psychiatry, some of what passes for psychoanalysis, much of clinical psychology, all of religion, and a good deal of the less pretentious arts of medicine and social service, is based upon a cult of passivity and surrender." The Apostle Paul, Lindner complains, took Jesus' rebellious creed and made of it a soporific distillation which has "softened the muscles of resistance to exploitation."

"Human beings," says Lindner, "are enclosed by an iron triangle . . . One side ... is the medium in which they must live; the second is the equipment they have or can fashion with which to live; the third is the fact of their mortality . . . If there is purpose to life, [it] must be to break through the triangle that thus imprisons humanity into a new order of existence."