Manufacturing Victim: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People

Rating:
Summary: Confusions and distortions
Review: Beware of confusing psychology, psichiatry, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Beware also of "throwing the baby with the bath water", as they say. There's no doubt the *pharmacological* industry is exploiting anything in *psychiatry* studies to come up with more and more products to sell to more and more people. Now what does this have to do with Freud and Jung? Everything we as humans make up to make sense of our lives is "pseudoscience", the confidence trick is in existing at all, in living, so if there's something that actually helps people and helps them make more sense of their situation, why should it be lumped in with the greedy CEO's at Pfilzer? People with difficulties in coping with life, alcoholics, junkies, suicides, anorexics, autistic, you name it - they are victims of their own confusions and masochism as well as external influences and genetic predisposition, it's a whole lot of factors that can't be treated magically with one single action, but it's not psychology making victims so just because it brings out the issue more clearly.

It depends a LOT on the kind of method used - and the person helping. I'm against mind manipulation as anyone, and it's psychiatry that's extending its scope and labelling anyone with a "disorder" that's partly a way to explain reactions that are common in people who share that specific problem but tends to ignore a person is a lot more than his or her own disorder/addiction/masochism. That looking at the bigger picture, that taking in the person as individual, different from all other who may share the same problems - that's what psychoanalysis does. When it's a temporary and non-dependent relation, not excessively unbalanced, the risks of 'manipulation' is very low - while the benefit of being help is tremendous. Ultimately it depends on individuals, not that "science" as a whole - psychoanalysis was never meant to be a science, it's a tool. And it works a lot better than any pill or psychiatric labelling. So be careful in what you criticize - our society could surely do with a lot more psychological (not pharmaceutical! it's two different things!) help for people even from a young age. It takes some ignorance to avoid acknowledging how many problems in the past went undiagnosed and as such caused emargination and even more suffering. We're all influenced of forces greater than our own choices, and when tools can be used to help people *stop* being victims, I find it very short-sighted to taint a whole area of positive work with such prejudices. Let's see, who's been historically against psychoanalysis and even psychiatry (which, when not too rigid or authoritiarian, is also very helpful for precise syndromes): the Nazis, Stalin, the Vatican and now Scientology. That'd be enough as recommendation, if it weren't for the fact that psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular were never meant to limit themselves at betraying individual differences by grouping persons under fixed labels to study as guinea pigs. Quite the opposite. It's one of the foundations of our culture, and it's been an extremely prolific and positive one. Don't confuse it with its abuses or commercial exploitations, or even with the new-agey simplifications that pass for 'self-help' these days.

Rating:
Summary: Victims, yes. But victims of whom?
Review: Decades ago Thomas Szasz published the definitive exposure of psychology as pseudoscience and psychiatry as pseudomedicine. Since then Robert Baker and others have published confirmations of Szasz's conclusions. They pointed out that, in every court case in which a psychiatrist gave ostensibly expert testimony, the other side called its own psychiatrist to contradict the first psychiatrist's supposedly expert opinion. And it is an observable fact that psychiatry, unlike any legitimate science, is a discipline in which two dissertations so incompatible that for either one to be valid the other must be incompetent nonsense can both be awarded Ph.D.s by the same department of the same university in the same year.
Now Tana Dineen has added testimony from her forty years as a practising psychologist to the revelations of Szasz and Baker. And eight years after the publication of the first edition of Dineen's book, the psychology hoax is still as widespread and dangerous as it was when Sigmund Freud first invented the moneymaking scam of psychoanalysis.
Dineen readily recognizes the worst scams of psychiatry for what they are. She is fully aware that the recovered memory hoax, unquestionably the most repulsive of all of the Psychology Industry's crimes against humanity, was invented for the sole purpose of enriching its creators and enabling them to exercise absolute power over persons who are indeed victims -- not of imaginary abusers but of the self-styled therapists.
Psychotherapy's bottom line depends on its success at manufacturing victims. According to its propagandists, not only are the relatives and friends of persons killed in the assault on the World Trade Center "traumatized victims." So is every person who encountered the atrocity by watching television or reading a newspaper.
Dineen's only weakness is that, while she denounces psychotherapy's excesses and self-serving practices, she continues to treat psychology per se as a legitimate science. Psychology is not a legitimate science. If persons who listen to compulsive talkers, nod sympathetically, and occasionally venture a comment designed to prove that they have been listening, are therapists, then bartenders and taxi drivers are therapists.

Rating:
Summary: A Devastating Critique
Review: If you suspect that psychotherapy is a pseudoscience, then this is probably the best book for you to read. It is both more informative and more easily readable than Ofshe's & Watter's "Therapy's Delusions" and Dawes' "House of Cards." Like these other excellent writers, Dineen exposes the faulty data, hypocrisies and outright lies which have made psychoanalysis the "most stupendous confidence trick of the twentieth century," as Peter Medawar has called it.

Rating:
Summary: A Devastating Critique
Review: If you suspect that psychotherapy is a pseudoscience, then this is probably the best book for you to read. It is both more informative and more easily readable than Ofshe's & Watter's "Therapy's Delusions" and Dawes' "House of Cards." Like these other excellent writers, Dineen exposes the faulty data, hypocrisies and outright lies which have made psychoanalysis the "most stupendous confidence trick of the twentieth century," as Peter Medawar has called it.

Rating:
Summary: Nation of Victims
Review: When a tragedy occurs at some school, office or worksite, policemen, firefighters, paramedics or rescue workers will rush to the scene to provide a much-needed service, saving lives. Increasingly, however, we see another so-called helping professional on the scene - the trauma or grief counsellor - who's been called in to save psyches.

Somehow, it's now the norm after every school shooting, car crash or airline disaster to bring in psychologists who, Moses-like, will lead those who survive the tragedy or even witnessed it to the promised land of "wellness." Somehow we've come to accept the idea that stranger with a few initials behind her name is needed to help us deal with the experience of violence or death.

Where did we ever get the infantile idea that after some tragedy - a parent's loss of a child, for example - we're supposed to be "healed"? Dr. Tana Dineen, in her book "Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People," answers to that question. And a fine and devastating answer it is. Well-researched, sharply focussed and leavened with numerous concrete examples, her critique of the profession of psychology should make you want to, well, burn your self-help books and motivational tapes.

The opening paragraph neatly sums up her argument: "Psychology presents itself as a concerned and caring profession working for the good of its clients, but the effects are damaged people, divided families, distorted justice, destroyed companies and a weakened nation."

That's a stinging indictment. And after you read Ms. Dineen's book you'll be hard pressed not to agree with it. Certainly, Dineen is careful to acknowledge that in the hands of dedicated researchers, psychology remains a respected field of scientific inquiry. The focus of her scorn is the clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and sundry counsellors and mental health practitioners who distort or ignore the research and reduce it to ego-stroking psychobabble and feel-good placebos.

A PhD in psychology herself, Dineen spent nearly 20 years as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in Ontario. In the mid-1990s, she packed it in. As she put it in an interview: "I couldn't maintain my integrity in a profession that is almost devoid of integrity. This book is my apology for decades of biting my lip about the pernicious effects psychologists are having on individuals and society."

Perhaps her most explosive argument is that refuting the concept of recovered memories. Dineen cites numerous cases where people, usually men, have been falsely accused of sexual abuse crimes based on such "memories." According to Dineen, there is no reputable scientific evidence that these memories are anything more than fanciful inventions. Because of this and other misuses of research, Dineen says psychologists should be barred from testifying in court as "experts" on human behaviour. Indeed, most of what psychologists is little more that job-creation, she argues. Therapists need patients, so they create disorders with which they can label their erstwhile consumers. In this way everybody becomes "abnormal" and in need of treatment.

The industry is also fond of inflating symptoms far beyond the original condition they once described. For example, the word "trauma" once referred to a physical injury. But now, after much "semantic inflation," trauma covers anything that upsets us. Ditto for "addiction;" it no longer refers to drug or alcohol abuse, but also to sex and shopping.

Psychology may have once been part of science's laudatory effort to mitigate life's hardships, but Dineen ably demonstrates how the psychology industry has gone, well, crazy in its attempt to pathologize every aspect of the human condition and turn every upset into a "dis-ease" in need of therapeutic treatment.

What Dineen's book ultimately reveals is the steady sentimentalization of society. A sentimentalist is someone in denial, and what she denies is reality. The sentimentalist assumes that good ends can be achieved without effort, self-discipline, patience or sacrifice. Such sentimentalism might be tolerated if it were confined to a deluded few. But western societies increasingly driven by sentimentalists promoting social engineering schemes. We are a society that runs whining to politicians who'll feel out pain or, more often than not, to a therapist who'll assure us that we aren't stupid, lazy or greedy, but victims of poor parenting.

In our secularized world, psychotherapy has replaced religion in that, like religion, it is what we turn to to cope with the vagaries of existence. The difference, though, is that psychology, unlike religion, seeks to eliminate those experiences that define what it is to be human. At the core of human experience is the mystery of both the grandeur and the misery of self-conscious mortality. Unlike animals, humans know they will die. Yet, if we have courage, we also learn that our awareness of death gives life its juice and joy. It is because our lives are so painfully transient that they can be so achingly meaningful.

Psychotherapy seeks to deny those experiences that make us human. As such, it is a threat to our freedom. As philosopher Leon Kass puts it, the ultimate aim of psychotherapy is "to order human experience in terms of easy, predictable contentment." But if we are always haunted by death, there is the need for character and courage to live with what we know is ineradicable. Psychotherapy, however, makes emotional security easy by eradicating the need for moral virtue.

This has political consequences: Individuals freed from moral responsibility are no longer citizens, but patients or victims unable to manage their lives. As Dineen writes: "The psychology industry considers and treats people as children who, regardless of age, experience or status, must be protected, guided, sheltered and disciplined." But this smothering individual responsibility for the sake of self-esteem creates a depoliticized society of contented creatures who need only to be administered and kept passified.

And that, as far as I can see, is a form of tyranny, albeit a nice one. If so, Dineen's book provides the valuable service of exposing the threat to our freedom posed by all those trauma counsellors rushing to rescue our shivering psyches.