NOT MADE OF WOOD: A Psychiatrist Discovers His Own Profession

by Jan Foudraine ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1974

Foudraine is a crusading young (or so he seems) Dutch psychiatrist whose message is a familiar one here in the land of Thomas Szasz and Eric Berne, but they are a world away from Foudraine's melancholy reality. This is a professional autobiography with a strong personal dimension, for Foudraine's own experience becomes part of an ongoing private dialectic of expectations and contradictory facts. In medical school he had hoped to develop a Freudian sensitivity but was, instead, treated to exhibitions of Kraepelinian diagnostics; and then, during his clinical internship, he was advised to stick with shock and insulin while his instinct pointed to Horney, Adler and a therapeutic approach to schizophrenia. After a period of barely tolerated experimentation, he joined the staff of an enlightened American hospital. But there, too, he arrived out of context; with a head full of Sullivan and Laing he could not fail to perceive certain ""schizophrenogenic"" pretenses inherent in the very notion of a mental hospital. Foudraine responded to every patient in a brave, dignified, adamant fashion and achieved results (the case histories are affective and telling); but the progress was gradual. Intellectually he still relies on his mentors, citing Rogers, Szasz, Goffman and others to conclude that ""Psychiatry is part of the social sciences. Its subject matter is the communicative behavior of man as a role-playing and rule-following symbolic animal."" A strong, honestly engaged book that does not quite belong to the cool, cloudless realm of psychiatric best-sellers (a foggy translation is only one reason) but which can be read with a great deal of satisfaction.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1974

Categories: NONFICTION