A highly compelling, only occasionally overstated assessment of the role of psychotropic drugs in the treatment of mental...
A history and personal exploration of psychotropic drugs and medical procedures for treating mental illness and depression.
In this ambitious undertaking, psychologist Slater (Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother, 2013, etc.) applies vigorous research and intimate reflection to the issues involved with treating mental suffering. Along the way, she asserts thought-provoking yet potentially controversial views and conclusions. The author is open about her long-standing struggles with depression. “My adulthood,” she writes, “has been marked—marred—by periodic depressions preceded by stupid, inane manias.” She is also fairly transparent about her agenda: “I wrote this book in part so I could examine some of the drugs I take, and others I never have. I wrote it in part hoping I would find, in my research, that there really are physical substrates to mental suffering.” Through stories, case studies, and scientific investigation, Slater considers a broad spectrum of treatments used over the last century. The author includes discussions of the early successes of Thorazine and Lithium; early antidepressants, including the phenomenon of Prozac and her lengthy experiences with that medication; some enlightening examples of positive placebo tests and startlingly effective experiments with hallucinogenic drugs; and an overview of the evolution of relevant medical procedures, including “neural implants, the only malleable and reversible form of psychosurgery.” Slater also confronts the shockingly random nature of decision-making processes within the medical and pharmaceutical communities, whether in the development of psychotropic drugs, the prescribed treatments, or the actual diagnosis of the various psychological disorders. Ultimately, the author finds great hope in hallucinogens such as LSD, “magic mushrooms,” and MDMA. “The psychedelics allow patients stuck in self-destructive patterns of thought or behavior to view themselves and their role in the universe in a radically different light,” she writes. “They appear to illuminate death, or the limit of life, and in so doing to underscore its preciousness.”
A highly compelling, only occasionally overstated assessment of the role of psychotropic drugs in the treatment of mental health issues.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55253-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Eminently useful, although somewhat contradictory, this admiring intellectual biography of an iconoclastic psychoanalyst recapitulates the strengths and weaknesses of its subject's thought. Karen Horney (18851952) played a key role in the development of psychoanalysis between the wars and transcended her discipline as a feminist thinker. Horney scholar Paris (English/Univ. of Florida) surveys the psychoanalyst's ideas while locating their sources in her personal experiences. He builds on the work of previous biographers Jack Rubins (Karen Horney, 1978) and Susan Quinn (A Mind of Her Own, not reviewed), who brought messy details of Horney's life to light without, he contends, fully relating them to her mature theory. For Paris, Horney's ideas represent her effort to come to grips with her own problems—to perform, as her best-known title has it, a ``self-analysis.'' After a lucid account of Horney's youth in Germany, Paris treats her early, relatively orthodox essays and her subsequent development of a theory of feminine psychology. He shows how pondering social concerns led Horney to consider the cultural dimensions of neurosis and eventually to develop a new paradigm of psychological structure as a complete, ongoing system, rather than an individual story only understandable through recourse to its occluded origins. Her adult life was thorny: Paris discusses her ``female Don Juanism,'' her battles in the bitter psychoanalytic arena, and her difficult affairs with famed rivals like Erich Fromm. Extensive commentaries on Horney's late thought tie these strands together, focusing on ideas about pride and defense strategies expressed in Our Inner Conflicts and Neurosis and Human Growth. Throughout, Paris maintains allegiance to Horney's conviction that we each have a true inner self, even while he depicts stark discontinuities among the facets of her own personality. It will take a grander synthesis than his, one that incorporates wider historical and cultural context, to really resolve this tension between Horney's thought and life. In the interim, however, this serves as a fine introduction to a stimulating thinker whose influence continues to rise as therapy becomes more pragmatic and less dogmatic.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05956-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Madness and pathos alternate in these selections from the controversial psychoanalyst's (18971957) papers, which document the scientific delusions and personal difficulties that preoccupied him from the mid-1930s through his immigration to America on the eve of WW II. Because materials remain missing, this sequel to 1988's Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 18971922 begins in 1934. In the intervening years of 192333, Reich's studies of the function of the orgasm and of genital sexuality's effects on character found him moving from psychoanalysis toward physiology and biology. Settling in Oslo, Reich put his radical political activism on the back burner while beginning a new program of experiments to examine nothing less than the fundamental energies of life. The excerpts from his journals and letters collected here form a streamlined narrative of his struggles to gain recognition for the theories to which this work gave rise. Reich believed that his insights represented ``the greatest discovery of the century.'' Readers need not be molecular biologists, however, to be skeptical of this claim: The laboratory jottings reproduced here seem like so much hocus-pocus. Meanwhile, Reich's ravings (``the living arises from the nonliving!!'') escape the lab to infect his accounts of a disintegrating home life. He can't seem to reflect personally on sex without proclaiming, ``My theory is correct!'' His children remain alienated from him, and his lover leaves him, but Reich consoles himself with the idea that his suffering is that of a man of genius. With his 1939 ``discovery'' of orgone, Reich seems to have gone over the edge for sure: ``I yearn for a beautiful woman with no sexual anxieties who will just take me! Have inhaled too much orgone radiation.'' At this point, the deepening shadow of Nazi expansion forces the Jewish and communist Reich's emigration to a credulous New York. Reich comes across as a crank, but a human figure all the same. Ideal material for a screenplay about a 20th-century mad scientist.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-11247-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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