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The term whig history refers to the ill-considered celebration of contemporary success. Paris's whiggish book, describing the current “decline” in psychoanalysis within North American academic psychiatry, is intended to portray the superiority of the latest fashion in relying on biological metaphors. No attention whatever is paid to the prevalent corruption of medicine thanks to the power of drug companies. Academic “research” gets praised in contrast to clinical wisdom—the only realm where psychoanalysis gets accorded any merit.
Nobody could dispute that analysts, while in power within psychiatry, arrogantly ignored developments within psychopharmacology. In my view, the result of what Paris paints as the triumph of the biological perspective means that we are back essentially where we were at the turn of the twentieth century, when classification and heredity were the two key concepts. Psychiatry is now in such a dead end that medical students are unlikely to want to enter psychiatric residency programs—hardly support for Paris's triumphant opening to chapter 1: “Contemporary psychiatry has a respected and secure place within medicine.”
No attention whatever gets paid here to unfortunate side effects of medication, and no thought is given to how prominent a role was once played by relying on lobotomies. Analysts have played a respectable role in challenging fads that did significant damage, a tale apt to be forgotten today. Paris repeats the mantra of “science,” and winds up by italicizing in his last sentence the word doubt, but throughout his book there is no skepticism directed toward what is most currently fashionable. Categories of DSM that include two decimal points have made North American psychiatry a laughingstock among sophisticated practitioners elsewhere in the world.
Analysts made abundant mistakes of their own in the past, which people like Paris are repeating in a new way from their own positions of power and authority. Although one might never guess i