You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What is encountered in therapeutic practices as a psychological “disorder” can be understood less and less without the influence of “social media.” This is the dismaying experience of all who have treated anorexic individuals and the fact that there are powerful influences from websites that encourage young women to eat less and less and “hang in there” until death. Clinical nosology, which early on described family systems dynamics in this disorder, is expanding its modeling to include such influences. Anorexia is a seemingly unified solution to a wide variety of psychological conflict situations; such reasoning informs treatment management. The same could be said for obesity. And certainly also for alcoholism or other forms of drug addiction.
All three can no longer be fully explained by unconscious conflicts, but come about through a decision under unconscious pressure to conform. In retrospect, it seems as if the abandonment of the specificity hypothesis in psychosomatics (specific unconscious conflicts determine a specific clinical picture) was a beginning of this development. George Devereux had proposed the notion of “ethnopsychic disorder,” according to which social conflicts manifest individually; admittedly, today we need expanded notions to understand why so many people uniformly resort to “preformulated solutions” to quite different conflicts and problems. Stephen B. Levine, professor of psychiatry at Case Western University School of Medicine, contributes a distinct term: in a (second) preface he speaks of “larger cultural wars.”
Creating a calm place for reflection is the main concern of Evans and Evans’ book. They offer an immensely rich clinical tableau for gender dysphoria - that is, the observation that for the last 10 years or so, more and more (very) young people have been approaching appropriate institutions with a conscious desire, and sometimes an equally conscious demand, for gender reassignment. The married authors are both psychoanalysts with