Review of Joseph Dodds' “Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos”

Once in a while, a book enters the field of psychoanalysis that is so revolutionary that it turns everything upside down, causing us to question the very framework under which we operate. The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz (1961) was one such book. Rather than to assume that craziness resides within individuals, Szasz flipped the focus to examine the role of psychiatry within society at large. Symptoms of mental illness, including psychosis, became “problems in living,” while the social dictates and extreme practices of psychiatry became problems, rather than solutions. Szasz asserted that lobotomies, forced drug treatment, and involuntary hospitalization were little more than social indoctrination and abuses of power perpetrated by psychiatric authorities. By dismissing psychiatry as pseudo-science, or scientism, a view echoed by Foucault (1988) and Goffman (1961), Szasz helped to widen the scope of psychoanalysis. By identifying the importance of culture and social framework, he

illuminated how certain practices pose threats to people's freedom and dignity.

In some ways, Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos by Joseph Dodds (2011) is another revolutionary book that shifts our perspective through widening the scope of psychoanalysis still further. Dodds not only takes into account the cultural and social context in which our minds and profession reside, but he also includes the environmental context in which our bodies and other physical aspects of existence are housed. By pointing out that most psychoanalysts practice a psychology without ecology, his book reframes the nature of the problem once again, this time to address threats to the very life on Earth as we know it. When we sit with patients in the hermetically sealed environment o