The Frantic Retreat From the Mind to the Brain: American Psychiatry in Mauvaise Foi

I have tried to demonstrate that American psychiatry is retreating to self-confinement within a biological paradigm that manifests Sartre's notion of bad faith. I have presented five alternative paradigms: those of Freudian psychoanalysis, Husserl's phenomenology, Sartre's existentialism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Kohut's psychology of the self, which are authentic in that they deal directly with the basic choices and issues that every human being in society has to contend with and they recognize fully in their various ways the etiologic importance of personal and collective psychic mythology and psychic realities.

I have reviewed the dangers of self-pronounced “eclecticism” and have warned how this attempt to avoid facing the issues and to hide behind an inauthentic and confused orientation may be responded to by society with a massive antipsychiatry movement and a spate of malpractice suits. Abroms (1983) recognizes that “Eclecticism has too much the connotation of superficiality, of ‘jack-of-all-trades, master of none,’ to capture the stringent requirements of modern psychiatric professionalism” (p. 744), and he takes a constructive step forward in suggesting his conception of “serial pluralism.” We need more ideas like this.