Reviews for Psychology Survey, Vol. 2

The average rating for Psychology Survey, Vol. 2 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-04 00:00:00 Rmi Lauzon Reading Michel Foucault's Madness made me feel stupid. Then smart. Then stupid again. Then smart for a little. Then okay. Then stimulated. Then relived to finish. I don't know much about Mr. Foucault but apparently he's written extensively about what contemporary Americans would call mental health issues but he calls (at least in translation) Madness. I'm not offended. Getting offended about his terminology would be stupid. A quick search indicates Foucault wrote at least one other book on the subject (Madness and Civilization or The History of Madness, depending on the edition, apparently). I'm not sure where this shorter work fits contextually but from what I can tell the first edition of Madness was a precursor to Madness and Civilization while the revised publication followed a year after the publication of Madness and Civilization. This book (uh, the one I'm reviewing) also was published previously as Mental Illness and Psychology. Got that straight? Good. Anyway, I'm relieved answering essay questions on the first hundred pages of Madness was not required. Foucalt writes some LONG sentences, with many clauses, and I had to re-read a few pages over to create meaning beyond the skim level. And every now and then he'd say something like, “And those three points summarize the Freudian approach to physiological organic treatment.” And I'd be, like, “What the fuck? Three points? Let me go back. No, I see two. Wait, now I see four. Three? Which point do I drop?” I was quite proud when I could identify the correct three points. Were I studying Madness I wouldn't even bother reading before class. I'd wait until after the class's conversation to read. That's not to say the first hundred pages of Madness are not a worthwhile read. Wading through the text is a noble and stimulating struggle. I've not read a book in years that contained this many words I've never seen before. The first hundred pages focus primarily on the definition and origins of madness along with descriptions of both its treatment and societal context. I think. He argues against framing madness as a regression into childhood. I don't know anyone who would believe the assertion that madness is a regression into childhood. Remember, this book was last revised fifty years ago. So even someone with only a rudimentary understanding of psychology recognizes the dated nature of the analysis. I'd love to hear Foucault's take on psychiatric medication, etc, but he's dead, so I can't. Foucault switches gears in the last forty pages to the point where I felt like I was reading a different, and much more interesting, book. He analyzes the way mad (and I should clarify that he seems to be usually talking about severe mental illness, not garden variety depression) people have been treated, included and excluded, etc. in European society over time. And he argues that only through the presence of madness can man identify the normal. I think. “If carried back to its roots, the psychology of madness would appear to be not the mastery of mental illness and hence the possibility of its disappearance, but the destruction of psychology itself and the discovery of that essential, non-psychological because nonmoralizable relation that is the relation between Reason and Unreason.” Yeah. What he said. There are no typos in that sentence. I double-checked. Pg. 124. I don't regret reading Madness. The experience was a hell of a neurological workout. I wouldn't read more Foucalt, however, unless the book was more like the last 40 pages and less like the first 100. I feel guilty for not wanting to do the hard work associated with the first hundred pages, but I'd read the last 40 pages again. So Madness is a cool little book with a whole lot of intellectual energy packed into its thin profile. But if I had to read another Foucault book I'd buckle down and face the text as a grim task that would be good for me. Sometimes I like reading books that make me feel that way. Sometimes I don't. Madness seems like a short introduction to Foucault's work, and that was good enough for me, for now.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-03 00:00:00 Martin Oswald One of the learned professor’s earliest known writings, and very obviously a graduate student’s work. The introduction is actually the best part, wherein the editor explains how the first draft (which is precisely not this text) was a more or less straightforward Marxist account of the issues at stake, and that the second draft substituted in heideggerian terminology for the Marxist arguments. Throughout, “the phrases are conveniently ambiguous. They could refer to his early Marxist analysis or to his later Heideggerian cultural account” (xxiv). Foucault revised it because of the “unstable relation of philosophical anthropology and social history” (xxvii), but after revision he “was not happy with the second version”—“and for good reasons,” as it became “an unstable synthesis [!] of early Heidegger’s existential account of Dasein as motivated by the attempt to cover up its nothingness and later Heidegger’s historical interpretation of our culture as constituted by its lack of understanding of the role of the clearing in both making possible and limited a rational account of reality” (id.). Text proper states its purpose as “to show that mental pathology requires methods of analysis different from those of organic pathology and that it is only by an artifice of language that the same meaning can be attributed to ‘illnesses of the body’ and ‘illnesses of the mind.’ A unitary pathology using the same methods and concepts in the psychological and physiological domains is now purely mythical” (10). One kickass way this plays out is that “if this subjectivity of the insane is both a call to an abandonment of the world, is it not of the world itself that we should ask the secret of its enigmatic status?” (56). Nice summary of Freudian theory follows, with the notion that there is a myth of a psychological substance, such as Freud’s libido or some other cat’s psychic force (24). It has been said that the final chapters (64 ff) are essentially capsules of his later writings in Madness & Civilization and elsewhere; it is quite correct that these brief final chapters anticipate the later developments. Probably not the best place to start with Foucault; maybe best left for Foucault maniacs.