Reviews for Challenging the therapeutic state

The average rating for Challenging the therapeutic state based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-25 00:00:00 Barry Burrus Matthews explores the Cartesian model for psychiatry that treats the body as a causal mechanism within a deterministic conception; this model, however, is inadequate for a field which purports to study the meaning of experiences: mental illness is not a breakdown of the "brain" per se, but a maladaptation to our environment. As such, mental illness needs to be conceived on new terms: Matthews proposes a model based on Merleau-Ponty's "body-subject" conception of perceiving beings. Merleau-Ponty's human being is an embodied person foremost; our very being manifests through our presence, our bodily actions. For example, when I become excited to see someone I haven't for a long time, the pitch and tone of my voice change, I wave my arms, smile, and so on. My excitement is manifest in my actions: we cannot say it exists separately from them. Matthews' new model for a psychiatry of body-subjects is not the strength of this work. The first half of the book is an explication of basic philosophical problems, such as objectivity-subjectivity, causality-correlation, explained in terms of their relevance to psychiatry. Several chapters towards the later part then explicate the body-subject, while later chapters delve into legal and ethical implications of the new schema. Matthews' new model is not explicated in detail, it remains vague and at superficial levels of distinguishing between possible dualisms. Perhaps this is because Matthews gets lost in simple examples; there are pages and pages of examples taken from every day experience that are described "experientially". However, lacking any poetical prowess, these establish nothing more than what just a few sentences could explicate. The dualisms these examples try to uncover, however, pervade the work to the extent that they become definitive for the body-subject schema itself; Matthews for example, relies heavily on his distinction between causal-explanation and meaning-explanation. Overall, this work is indispensable to those interested in foundations of thinking of mental illness; however, the model should be carefully thought and deeply examined by those interested in its implications.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-23 00:00:00 Patrick Martin In this book, Stanislov Grof details his theory about the connections between a person's birth experiences (being born, not giving birth) and later issues in life, psychological, physical and spiritual. Grof breaks birth down into stages, or Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs). He then details the experience of the infant in each of the stages, cycling through the blissful experience of floating in the womb, the increasing sense of being crowded and then panicked, feeling the contractions and having no way out, the physical pain of being out of the mother and into the world, and the first bewildering experiences of world outside the mother. Grof ties these experiences to later symptoms such as anxiety, addiction, chronic pain, asthma, etc. He describes a method of taking a person back through the birth experience, through breathwork, to resolve some of these issues. Some critics countered that breathwork is ineffective and noted that Grof's initial information came from research with LSD in psychotherapy, which is currently illegal in the United States. I have no idea what initially prompted me to pick up this book. It's a fairly hefty read, and this was years before I was in graduate school for counseling. And truthfully, reading Grof's work, I had no desire to practice the kind of experiential, birth-focused therapy he advocated. But this book was my introduction to the world of transpersonal psychology, and I still remember my incredible excitement, reading some of his ideas, thinking, that's it, this is what I want to do.