Author: Elisabeth Roudinesco. Translated by Rachel Bowlby
Publisher: Columbia University Press – 181 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram
Today people in America and other Western nations rely increasingly on medications to alleviate psychic distress, rather than to find the root causes of their mental and nervous conditions with the help of psychoanalysts, Elisabeth Roudinesco writes in this eye-opening book.
She points out that there exists in our “depressive society” an epidemic of distress that is being made worse by the increasing use of more and more drugs such as Prozac, Viagra, Zoloft, and others. The mindless use of such drugs fails to solve the users’ real problems, she asserts. For example, a woman given an antidepressant when she is grieving the loss of a loved one, is getting temporary relief only for her symptoms, and nothing to help her overcome her problem.
The author sees a society “obsessed with efficiency and desperate for the quick fix,” whereas the “talking cure” – sharing thoughts and feelings with counselors qualified to understand and treat people as human beings – can be effective in helping those unable to cope with problems on their own. This makes more sense, Roudinesco explains in this helpful book.
She writes: “The rush to treat symptoms (by popping pills) is itself symptomatic of an antiseptic and depressive culture in which thought is reduced to the firing of neurons and desire is just a chemical secretion. In contrast, psychoanalysis testifies to human freedom and the power of language.” She has organized her analysis of our “depressive society” and her recommendations in the contents page of the book, which we present here to give you an overview:
- The Depressive Society
- The Defeat of the Subject
- The Medications of the Mind
- The Soul is Not a Thing
- Behavior-Modification Man
- The Great Quarrel Over the Unconscious
- Frankenstein’s Brain
- The “Equinox Letter”
- Freud is Dead in America
- A French Scientism
- The Future of Psychoanalysis
- Science and Psychoanalysis
- Tragic Man
- Universality, Difference, Exclusion
- Critique of Psychoanalytic Institutions
The basic thesis of this book can be found in chapter 2, The Medications of the Mind, in which Roudinesco writes: “ Since 1950 chemical substances called psychotropic drugs have changed the landscape of madness. They have emptied the mental hospitals and replaced straitjackets and shock treatments with the soft wrapping of medication.”
“Although they do not cure any mental or nervous illnesses, they have revolutionized representations of the psyche by fabricating new human beings, smooth and moodless, exhausted by avoiding passions, ashamed of not conforming to the ideal offered to them. Prescribed as much by general practitioners as by specialists in psychopathology, psychotropic drugs have the effect of normalizing behaviors and suppressing the most painful symptoms of psychic suffering without seeking to find their meaning (italicization for emphasis in both instances mine).
In Why Psychoanalysis? Elisabeth Roudinesco has done an outstanding job of comparing and contrasting the use of drugs versus getting help from mental health counselors in the diagnosis and treatment of problems of the mind. And this is an easy read for anyone; not just written for experts.
Elisabeth Roudinesco teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of twelve other books, including Jacques Lacan (Columbia 1999), and Revolution and Madness: The Lives and Legends of Theroigne de Mericourt.
Rachel Bowlby is a professor of English at the University of York. She has written Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (Columbia 2001); Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf; Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola; Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing, and Psychoanalysis; and Shopping with Freud.
