What is good for business is to medicalise all psychological problems, all disabling fears and all psychotic desires in order to remove ‘undesirables’ from society, integrate discontents into the market, via monetised narcotics and therapies, and shunt from view the cause of misery — the system and the ego which feeds it. In the past, the medical myths used to subdue undesirables, have included drapetomania (the ‘disease’ of wanting to flee from slave owners), kleptomania and hysteria, now somewhat out of fashion. Today such baseless myths include, ‘schizophrenia,’ (a hypothetical disorder which no test exists to detect and which many psychiatrists do not believe in), ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’ (an inability or disinclination to be schooled), ‘oppositional defiant disorder’ (refusal to accept unjustified restraint or fraudulent authority), ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ (anyone we don’t like), ‘explosive disorder’ (because it’s useful to pathologise people who are angry with us), ‘bipolar disorder’ (extreme moodiness) and the smorgasbord of fetishised phobias available to justify not having to clean the bathroom or shit in the woods. Soon, poverty, unemployment, offence, unprofessional behaviour, genuine character and presence will become disorders to be electronically detected and medically treated. For our own good.
Modern capitalism is, essentially, a pharmacratic, or medicalising, system. Just as land and labour must be ripped from context in order to integrate them into the market, so the body must be rationalised and all its problems medicalised. In theological societies, religious authority claims control over the soul of men and women, and those who wish to assert non-religious autonomy are persecuted as heretics, in ‘communist’ societies (aka State-Capitalist states: see myth 22) centralised authority claims control over land, labour, surplus and so on, and those who wish to assert non-communist control over their own (or their community’s) resources are persecuted as ‘capitalists’, and in ‘capitalist’ societies (the pharmacratic or therapeutic state) professional authority claims control over the drugs, medical care, health and ‘rational attitude’ of the citizen, and those who wish to assert non-capitalist control over their own bodies, minds, drug-use, medical care, communities or natural environs are persecuted as patients, or, if their assertions enter too forcefully into the objective realm, lawbreakers.3
Ultimately, of course, it’s all the same thing. The sickening system. It is impossible for professionals and their dependent punters to accept the role that the system has in the cause of unhappiness, or in the formation of their attitudes towards it. They must therefore produce a predictable litany of justifications for their coercive interventions; ‘Depression must be an illness because drugs have an effect on it’ (so slight sadness is a physical illness because ice-cream cheers me up?), ‘Denial of mental illness equals denial of people’s problems,’ (automatic conflation of ‘suffering,’ which clearly exists, with ‘mental illness,’ which nobody has ever discovered), ‘We know that schizophrenia has genetic causes’ (we don’t), ‘The division between mental and physical is an illusion’ (and so unicorns somehow exist?), ‘I knew someone who was depressed and they discovered she had a brain tumour — therefore depression is a physical illness’ (a logical fallacy; the discovery that some bachelors are secretly married does not make bachelorhood and marriage coterminous), ‘Mental illness must exist because doctors can treat it’ (and devils must exist because priests exorcise them?) and, finally, ‘mental illness must exist because there is consensus on what it is’ (just as there was once consensus on what witches are; verification is not validity). Such arguments are essentially religious in nature (see myth 25). That genes cause depression, that love is a chemical, that smoking is an illness rest on the same kind of ‘evidence’ as that the body of Christ is a wafer, that Joan of Arc is a witch or that Rasputin was possessed by the devil; which is to say, on absolutely no evidence at all. Pointing this out, if you are a patient, results in more ‘treatment’ (more drugs, more therapy and more incarceration4) and if you are a non-patient, in denial, ridicule and attack.
This taboo, that the authority of psychologists and the pseudo-science of psychology (see myth 27) rest on religious illusions rests upon the wider taboo, of the entire medical-disciplinary wing of the capitalist system, that the best way to deal with so-called ‘mental illness’ is to improve reality. For the doctors, therapists, politicians, managers, academics and journalists of the capitalist market-system, ‘society’ may be to blame, but serious attempts to deal with the stress, loneliness, confusion, boredom, fear and alienation of living separated from our communities, our nature and our own selves by allowing us to return to these domains, is out of the question. You are unhappy because of a fall in your serotonin levels, or because you don’t have a sufficiently well-qualified therapist, or because you’re not doing enough meditating. It can’t be because you’re forced to spend your life running on a hamster wheel with lead boots. What you need, sir, is cognitive behavioural therapy and a mantra! You’ll stay on the wheel, and keep the boots, but feel less miserable about it. Getting off the wheel is as unthinkable, as unsayable, as the greatest taboo of all in psychology, the word guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of every mental-health professional; sanity.
See, e.g. Traumatic exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder in borderline, schizotypal, avoidant, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders by S Yen et al, Childhood verbal abuse and risk for personality disorders during adolescence and early adulthood by Jeffrey G. Johnson et al, Household food insufficiency and mental health in South Africa by Katherine Sorsdahl et al, Does population density and neighborhood deprivation predict schizophrenia? by A. Sariaslan et al, who Report on Disability, Living in America will Drive you Insane — Literally by Bruce E. Levine, Depression as a disease of modernity: Explanations for increasing prevalence, by B.H.Hidaka. See also L.A.Sass, Madness and Modernism, I. McGilchrist The Master and His Emissary,
Many authors of the dsm-iv for example, upon which psychocrats the world over (including authors of the icd-10) base their diagnoses of what is and is not a disease, had links with the pharmaceutical industry (Cosgrove et al., 2006). Fewer authors of the dsm-v had demonstrable links, but the fundamental fraudulence — the medicalisation of social and individual problems in the service of the market-system — remains.
‘It turns out that those who adopted the biomedical and genetic beliefs about mental illness were most often those who wanted less contact with the mentally ill or thought of them as dangerous and unpredictable’. Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us. Note that this passage, and the entire core argument of this section, is based on the work of Thomas Szasz. See The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz and Szasz Under Fire (ed. Jeffrey A. Schaler).
Which involves the classic catch-22 of incarceration; you can only get out once you have admitted that you should be locked up.
27. The Myth of Psychology
Modern academic and experimental psychology is to a large extent a science dealing with alienated man, studied by alienated investigators with alienated and alienating methods.
Crisis of Psychoanalysis, Erich Fromm
Psychology is a pseudo-science; it has more in common with economics, statistics and law, than with biology · · · Psychology is used to make money for large corporations and suppress dissent. The most important function for the late-capitalist psychologist is to expose the human mind to bureaucratic surveillance, measurement and control · · · Exploring human-nature, investigating consciousness and recognising sanity are taboo activities for psychologists; and therefore ‘insane’.
The state-corporate religion of psychology is, as Karl Popper pointed out, an activity which can never be falsified and, as Emmanuel Kant pointed out, can never be objective. It is, in other words, a pseudo-science, like economics (see myth 2). Its spurious validity rests largely on statistics (‘the science of the state’1), with which it has been, since its inception, intimately connected. Unlike a true science, psychology lacks any firm theoretical basis, has no established body of facts to draw upon and cannot make reliable predictions about the real world. It cannot even define its own subject matter.2
Psychologists refuse to draw evidence about the nature of psychological truth — consciousness — from the only direct source they can ever have of it; their own conscious awareness of their own lives, which is why they have nothing meaningful to say about sanity. The objectivity they rely on — which they must rely on in order to join the scientific fraternity they so ardently wish to claim legitimacy from — is a sham, a monumental fraud, based on the ceaseless diagnosing, classifying, naming, categorizing, quantifying and measuring of behaviour, upon which they invent the fictional medical categories they call mental ‘illnesses’ (see myth 26).
An enormous number of young people now study psychology. Are they taught about the nature of consciousness, or encouraged to consciously experience the world? Are they helped to understand the effect of coercive systems upon consciousness? Does self knowledge play any part in their courses, or true love, or genuine creativity, or nature3, or techniques for enhancing spontaneity, or for divining conscience, or for critically responding to official narratives? Are they encouraged to take responsibility for their unhappiness or to help others to do so? Do those thinkers and writers who have worked in the field and said anything meaningful about such matters — Wilhelm Reich, R.D.Laing, Erich Fromm, Tomas Szasz, etc. — make it onto the syllabus? No, no, no, no, no. Instead, students are taught to medicalise problems, to label strange behaviour, to fear their own thoughts, to detest alternative ways of living or perceiving, to psychologise away problems of an ethical, social or political nature, to ignore the evidence of their own conscious experience and to view the world through the insane prism of the mutilated, modern mind. Those students who graduate in psychology, get a PhD and rise up the psychocratic career ladder, are characterised, like all successful professionals, by extreme subservience, stultifying lack of culture, an inviolate sense of institutionalised superiority and intense mediocrity; evidenced, in the case of psychologists and psychiatrists, by an inability to make original utterances about the human condition.
Psychologists are not employed to investigate human nature, consciousness or the reality of human life on earth, all of which provoke annoyance, anxiety and dread in professionals. The priorities of their employers lie elsewhere. Firstly, psychologists are employed to expand the category of ‘the mentally ill’ in order to expand the market for therapies and drugs. Secondly, related to this, their job is to place all responsibility for the frustrations of living in a punishingly inhuman world upon measurable elements of the human body (brain, genes, chemicals, genitals and whatnot). The idea that individual consciousness, much less society, is responsible for human misery and rage must be annihilated. Thirdly, psychologists are employed by large corporations to make us buy more, which amounts to inducing a constant state of desire and anxiety in consumers; particularly young users of modern tech. Fourthly, alongside perfecting technologies and strategies of consumption, psychologists are employed by corporations and other institutions to control and select compliant operatives (‘gifted students,’ ‘team players,’ ‘boardroom material’ and the like). Next, related to this, the state employs psychologists to refine methods of social control and to identify threats to the market system (face-recognition is currently the most heavily funded area of psychological research). The sixth job of psyche-professionals is to support state-military operations by enhancing the power of professional murderers (official term: soldiers) to kill and torture. The seventh unspoken bullet point on the job-spec of psychologists is to construct official narratives that reconcile humans to living meaningless, hopeless, atomised lives, adrift in a hostile universe (see myth 32).
This mission contains two superficially antagonistic goals. The first is to take responsibility for the destruction of reality from the state-corporate system and place it squarely onto the shoulders of ordinary people, who then are expected to bear the entire load of the world’s problems. If, that is to say, your anxiety, depression and rage are anybody’s fault; they are yours. We are all, as ‘the father of psychology’ Sigmund Freud taught us, inherently violent, neurotic and fearful addicts. We have always been so, and we always will be, and it’s up to society to domesticate us into ‘ordinary unhappiness’. Indeed. But when we look closer, we find, along with this thoroughly Hobbesian view of the universe, a psychological ‘reality’ that also, in key respects, completely lets individuals off the hook; for it is either a few scapegoats who are to blame for our woes (rogues, narcissists, perverts, paedophiles4 and foreigners), or it’s the magic of ‘mental illness’. Problems are not due to the system, or to our own cowardice, stupidity and irresponsible selfishness. No, it’s because of baddies and demons. The world tells you that it is your fault, but you are not responsible, when the truth, as always, is the precise opposite; it is not your fault, but you are responsible.
The image of human nature disseminated by psychocrats and infocrats — helpless babes who must be continually watched over, supervised and disciplined — is not considered to be an invention or a theory. It is a fact. Psychologists are just ‘telling it like it is.’ The ‘is,’ however, that psychologists ‘tell it like,’ upon closer investigation, turns out to be life in a repressive, unnatural, sickening and profoundly coercive system which cannot function without stunted, obedient, cowards. Psychology graduates have repeatedly ‘discovered’ that human beings are selfish, stupid, insensitive, easily-led, crude, docile and lazy — in short both domesticated and in need of domestication — by studying people in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democracies. Nowhere is it noted, in the literature of psychology, that such people are deeply and disturbingly w.e.i.r.d.5
Thus we are told that without the system there would be no work, no growth, no freedom. Why? Because people are inherently selfish, violent and lazy. And how do we know this? Look at how people behave. Where? In the system!
Thus we are told that humans are selfish, violent and stupid because we are animals, which are also selfish, violent and stupid. Which animals? Animals in zoos of course, and laboratories, and marginalised, degraded habitats. And pets.
Thus we are told that there is no escape, no alternative (see myth 33). The universe, the world, all life, consciousness and everything we experience are literal components in a literal mechanism, one that guarantees endless toil and suffering. And how do we know this? Actually, we don’t know this, but we’d prefer you didn’t know that. Better not to worry though. If you have problems and frustrations, just go and see a professional to discharge your pent-up anguish; someone who refuses to have any relations with you outside of a brief, market-transaction, who never divulges personal information about themselves, never criticises you and certainly doesn’t love you, who charges you hundreds or even thousands of pounds an hour for their ‘services,’ which amount to a brief and highly artificial system-sanctioned relationship in which, for a few moments, you can feel like a King or a Queen. We’re talking about psychotherapists, but the same can be said for prostitutes. Not really much difference.
If whoring isn’t your thing, you can do three Hail Marys, or an hour of yoga, or some transcendental meditation, or get smashed, or attend a support group, or positive think your way to untold riches, or faff about in an alternative reality; all firm favourites of management. Perceiving the sickening system, perceiving the puppy that suckles from it, or actually being well? Okay, fine, but just as entertainment, if you don’t mind, just for a lunch-hour, just for a ‘philosophical chat’ or to offload your feelings of frustration and despair. Not for life; this we would prefer not to deal with.
This is not a new phenomenon. ‘Therapy,’ in the sense of integrating the individual into society and of managing sane deviations from official definitions of reality,6 is as old as civilisation. All civilised societies have a theory of ‘sanity’ and of ‘madness’ and a series of techniques for ‘curing’ the latter so that the challenge to the social order that she represents is mitigated and she gets her mind right. These techniques include arousing guilt by stimulating broken identity with ‘normal’ people (‘think of your poor parents!’), overcoming resistance by offering a shoulder to cry on, teaching ‘patients’ the true nature of the objective world (the nature of the gods, the nature of the mind), stimulating subjective states which this world depends on (such as anxiety, craving, and moral responsibility), ‘conceptually liquidating’ everything that lies outside of the conceptual universe of our world (alternative world-views which are, by their very nature, not to be taken seriously; the babblings of maniacs, sub-humans, barbarians, terrorists or whatever exclusionary label is flavour of the month7) and, finally, guiding the mind of the doubter towards the terrifying consequences of deficient socialisation; namely to highlight — and broadcast — the terrible fate of genuine dissidents and mystics.
What is new is the move away from repressive techniques of conditioning to an entirely permissive approach8. This is the most insidious, and entirely unconscious, purpose of modern psychology and psychiatry — to make the implicit, mysterious, unspoken or unspeakable life of the psyche explicit, literal, legible and manageable. This is now of the utmost importance to the system. Just as every crumb of land must be measured and mapped, and children must be inculcated into a life of self-conscious accountability, and women must be forced to conform to manifest, male styles of abstract engagement with sensuous experience, and everyone on earth must be named, numbered and fixed in definable place, so our innermost feelings, urges (particularly sexual urges), intuitions, intimations and inspirations must be brought into the light; confessed, declared, written about, researched, recorded and posted. This way the nightmare of life as it actually is, or you as you actually are is banished from the manager’s mind, and the unruly outsider (the deviant, the child, the woman, the foreigner) can be brought under legal, educational, academic and medical professional control, without any need for centralised state-corporate repression9. Modern therapy and the justifying architecture of modern psychology allows us to ‘express ourselves’, to ‘reach our potential,’ to achieve ‘emotional freedom.’ In so doing we do not escape from the system, but enter more fully into it.
The young science of the state initially concerned itself with collecting demographic and economic data. Accordingly it became known as Political Arithmetic in English, and later took its name from the German Statistik. Here begins the numerical disciplining of people and the social spaces they inhabit into various boxes, categories and packages. Ron Roberts, Psychology and Capitalism.
Ibid.
‘Psychotherapists have exhaustively analyzed every form of dysfunctional family and social relations, but “dysfunctional environmental relations” does not exist even as a concept. Since its beginning, mainstream Western psychology has limited the definition of mental health to the interpersonal context of an urban industrial society: marriage, family, work, school, community. All that lies beyond the citified psyche has seemed of no human relevance — or perhaps too frightening to think about. “Nature,” Freud dismally concluded, “is eternally remote. She destroys us — coldly, cruelly, relentlessly.” Whatever else has been revised and rejected in Freud’s theories, this tragic sense of estrangement from nature continues to haunt psychology, making the natural world seem remote and hostile’. Theodore Roszak, The Nature of Sanity.
Who, incidentally, are regularly conflated with hebephiles and ephebophiles.
David Lancy explains; ‘The view that many well-established theoretical positions in psychology cannot be as widely generalized as their authors assume was given a boost by a carefully argued paper published in 2010. Joe Henrich and colleagues challenged the very foundations of the discipline in arguing that psychologists fail to account for the influence of culture or nurture on human behavior. From a large-scale survey they determined that the vast majority of research in psychology is carried out with citizens — especially college students — of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democracies (weird). They note that, where comparative data are available “people in [weird] societies consistently occupy the extreme end of the … distribution [making them] one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens” (Henrich et al. 2010).’
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality.
The ‘fundamental syllogism’ works like this; a. the neighbours are fools, b. the neighbours are anarchists, therefore c. anarchism is foolish, and therefore not even worth engaging with (‘I don’t debate with fools...’ or homos, Jews, trans-phobics, genocide deniers, atheists, heteros, [add exclusionary tag here]) for it is, by its very nature, beyond sense and reason. Ibid.
Critics like Szasz and Laing are mistaken here; Foucault is a surer guide.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
28. The Professional Myth
…do you know many lawyers who support free training for litigants to represent themselves, doctors who favor making it easier for people without medical qualifications (such as experienced nurses) to practice medicine or indeed many teachers who support opening jobs in schools to anyone, with or without degrees or teacher training — or letting students run classes without teachers?
Brian Martin
The prime directive of professionals is to deprive ordinary people of the means to feed, entertain, heal, educate, regulate and rule themselves. Everything else that professionals do is secondary · · · Individually professionals may be good people, and, within the constraints of the system, they may even do good, but the ultimate result of their activities is stupefaction, disorder and boredom · · · The late-capitalist phase of the system sees subjugation to professional control internalised, and with it, a servitude that can hardly be imagined, let alone overcome.
Professional doctors make the world healthier; professional teachers make the world more intelligent; professional policemen, soldiers and lawyers make us safer; we need professional architects to build our towns; we need professional farmers to produce our food; we need professional artists to produce our culture; and we need professional psychologists and psychotherapists to determine the nature of sanity and even reality. Who tell us these things? Professionals, and their dependent clients.
Modern professionalism has its roots in the power of priestly elites who, for millennia, have been struggling to place themselves between the individual consciousness of ordinary men and women, and the mystery, generosity, intelligence, and, ultimately, the reality of the context or situation they live in. It has always been intolerable to priests, and to the elites they serve, that ordinary people have direct access to reality — the reality of death, for example, or the reality of sexual love, or the reality of nature — which is why they have always sought to intercede, in the name of divine authority, and to dress up; to dress up themselves in important-looking robes and important-sounding titles, and to dress up the truth in a religious dialect remote from ordinary speech. When, at the end of the medieval period, divine authority started to lose its power, the modern, secular, professional was born; identical in nature and function to the priest, but instead of appealing to divine authority, or using a religious dialect, or dressing up in priestly robes, appealing to scientific authority, speaking and writing in a technical dialect and dressing up in professional gowns.
The modern professional — the doctor, the lawyer, the manager — was born with the scientific-management revolution of the late nineteenth century which saw capitalist enterprises conglomerate into immense super-corporations overseen by an army of professional ‘knowledge workers,’ and vast areas of human activity handed over to their ministrations. The skilled craft of the ordinary worker was broken up and its direction given to rational planners employed to manage production lines for the body of the now decapitated labourer so that they could carry out intensely specialised micro-activities with nothing but the thinnest dribble of conscious input, if any.
