Books & Culture: A Christian Review
If you read only one book about Freud's "legacy," make it this one...
Journal of the American Medical Association
Psychoanalysis is no different from any other theoretical construct in medicine. Unfortunately, some constructs are misapplied by true believers. Time separates the useless and marginal from the valuable. Scientific rigor and intellectual honesty, therefore, have the call on the future. To reflect upon Madness on the Couch will be provocative, cleansing, and convincing and could be part of a course for every resident in psychiatry.
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
Extensively researched but depressingly mean-spirited, journalist Dolnick's debut chronicles the American midcentury's full-out embrace of psychoanalysis and willingness to apply it with impunity. Theorists such as Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, R.D. Laing and Bruno Bettelheim broadened Freudian theory to treat not only anxiety and neurosis, Dolnick explains, but also more severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. As Dolnick shows, these neo-Freudians quickly came to dominate the psychiatric industry. They shared with ur-Freudianism an emphasis on talk therapy for even the most disturbed patients and, most damningly in Dolnick's eyes, a vision of the home as nest of pathology; it was in this era that the term "refrigerator mother" was coined to designate the mother of a schizophrenic. Today, these theories have receded into the background of psychiatry because of their apparent clinical inefficacy and the emergence of powerful (but hardly problem-free) drug therapies. In an ill-focused j'accuse, Dolnick, a contributing editor of Health magazine, charges the neo-Freudians with sloppy science, moral laxness and intellectual infirmity. Above all, he faults them for "hubris," because they failed to conduct double-blind experiments in testing theories (although in the epilogue he admits that such trials were not even invented until 1948, nor widely in use until long after). He also pins the blame for an entire generation's demonization of domestic life squarely on the shoulders of this small band of therapists. In sentence after sentence brimming with accusatory hauteur, Dolnick shifts his moral critique from anecdote to anecdote, now sympathizing with the patients, whose symptoms he details with distasteful breathiness, now with the hard-working but sadly befuddled psychoanalysts in the trenches, and now with the unfairly blamed parents. While this book can be seen as yet another case of hindsight Freud bashing, it lacks the intellectual subtlety that would make it a genuine contribution to such historical revisionism.
Library Journal
A contributing editor to Health magazine, Dolnick slams psychiatry's efforts to cure mental illness in the '50s and '60s.
Booknews
A highly critical account of the misguided attempts on the part of some members of the psychiatric profession of the 1950s and 60s to attribute mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder to cold, contradictory, or otherwise unwholesome parenting. The author incorporates the personal stories of parents who endured criticism for making their children sick, only to find themselves vindicated when the biological origins of these conditions were identified.
Books & Culture: A Christian Review
If you read only one book about Freud's "legacy," make it this one...
Derek Bickerton
[Dolnick] brings to his task a formidble array of strengths....[the] narrative moves smoothly and effortlessly, never lingering too long on any topic yet never leaving a topic until its full significance has been explored....the book is a delight to read. -- The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
A very important, sobering study of psychiatric overreach during a quarter-century (roughly 1948-73) in treating three psychotic or near-psychotic illnesses: schizophrenia, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Dolnick, a veteran science and health journalist (formerly with the Boston Globe), notes how prone to "parent bashing" leading psychiatric and psychoanalytic theorists were during this period. Thus, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann coined the term 'schizophrenic mother' in 1948, and Gregory Bateson (more an anthropologist than a psychologist) in the mid-1950s alluded ominously to parents of schizophrenics placing their children in highly anxiety-provoking, unresolvable dilemmas termed "double binds." Bruno Bettelheim, who for many years was seen as a pioneer and kind of national guru in the treatment of autism, wrote in 1981, "All my life I feel I have been working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them." Theorists also often based their absolutist, increasingly widely held conclusions, that parents had caused the illnesses and that mental-health professionals alone could cure then, largely through talk therapy, one of the most unscientific of methods. Sometimes they worked with ridiculously small study samples, as in the case of psychiatrist Theodore Lisz, who wrote for many years about schizophrenic patients after studying all of 17 upper-class New England families. Ultimately, of course, their theories and practices proved almost entirely wrong; psychoanalysis was found to be largely useless in treating the severer mental disorders. In addition, the discovery and effective employment of psychotropic medication, beginning withthorazine in 1952 and culminating with Prozac during the 1990s, demonstrated that severe, and many lesser, emotional and mental disorders are largely rooted in biological imbalances, not in individual or familial psychological dynamics. Dolnick provides valuable information on Freudian, non-Freudian, and contemporary theories about the three illnesses he examines and on how long-held views gradually were debunked during the late 1960s and '70s, and he writes in a tremendously engaging and informative manner. This cautionary tale of pseudo-scientific hubris my well be not only the yearþs best book on a mental-health topic, but also one of the most compelling works of its kind in this decade.
