Re: Re: psychopathology and meds

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 12 May 2002 08:16:53 +0900, miychi wrote:
>For Freud and Lacan,psychical apparatus and
>thought activity is not social nature but only
>purely private,in the individual

As I said, I plan to focus on questions of political economy as long
as I am on PEN-L. But I do plan to take a side road at some point in
a couple of months in order to address some basic questions dealing
with psychology and society. After all, since so much of
postmodernist thought relies on a Freudian substratum, it is
important to address this component. Specifically, I plan to take a
close look at Deleuze-Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus", some of Lacan's
writings and Foucault on mental institutions.

Speaking of psychology, I thought that this post from the Science for
the People mailing list would interest PEN-L'ers. It was part of a
thread on evolutionary psychology (ie. sociobiology) prompted by an
intervention from Ian Pitchford, the moderator of a very ambitious
email list devoted to the topic.

----
I don't know why Ian Pitchford suddenly decided to put things on the
very quiet SftP list. But I do know that a few years ago I was
surprised to see that Herb Gintis (of Bowles and Gintis, economists
and authors of a good critique of the American educational system and
other left-wing studies had written a very abusive and negative
review of the Rose's ALAS POOR DARWIN. I wrote him to find out if
indeed he was the same Herb Gintis, and it turns out the two of them
have become dedicated and, as far as I can see, insanely
simple-minded supporters of evolutionary psychology. They do things
like try to come up with mathematical proofs that prejudice against
'shirkers " as opposed to workers would have been built in by our
putative ancestors' supposed experiences as hunter-gatherers. Gintis
was angrily adamant abvout the wonders of ev. psych, but what he and
Bowles were up to, I was saddened to conclude, was mathemtically
precise while being utterly intellectually shoddy. Their work
apparently is respected in the eve-psych community, which is
certainly an ad hominem argument against the lot of it. (And there
are many cases where hard workers are the ones despised.)

While Michael Weissman is evidently right to suggest we have some
inherited tendencies, which we know because we share these tendencies
with most other mammals, evolutionary psychologists mostly focus on
the unknown and probably unknowable era of \spcifically proto-human
evolution, being mostinterested in tendencies that are not shared
with other mammals, and for which evidence, even in anthropological
terms, is necessrily questionable, since virtually all present day
cultures have been influenced by the west by this point, and ealrier
investigatros of them from the west had by now unknowable biases to
see what they thought they should see.

Further, followers of evolutinary biology, if not all its
practitioners strongly support neo-liberal or libertarian ideologies,
and the common drift of their work on ev. psych has that written all
over it.

by the way, though anthropological studies are always suspect, I
understand that in not all socieities are insults responded to in
kind. Unless one could definitively demonstrate the opposite, why
should we believe the tendency evolved as such?

Michael H. Goldhaber



--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 05/11/2002

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