Re: The rise of an emotion based left was Bush using drugs

[Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Speaking of autism, read -- if you haven't already -- Mark Haddon's The Serious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, an outstanding first novel by a British writer with a background in working with autistic kids. Very funny and empathetic, about one such terrifically engaging 15 year old.

 

MG

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Devine, James

To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 12:04 PM

Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The rise of an emotion based left was Bush using drugs

I agree: as I've said before, people such as Castro and Noriega

are dismissed as "crazy" by establishmentarian figures.

 

As someone who deals with the community of parents of kids on the autistic spectrum,

I'm always fighting the urge (not just by others) to diagnose various people as autistic,

Asperger's, etc. without actually knowing them personally and therapeutically. (These

people include Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, the fictional Napoleon Dynamite, etc.)

 

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

-----Original Message-----
From: PEN-L list [mailto:PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Brian McKenna
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 8:18 AM
To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The rise of an emotion based left was Bush using drugs

Hi all,

I disagree strongly with this view. . .

Mental health tags are continually used to discredit whistleblowers, Marxists, and others who challenge orthodoxy. This reproduces the dominant view that mental health questions only pertain to individuals, particularly those individuals who are not conformist in a pernicious hierarchical social order. It also reproduces the Western view that mental health applies to isolated individuals, not societies and their leaders. . .

Bush on the Couch is a very important work that brings bourgeois psychoanalysts and phsycologists beyond the clinic and applies their insights to the true sources of perversion in the land.

Yes, there is a danger in this. . .but the prevailing ideology of individual causation of disease and illness, captured in the dominant ideology of biomedicine is far, far worse. . .

Marx and others are fair game for this analysis as well. . .

Brian McKenna