An Intellectual History of Psychiatry.docx (original) (raw)

This paper is the last one in this short project, an addition to An Unusual Power, and looks at how psychiatrists developed their views, seeing their clients/patients as objects, relying on poor science, driven, I suggest by ideology not evidence based analysis. This paper describes the evolution of different strains of psychiatry-Proprietor, Asylum, Dynamic, and Biological, or as I have identified it, Laboratory. It will describe a professional group, often from the same demographic, driven by a search for status, defining itself through dogma and power, and expressing limited insight into the human condition. I will, apart from looking at and analysing the historical evidence, employ personal anecdotes, using client witness to treatments, and attempt to understand the significance of psychiatric case-studies, what they say about the profession, considering also an economic understanding of medicine and medical care. In the process, I will look at child prostitution in Victorian London, asylums in the UK and America, Freud, principal Victorian psychiatrists, Proprietor, Asylum, Dynamic and Biological-Laboratory Psychiatry and the economics related to psychiatric ideas and practices. This paper holds that the history of Asylum Psychiatry, the now dominant form, was and remains a search for legitimacy, not the history of a science.