Looking over Foucault’s ingenious structural history of medical practice, The Birth of the Clinic (1963; English translation 1973) I was struck by how well Foucault’s early work draws together communication, critical theory, and the anthropology of medicine. The study of communication–language, symbols, discourses–is at the heart of any serious attempt to understand–to set apart, to …
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Psychiatry and psychotherapy: beyond good and evil?
According to research published in the latest issue of the American Medical Association’s Archives of General Psychiatry (65[8], August 2008), the past ten years have seen a tremendous decline in applied psychotherapy, a change which the authors attribute directly to “a corresponding increase in those [psychiatrists] specializing in pharmacotherapy–changes that were likely motivated by financial …
Trepanation and technologies of the self
Neurophilosophy has posted a tremendously ghoulish and thoroughly fascinating interview with Heather Perry, the Gloucester woman who in 2000 decided to trepan herself in order to attain “more mental energy and clarity.” She denies a suggestion made by the BBC that the bathroom surgery, performed with local anaesthetic and an electric drill, was nearly fatal. …
