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Fear of Psychiatry: The Legacy of the Sixties
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16005 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
3,719 Words |
| Author
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Paul S. Appelbaum
Paul S. Appelbaum, M.D., is A.F. Zeleznik Professor of
Psychiatry and director of the Law and Psychiatry Program at
the University of Massachusetts Medical School. For the 1988-
89 academic year, he is Visiting Interdisciplinary Professor
at Georgetown University Law Center. |
The 1960s have left a peculiar legacy. Seen from a distance of nearly two decades, it is apparent that the era's pervasive rebellion against the central institutions of society--including government, marriage, and the professions--was an expression of general rage over the growing complexity of life. Popular unwillingness to accept the relative limitations on individual freedom necessary to sustain a highly differentiated society was acted out on the streets, on college compuses, and in countercultural homelands like Berkeley and the East Village. If we now recognize that the anarchic spirit of the period threatened to dismantle the very structures that promoted the generation's affluence and leisure, which in turn made possible its intellectual vigor and ethic of protest, the best that can be said for the activists of the time is that the threat was not immediately apparent to them.
It was a time of heightened suspicion about institutions that had the capacity to impose limits of any kind. Government was deemed corrupted by its power and drunk with the prospects of extending its control both in this country and abroad. Marriage was attacked for limiting sexual freedom, and relationships were actively fostered beyond time-honored boundaries. Scholars and universities were accused of imposing artificial categories on knowledge, thereby restricting the scope of learning and channeling it into paths supportive of the status quo. And the professions were condemned for creating esoteric bodies of knowledge that fostered the dependence of the majority on a select few by restricting access to knowledge.
Eventually, these restrictive aspects of the core institutions came to the seen less as epiphenomena and more as their reasons d'etre. Professions from law to engineering to medicine, for example, were no longer considered to be dedicated primarily to advancing knowledge for the benefit of their clients and patients. Instead, they were viewed as having the principal objectives of obfuscating and limiting access to their knowledge and techniques, for the sake of profiting from a general need for their services. If specialized knowledge could also provide the basis for an expansion of the social power of the professions--which could aggrandize themselves further by imposing their services on those who failed to seek them--so much the better.
The faintly paranoid tinge of this analysis should be familiar to those acquainted with the history of American populism in its multifarious denominations. Fortunately, as was always the case before, the self-destructive binge that characterized the sixties came to an end as the United
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