Frank Cioffi

Wittgenstein, whose conversations with Rush Rhees lead off these philosophical Essays on Freud, once wrote to a friend: ‘I, too, was greatly impressed when I first read Freud. He’s extraordinary – of course he is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled … so hang on to your brains.’ This is not a piece of advice that all the contributors to this volume have been willing to follow. And though this is compensated for by the distinction of many of the papers it is unfortunately true of those contributions which deal with that question which has the most general claim to interest: how has it come about that little more than a decade short of its centenary the most fundamental and distinctive claims of psychoanalysis should still be the subject of radical scepticism.–

Peter Sedgwick has given us an informative, penetrating, witty and critical account of anti-psychiatry as represented by Laing, Szasz, Goffman and Foucault. The central ambition of anti-psychiatry has been to replace the so-called medical model of mental illness by a ‘labelling’ one, according to which the behaviours which provoked diagnoses of psychopathology were not manifestations of some underlying pathology but merely conduct found obnoxious by the labellers. Sedgwick counters anti-psychiatry’s startling claim that mental illness is just deviancy with the apparently paradoxical one that illness of any kind is deviancy: ‘The attribution of illness always proceeds from the computation of a gap between presented behaviour (or feeling) and some norm.’