A Rigged Radio Interview—with Illustrations of Various Ego-Ideals

A RIGGED RADIO INTERVIEW— WITH ILLUSTRATIONS OF VARIOUS EGO-IDEALS PERCIVAL BAILEY* Withered andparched by unbelief, the soul Impossible, unbearable things is bearing. We are lost men and ruin is ourgoal, Athirstforfaith, to begforfaith not daring. Tiutchev (1803-73) Question: What is your impression ofthe modern psychiatric scene? Answer: Returning to it after an absence of thirty-five years, I am conscious mainly ofcertain lacks. Question: What are some ofthem? Answer: There is an almost spiritualistic approach which neglects the organ ofbehavior, clearly akin ideologically to Christian Science, which developed out ofmagnetism and spiritualism as they had developed out of sorcery and witchcraft. The psychiatrists will tell you that they know the brain is the organ ofmentation. In practice they tend to ignore it and talk offunctions as though they were disembodied. Freud never lost his belief in the importance ofbiologicalfactors inthe causation ofmental illnessand said that he did not talk about them because others talked about them enough. Today they are not talked about enough; many psychiatrists seem to have a veritable "biophobia" (1). There is a great deal oftalk about drugs, but this is not biology. In practice this neglect ofbiology leads to whatWhitehorn (2) called thepernicious concept ofpsychogenesis, which impresseseveneminenthumanists as overdone. "It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism, of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas" (3). * Director of Research, Illinois State Psychiatric Institute, 1601 West Taylor Street, Chicago 12, Illinois. I99 Question: What is the meaning ofthe term "psychogenesis"? Answer: Those who are addicted to this form ofexplanation believe that mentation has access to, or is controlled by, a special source of power, variously spoken ofas the Soul or Ego. "Finally, there are cases when the thinker, in a boundless frenzy ofmental speculation, endows some innocent grammatical form with all the properties of psychological validity; take, for instance, that widespread and naïve quibble—the conception of the Ego" (4). This supposed source ofpower is clearly or obscurely felt by them to be separate and, in many ways, opposed to the tendencies of the biological mechanism which we call the body. They are, in other words, to quote ErnestJones, "obstinate dualists" whose fundamental manner ofthinking is deeply rootedinarchetypalforms as old, or older, than Zoroaster which have come down to us via Manichaeism and Catharism and are verymuch alive today in all the various forms ofpsychodynamics. "Our views have from the very first been dualistic. . . . But>this way oflooking at things is very far from being easy to grasp and creates a positively mystical impression " (5). Question: Can you name another neglect? Answer: There is a tendency to neglect general principles in the absorption with the personal tragedy ofthe individual. Much ofthis tendency is due to the influence ofSigmund Freud, asJanet pointed out to my friend Henri Baruk (6); although understandable in a physician, this tendency has definite dangers. Mathoper and others lament this movement as retrograde. Ifonespeaks ofthe development ofa subject one thinks ofprogress; one forgets readily that there are also retrogressions. I should like to mention that also the modern development ofpsychiatry contains such retrogressions. One such backward step occurs when the fundamentals ofestablished psychopathology, which generations of clinicians have elaborated, are lost ... [7]. Young psychiatrists are too often not taught the results ofthe patient observations ofgenerations ofour predecessors which must also be taken intoaccount inthe development ofpsychiatrictheoryand inthe evaluation and management ofany individual patient. Question: And still another? Answer: There is a tendency to decry clinical observation, speaking ofit aspurely descriptive in a derogatory way as something inferior to listening 200 Percival Bailey · A Rigged Radio Interview Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1961 to the sayings ofpatients. This overdependence on verbal behavior is perhapsnotsurprising in viewofthe originofpsychoanalysis. (For the Greek, the prime sense is seeing; for the Hebrew, hearing [8].) The same argument is often used to belittle animal experimentation: "There can be no doubt that such mechanisms exist, but we easily recognize such mechanisms as those we study every day in psychoanalysis, and we can understand much better than in animal reactions. The animal is not able to tell us...