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Edward Dolnick
Simon & Schuster, New York; 1998
352 pp. $35. ISBN 0-684-82497-3
Blaming the brain:
the real truth about drugs and mental health
Elliot Valenstein
The Free Press, New York; 1998
320 pp. $35. ISBN 0-684-84964-X
I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. -- Bob Dylan
The shape of blame is round. It seeks its target with an arrogant certainty that often as not turns on itself.
Psychiatric problems are played out within the labyrinth of human volition and shame. Perhaps that is why the quest for their etiology raises the spectre of a witch-hunt. It is no coincidence that two recent books addressing the causality of psychiatric disorders use the word blame in their titles: Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis, by Edward Dolnick, and Blaming the Brain: The Real Truth about Drugs and Mental Health, by Elliot Valenstein.
Both writers take to task the theorists and institutions who were or are prepared to reduce the mysteries of psychiatric illness to a dogmatic cause. In a mirrored symmetry, each challenges the opposing side of the mind-brain divide.
Dolnick's Madness on the Couch chastises post-Freudian psychoanalysts for their characterization and treatment of mental disorders, particularly schizophrenia. Dolnick sees Freud as a victim of his own theoretical parsimony, by which his ideas were drawn exclusively from his interpretations of patients' narrative recollections of childhood. However, he does acknowledge Freud's own reservations about the application of psychoanalysis to schizophrenia. It is more with Freud's heirs that he takes issue.
Using a journalistic approach, Dolnick, a science writer by trade, brings to...