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Uncovering the reality beyond magical voluntarism Power Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress DAVID SMAIL ROSS-ON-WYE: PCCS BOOKS; 2005; PB £12.00 (ISBN I 898059 71 3)
WHEN I first read David Smail, it was because a reviewer had said that Smail was 'psychology's Voltaire'. I was intrigued. Could Smail's work match the fearless satire and the perspicacity of the 17th-century genius? The answer, when I read one of his earlier books, The Origins of Unhappiness, was yes. And it is yes again in this, his latest book. Smail, a clinical psychologist, scythes through the shibboleths of modern clinical psychology and teases its heroes: Freud was a saloon bar bore; Albert Ellis simple-minded.
But Power Interest and Psychology isn't just an iconoclastic romp. Certainly, the book is irreverent and destructive (or perhaps I should say 'deconstructive'), but it is powerfully and originally constructive...