How much neurosis should we bear?

Alan Donagan

pp. 41-53

in: Tristram Engelhardt, Stuart Spicker (eds), Mental health: philosophical perspectives, Berlin, Springer, 1978

Abstract

In his monograph, Herbert Marcuse Alasdair MacIntyre has remarked that, while "with Freud's own writings it is continually necessary for the reader to turn back from the theorizing to the case histories, from the inflated conceptual schemes to the revealing clinical detail," Marcuse "all too characteristically" has been primarily interested in Freud's metapsychology rather than in his method of therapy ([14], pp. 43–44). Although I endorse this judgment of MacIntyre's, the paper I am about to present is almost entirely metapsychological; that is, it is about certain concepts of mental disease and illness, and not about what those concepts have been (rightly or wrongly) applied to. However, my purpose has been clinical. I have concerned myself with the implications of certain metapsychological doctrines for psychiatrists"attitudes to their patients; and, indeed, for anybody's attitudes to himself or to anybody else.

Cited authors

Marcuse Herbert

Freud Sigmund

MacIntyre Alasdair