In this post, I seek to expose and challenge the philosophical presuppositions that underwrite the entire DSM enterprise. These presuppositions descend directly from the metaphysical dualism of Rene Descartes. So well said. That's precisely it. As long as we concentrate on a specific "DSM condition" as being absurd, it doesn't do much in the long run. The point is that the DSM as such misses the point. Again, reductionist vs holistic approach. Dr. Peter Breggin often talks about it (the video below).
Descartes’s metaphysics divided the finite world into two distinct basic substances: res cogitans and res extensa, thinking substances (minds) with no extension in space and extended substances (bodies and other material things) that do not think. This dualism concretized the idea of a complete separation between mind and world, between subject and object. Descartes’s vision can be characterized as a decontextualization of both mind and world. Mind is isolated from the world in which it dwells, just as the world is purged of all human meaning. In this vision, the mind is pictured as an objective entity that takes its place among other objects, a “thinking thing” that, precisely because it is a thing, is ontologically decontextualized, fundamentally separated from its world.
The DSM is a pseudo-scientific manual for diagnosing sick Cartesian isolated minds. As such, it completely overlooks the exquisite context sensitivity and radical context dependence of human emotional life and of all forms of emotional disturbance. Against Descartes and his legacy, the DSM, I am contending that all emotional disturbances are constituted in a context of human interrelatedness. One such traumatizing context is characterized by relentless invalidation of emotional experience, coupled with an objectification of the child as being intrinsically defective. No wonder receiving a DSM diagnosis can so often be retraumatizing! Very well put.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...xpanding-bible
On a side note, that's pretty incredible. I was just planning to write today about the Descartes’s metaphysics (the dualism thing) somewhere on the forum.
