The Eaton T. Fores Research Center:
Biopsychiatry Resources
Copyright © 2003 by The Eaton T. Fores Research Center
The Eaton T. Fores Research Center:
Biopsychiatry Resources
The
Institute For the Study of the Neurologically Typical provides one of the Web's
finest sites on the subject of biopsychiatry and its proper context.
Clicking on the Institute's logo (left) will take you directly to the site;
while a couple of especially important pages within the site have individual
links shown below. The position of the ETFRC with respect to biopsychiatry
is similar to, although not identical with, that of the ISNT. The
principal difference is that, while the ISNT points up the arbitrary, relative,
and normative aspects of various schemes for pigeonholing human consciousness
while pretending to have an objective, positivistic, and scientific view of it,
the ETFRC maintains that the entire enterprise of biopsychiatry
– like those of cognitivism, functionalism,
artificial intelligence, and other variants of the long-discredited behaviorist
approach to understanding consciousness – is entirely incoherent and
content-free. The idea of "mental pathology," like the idea that some
amount of syntactic complexity is necessary and sufficient for, and by itself
explains the arising of, consciousness, is deeply flawed. It is also our
position that such views are not ethically neutral, but rather are the products
of defensiveness and ill-will and should be judged as such. We feel that
psychoanalytic and other depth-psychological paradigms are useful for this.
To paraphrase John Searle, we do not understand such views as genuine candidates
for truth, but rather as forms of intellectual pathology. We therefore
believe that it is right and proper to inquire after the origin of the
pathology, especially in light of its ethical entanglements and consequences.
Of special interest on the ISNT site is the description of two new forms of
psychpathology, which have not yet been classified by a Linnaeus of human
bondage. One is a psychotic
disoder, and the other, a personality disorder. Links to these pages
follow:
