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Psychiatry today is an area whose disciplinary location is exceptionally problematic, as its methodology and its very logic not only differ from the rest of medicine, but are often directly opposed to those of medicine. Psychiatry is a social discipline which does not address illness in the physical sense, but seeks to help organize one’s ways of perceiving and experiencing reality in ways that are more conducive to the person’s Socialitas (Giorgio Agamben), or sociality, and thus also to the welfare of society. If psychiatry deviates from its very purpose, and serves ideological goals which foster particular interests, as opposed to those that are specifically organic and social, then it has betrayed its very reason for existence, and should be questioned as a discipline. Today there are all kinds of psychiatry, including the various ideologically based schools of the discipline, such as feminist psychiatry, which then, at least to a large measure, derives its ‘medical’ conclusions from feminist ideological premises.
Arguably any kind of normative science must rest on certain theoretical assumptions, and thus also psychiatry, if it purports to be a science, must start form some kind of value normativity, or ideology. All paradigms of psychiatry throughout its fairly brief history as a science have been based on various theories of how the human mind operates and what are the beacons by which one stays normal. In this, psychiatry has traditionally depended on psychological theories, and we all know how different they are in understanding the very foundations of our psychic functioning. Thus, on the one hand, psychiatry is necessarily a practical application of a particular psychological theory. On the other hand, however, if psychiatry becomes the exteriorization and emanation in clinical practice of an anti-social theory, such as that of feminism, which ultimately seeks to turn men and women into mortal enemies, by describing their relationships, variously, as those of competition for power and control, of lurking violence and exploitation, while it describes the role of the family as a ‘prison’ for otherwise free and flourishing women (or men), then such psychiatry fails the imperative to serve Socialitas; it becomes a delinquent psychiatry.
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