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Anti-psychiatrists believe that statistics and symptomatology, the foundations
of institutional psychiatry, are misleading because they reduce the patient to
a mass of unrelated signs. Instead of leading to a greater understanding of
the patient, the patient's subjective experiences are lost under a pile of un-
connected data.
It is just possible to have a thorough knowledge of what has been discovered
about the hereditary or familial incidence of manic-depressive psychosis or
schizophrenia, to have a facility in recognizing schizoid 'ego distortion' and
schizophrenic ego defects, plus the various 'disorders' of thought, memory,
perceptions, etc., to know, in fact, just about everything that can be known
about the psychopathology of schizophrenia or of schizophrenia as a disease
without being able to understand one single schizophrenic. Such data are all
ways of not understanding him.
(Laing 1960: 33)
These insights are underscored by the perspective of narrative psychology, an
area of study developed by Jerome Bruner (Bruner 1986) (Bruner 1990) (see
Chapter 3) which focuses on how people interpret specifically intentional be-
havior. Narrative psychology shows that, whereas people tend to understand
inanimate objects in terms of cause-effect rules and by using logical reasoning,
intentional behavior is made comprehensible by structuring it into narrative
or 'stories.' Narrative psychology suggests that this process of creating narrative
is the fundamental difference between the way people understand intentional
beings and mechanical artefacts.
That is to say, if I want to understand and build an inanimate object, I may
decompose it, try to understand what different pieces are for, replicate how
they work, and figure out the rules underlying its behavior. On the other hand,
if I want to understand a person's behavior, I am interested in such things as
what motivates him or her, the reasons he or she engages in particular activity,
and how his or her behavior reflects on his or her whole personality.
This contrast between narrative explanations that explore the meaning of
living activity and atomistic explanations that allow for the understanding and
construction of mechanical artifacts echoes the criticisms of anti-psychiatry.
Anti-psychiatrists, after all, complain that the difficulty with institutional psy-
chiatry is that it reduces the patient to a pile of data, thereby making a machine
of a living person. The anti-psychiatric solution of interpretation uses narrative
understanding to 'repersonalize' patients: structuring and relating the 'data' of
a patient's life into the semi-coherent story of a meaningful, though painful,
existence; focusing on the patient not as an instance of a disease but as a partic-
ular individual and how that person feels about his or her life experience; and
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