A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry—Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment

A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry—Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment
ISBN-10
1849354618
ISBN-13
9781849354615
Category
Psychology
Pages
216
Language
English
Published
2022-06-22
Publisher
AK Press
Author
Bruce E. Levine

Description

There is today a crisis in psychiatry. Even the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, has said: “Whatever we’ve been doing for five decades, it ain’t working.” The field requires a completely fresh look, and clinical psychologist Bruce Levine—a man often at odds with his profession—enlists the early Enlightenment philosopher Baruch de Spinoza to help work through the problem. Readers unfamiliar with Spinoza will be intrigued by the modern relevance of his radical philosophical, psychological, and political ideas. Levine compares the radical/moderate divide among Enlightenment thinkers to a similar divergence between contemporary critics of psychiatry, siding historically with Spinoza in order to bring an equivalent intellectual force to bear upon our modern crisis and calling for new forms of free and enlightened thinking.

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