ABSTRACT
Although mainstream psychologists now profess they teach, research, and conduct therapy according to the DSM and “evidence-based” rules, in their hearts they are afraid that something is wrong with that scientistic frame, and late at night they are haunted by that fear. One of the main hermeneutic arguments against scientism is that it is not possible to “bracket off” the moral and political influences from psychological practice, and therefore to try and do so only results in disguising them. To illustrate this point I introduce mainstream psychotherapy theory about PTSD and Peripartum Depression, critique them by drawing on Donnel Stern’s relational psychoanalytic theory about dissociative enactments and Peter Marin’s 1981 study of Vietnam veterans. Marin contended that the PTSD he encountered while working with the vets was an expression of “moral pain,” especially exacerbated by a particular kind of political betrayal from which vets suffered at the hands of their doctors, therapists, religious leaders, families, and friends. The same process, I argue, is at work with young women about to or recently having given birth. I suggest that this betrayal, too painful to be tolerated consciously, stays “unformulated” and then enacted unconsciously in various psychological symptoms. Although originally an attempt to address the pathogenic instances of the social context of patients, the categories of PTSD and PPD came to utilize only a limited understanding of the social realm. As a result, the DSM categories contribute to an ongoing history in American psychology that mystifies the link between individual and collective suffering, thereby making difficult a more comprehensive understand and meaningful treatment of wartime or birthing trauma and the society that brings them about. This creates an intellectual tokenism that works hand-in-glove with state and corporate interests in health care. The result is a technicist psychotherapy that medicalizes, and thereby depoliticizes, political suffering.
