ABSTRACT
In protecting their autonomy people are resisting the idea that they should, necessarily, have to do it someone else’s way. However, ultimately, this is top of the psychiatric agenda. Psychiatry, many aspects of psychology and most forms of psychotherapy have defined certain ways of living as ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ or ‘adaptive’. Almost every psychiatric principle is rooted in such assumptions. Moreover, if people do not elect to pursue a style of living that is ‘healthy’, normal or ‘adaptive’, most psychiatric professionals believe that they should have the power to make such people ‘see reason’. The moral imperative (should) is clear-cut (however ‘wrong’ it might be to others). However, the idea that anyone might ‘make’ someone see reason makes no sense. People might be encouraged to explore their current understanding of their relationship to the wider world. They might even be encouraged to examine critically the values on which they base those understandings. In the final analysis, they might be encouraged to develop further their awareness of possible conflicts between what they ‘believe’ and their rationale for ‘believing’ it. However, forcing (or making) someone to embrace a different form of ‘sense’, ‘reason’ or ‘understanding’ is the agenda of ‘brainwashing’ and totalitarianism, however much we might cloak it in the language of care and compassion. It requires us to deny, completely, the independent status of the ‘person’ – another idea that has been addressed in many of the preceding chapters. It is one thing to talk of ‘people’ as some kind of social mass, within which ‘individuals’
make up the ‘people’ and so the social mass. It is quite another thing to talk of ‘persons’. This requires us to think of ‘individuals’ not as units of society but much as we think of our own unique selves. Viewed from that perspective, persons are in constant flux –swimming in the tide of life – mysteries that largely defy explanation. The world would be an easier place to manage were it not for the reflections thrown up by the notion of ‘persons’.
