Psychiatrists once believed that virtually all mental illness was caused by
bad parenting. This included schizphrenia, alcoholism, and even homosexuality.
Bruno Bettelheim, a well-known psychologist, declared "maternal rejection"
to be the cause of developmental disabilities such as autism and Asperger's Syndrome.
A Tiger by the Tail is a personal account of a "disturbed" child, and the therapy
to which our family was subjected.
Mothers of autistic children are no longer accused of maternal rejection,
and medical science no longer subjects people to psychotherapy as a
treatment for mental illness. However much of the public still accepts the
Freudian notion that subconscious feelings and emotions can damage "psyches".
Psychologists claiming to have some mysterious special understanding of human
motivation, that the rest of us lack, promote such syndromes as "repressed memory"
"multiple personality" and "Munchhausen by Proxy". As long as people are viewed
as consisting of materialistic entities such as "psyches", "ids", "egos" and "superegos",
and the public believes complex human behavior can be reduced to materialistic
formulas, we will remain vulnerable to a psychology industry competing for a shrinking
market.
Chapter 2--Who is more devastated, the disabled child or the parent?
Chapter 3--Is everything science cannot measure fictitious?
Chapter 4--Is delayed speech "abnormal"?
Chapter 5--What do psychological tests measure?
Chapter 6--Should "normal" be equated with average?
Chapter 7-- Do therapists try to impose their thinking upon the patient?
Chapter 8- - Who is abusing whom?
Chapter 9-- Do traumatic childhoods actually cause damaged adults?
Chapter 10-- Do therapists suffer rejection from the patient?
Chapter 11-- Do doctors close ranks over when challenged?
Chapter 12-- A Mommy doll, a Daddy doll and a baseball bat.
Chapter 13-- Can resentment feel like mental illness?
Chapter 14-- Is it the patient or the therapist who benefits?
Chapter 15-- Would "perfection" be a handicap?
Chapter 16--An innoculation against throwing rocks.
Chapter 17--What if patients wrote case histories about doctors?
Chapter 18-- A Mexican cure for profanity.
Chapter 19-- Is Western culture "normal"?
Chapter 19A--Are "liberated" women "normal"?
Chapter 20-- Should we wish that our children never know unhappiness?
Chapter 21-Did Freud, Marx and Darwin represent Twentieth Century materialism?