Institutional Neurosis describes the clinical features of the disorder in mental hospitals, its differential diagnosis, etiology, treatment, and prevention. This book defines institutional neurosis as a disease characterized by apathy, lack of initiative, loss of interest in things and events not immediately personal or present, submissiveness, and sometimes no expression of feelings of resentment at harsh or unfair orders. The cause of institutional neurosis is uncertain, but it can be associated with many factors in the environment in which the patient lives. This text considers the factors associated with institutional neurosis such as loss of contact with the outside world; enforced idleness; brutality, browbeating and teasing; bossiness of staff; loss of personal friends, possessions and personal events; drugs; ward atmosphere; and loss of prospects outside the institution. This publication is a good reference for medical practitioners and students interested in the mental changes that may result from institutional life.

Institutional Neurosis is a four-chapter text that systematically presents the dreadful mental changes that may result from institutional life and the steps that can be taken to cure them. The term "institutional neurosis promotes the syndrome to the category of a disease, rather than a process, thereby encouraging the public to understand, approach, and deal with it in the same way as other diseases. The opening chapter describes the clinical features of the disorder in mental hospitals, its differential diagnosis, etiology, treatment, and prevention. The next chapters consider the etiology or factors associated with institutional neurosis, including apathy, loss of interest, lack of initiative, and sometimes a characteristic posture and gait. The last chapter reviews the various aspects of the treatment of institutional neurosis. This book is of value to neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and researchers in the allied fields.

First Published in 1999. This is Volume XV of twenty-one of the Individual Differences Psychology series. Written in 1929, this study gathers together case histories of Adlerian psychology and the science of Individual Psychology that teaches that the recurring theme of all neurosis and conflict is a sense of discouragement and inferiority.

First published in 1984, Ideas on Institution is a review of the major English-language literature of the past two decades on the experience of living in institutions - hospitals, mental hospitals, prisons. The survey opens with a consideration of the writings of Erving Goffman, Michael Foucault, and Thomas Szasz. They shattered the liberal consensus that the purpose of imprisonment was to reform. Instead, their work argued that the purpose of prisons and mental hospitals was social control, and that prisons created criminals, and mental facilities created mental illness. Part II looks at four British studies : Russell Barton's Institutional Neurosis which suggested the existence of a new disease entity; Peter Townsend's The Last Refuge, a study of old people in residential care; The Morrisses’ Pentonville, a study of a London prison which became a classic in criminology; and Sans Everything, a symposium which paved the way for a series of official hospital enquiries in the 1970s. Part III examines David Rothman's two historical studies on how and why the U.S. constructed institutions, and how and why reform movements failed; N.N. Kittrie's The Right to be Different, a wide-ranging attack on the compulsory treatment of a variety of 'deviants', including the mentally ill, juvenile delinquents and drug abusers; Cohen and Taylor's Psychological survival, a disturbing analysis of the lives of long-term prisoners in a maximum security wing; Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment on the malignant effects of prison conditions on the personalities of both prisoners and their guards; and King and Elliott's study of Albany Prison, showing how a promising therapeutic experiment went wrong. This book will be of interest to students of history, gerontology, sociology, social policy, penology, psychology and political science.

Psychoanalysis began over a century ago as a treatment for neurosis. Rooted in the positivistic mindset of the medicine from which it stemmed, it trained its empiricist gaze directly upon the symptoms of the malaise, only to be seduced into attributing it to causes as numerous as there are aspects of human experience. Edifying as this was for our understanding of the life of the psyche, it left the sickness of the soul that was its actual subject matter, the neurosis which it was supposed to be about, out of its purview. The crux of this problem was of a conceptual nature. As psychology increasingly gave up on its constituting concept, its concept of soul, it succumbed to the same extent to treating its patients without an adequate concept of what both it and neurosis were about. Attention was paid to mishaps and traumas, the vicissitudes of development, and the Oedipus complex. But neurosis, according to the thesis of this ground-breaking book, comes from the soul, even is soul; the soul in its untruth. Indeed, both it and the modern field of psychology are successors of the soul-forms that preceded them, religion and metaphysics, with the difference that psychology's reluctance to recognize and take responsibility for its status as such has been matched by the neurotic soul's clinging to obsolete metaphysical categories even as the often quite ordinary life disappointments of its patients are inflated with absolute importance. The folie à deux has been on a massive scale. Owing their provenance to the supplement they each provide the other, psychology and neurosis are entwined in a Gordian knot, the cutting of which requires insight into the logic that pervades both. Taking up this sword, Giegerich exposes and critiques the metaphysics that neurosis indulges in even as he returns psychology to the soul, not, of course, to the soul as some no longer credible metaphysical hypostasis, but as the logically negative life of the mind and power of thought. Using several fairy tales as models for the logic of neurosis, he brilliantly analyses its enchanting background processes, exposing thereby, in a most lively and thoroughgoing manner, the spiteful cunning by which the neurotic soul, against its already existing better judgement, betrays its own truth. Topics include the historicity of neurosis, its soulful purpose as a general cultural phenomenon, its internal logic, functioning, and enabling conditions, as well as the Sacred Festival drama character of symptomatic suffering, the theology of neurosis, and ‘the neurotic’ as the figure of modernity's exemplary man. A collection of vignettes descriptive of various kinds of neurotic presentation routinely met with in the consulting room is also included in an appendix under the heading, ‘Neurotic Traps.’

Anxiety may be debilitating or stimulating; it can result in neurotic symptoms or in improved, heightened performance in an actor or athlete. It is something every human being has experienced. As Professor G. M. Carstairs points out in his Foreword: 'During the course of the twentieth century we have found it progressively easier to concede that we are all to often swayed by emotion rather than reason. We have come to recognize the symptoms of neurotically ill patients are only an exaggeration of experiences common to us all, and hence that the unraveling of the psychodynamics of neurosis can teach us more about ourselves'. Although Charles Rycroft is also a psychoanalyst, it is as a biologist that he has made this study of anxiety, the three basic responses to it - attack, flight or submission - and the obsessional, phobic and schizoid and hysterical defenses. Written in precise but everyday language, Anxiety and Neurosis is based on adult experiences rather than the speculative theories of infantile instinctual development. Its clarity and authority can only add to Dr Rycroft's established international reputation.

In this book the author examines the series of connections that give rise to the intimate relationship between environment and individual in the construction of emotional suffering, emphasising both the undisputed pathogenic action of environmental stimuli and the active participation of whoever is obliged to suffer the negative situation. The author shows that the way in which one tries to escape suffering is what often seriously jeopardises growth. Working with Difficult Patients points out the intrinsic link between some forms of mental suffering and the distorted responses that the patient has received from his or her original environment. For this reason the author explores the concept of the emotional trauma in particular, since this trauma, which occurs in the primary relationship, often impels the child into relational withdrawal and towards constructing pathological structures that will accompany him or her for the rest of their life. The chapters are ordered according to a scale of increasing treatment difficulty, which is proportional to the potential pathogenicity of the underlying psychopathological structure.

Is Science Neurotic? sets out to show that science suffers from a damaging but rarely noticed methodological disease — “rationalistic neurosis.” Assumptions concerning metaphysics, human value and politics, implicit in the aims of science, are repressed, and the malaise has spread to affect the whole academic enterprise, with the potential for extraordinarily damaging long-term consequences.The book begins with a discussion of the aims and methods of natural science, and moves on to discuss social science, philosophy, education, psychoanalytic theory and academic inquiry as a whole. It makes an original and compelling contribution to the current debate between those for and those against science, arguing that science would be of greater human value if it were more rigorous — we suffer not from too much scientific rationality, but too little. The author discusses the need for a revolution in the aims of science and academic inquiry in general and, in a lively and accessible style, spells out a thesis with profound importance for the long-term future of humanity.

Psychiatry is an endlessly controversial endeavour, incorporating emotively-charged questions over the reality of mental illness, the medicalization of everyday life, and the role of nature versus nurture which cause constant discussion today, and on which almost everyone has an opinion. In this Very Short Introduction Tom Burns explores the nature of psychiatry, focusing on what it can and cannot do, and discussing why its history has been beset by dramatic shifts in emphasis and types of treatment. Considering the main disorders that have shaped its practice (such as schizophrenia and manic depression), he analyses how it differs from (and overlaps with) psychology and psychotherapy. Many of the controversies arise from its dual origin 200 years ago and the separate development of psychiatry with a more 'medical' approach in the asylums, rather than the psychological approach which birthed psychoanalysis and various forms of psychotherapy. Discussing philosophical issues of psychiatry's legitimacy, Burns explores the mistakes psychiatry has made and the blind alleys in its history, before looking forward to the likely changes in its practice with the coming of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This is the first book to show how Latin American liberation theology can be applied to and can transform pastoral care in countries such as Britain and the USA. Hitherto pastoral care has tended to concentrate on looking after individuals. Stephen Pattison suggests that much of the suffering endured by individuals is actually socially and politically caused, and so is avoidable if the appropriate action is taken. The author argues that what we now require is a socio-politically aware and committed pastoral care which makes an option for oppressed and poor people and engages in practical struggle against the forces of injustice and oppression. Focussing as it does especially on mentally ill people and on women, the book will be of interest to all those who want to broaden their vision and knowledge of liberation theology or pastoral care, whether theologians, pastors, students for ministry, members of caring professions, or users of the services they provide.