From Dahomey, With Love

One of Freud’s distinctive departures from the psychiatric tradition of his time was to consider himself solely as the patient’s agent and thus to repudiate any obligations to the patient’s family and society. This radical line in psycho­analysis and in fact its ‘moral mandate’ is still a rarity among practitioners of psychiatry and psychotherapy. Most schools of psychotherapy attempt to achieve the impossible by trying to· ‘help’ the patient and at the same time ‘do justice’ to his family, friends, emp­loyers and even Government agencies. Psychiatry still serves the interests of families, groups and the community rather than those of the individual patient. Like many of Freud’s ideas that were later picked up singly, in isolation from the rest of his theoretical system. and then made the basis of new schools of therapy, the idea of the psychiatrist as the agent of the individual against his family and society, was made the central plank of the school of ‘anti-psychiatry’ associated with the name of R.D. Laing and David Cooper.