Dr. Rahman: Do you have your own place?
Gary Freedman: Yes, I have my own apartment.
Dr. Rahman: You're able to take care of that on your own?
Gary Freedman: Yes.
Dr. Rahman: What do you do about groceries? Who buys your groceries?
Gary Freedman: I buy my own groceries.
Dr. Rahman: You do that on your own? You're able to handle that on your own?
Gary Freedman: Yes.
Dr. Rahman: That's good. You used to work?
Gary Freedman: Yes.
Dr. Rahman: That's good. You used to work?
Gary Freedman: Yes. I used to work at a law firm.
Dr. Rahman: Did somebody get that job for you or did you get it on your own?
Gary Freedman: I got the job myself, on my own.
Muslims would say I am an infidel. Christians would say I am a heathen. To psychiatrists I am a high functioning psychotic; I tie my own shoes.
Lawyers (other than Akin Gump lawyers) would say I am not disabled. But lawyers do not make disability determinations; psychiatrists make disability determinations. Speaking metaphorically, it's the Muslims who decide who will be rewarded with 72 virgins when they reach Paradise.
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Dr. Rahman also asked me if I ever hear voices. That says a lot about what he thinks of my disorder. It's real and it's apparently severe.
The U.S. Marshal thought the same thing.
It's true what Jeffrey Masson said: Psychiatrists live in an invisible world of their own creation.
And society has alotted to the psychiatric profession the role of deciding who is functional and who is not, just as Catholics have allotted to priests the role of making things "holy." It's the agreed upon fiction, the agreed upon convention.
Just what is "holy water?" I once mentioned the term "holy water" to Israela Bash, an orthodox Jewish psychologist from Israel who I used to see. She said: "Holy water? You mean they got it from Jerusalem?"
Once again: an object's (and a person's) identity can depend on the value system of the evaluator.
To an anti-Semite a Jew is a crazed monster who is out to take over the world. The only difference between a rabid anti-Semite and a psychiatrist is that society has not assigned to anti-Semites the role of defining a Jew; but in the Germany of the Third Reich, society did assign the role of defining the Jew to anti-Semites.
Different societies have different fictions and conventions. American society has assigned to the psychiatric profession the role of deciding who is mentally ill. But it's a fiction, a convention of our society.
Wow, I'm starting to sound more and more like Nietzsche. Nietzsche once said: "There are no moral phenomena. There are only moral interpretations of phenomena."
Nietzsche died in an insane asylum.
Look at the D.C. Court of Appeals. They were blind to the evidence before them: a totally logical, well-reasoned brief of an appellant.
That appellant, unfortunately, had been diagnosed as mentally ill by a psychiatrist. The alleged word of a psychiatrist who never met the appellant trumped the first hand evidence presented by the appellant himself.
The Court was following the insane convention of American society, even when that convention led to a result that had no basis in reason or common sense -- or the law, for that matter.
"The psychiatrist has the final word."
Maybe an enterprising forensic psychiatrist like Robert L. Sadoff, M.D. could write an interesting law review article about me and my case. Dr. Sadoff used to be affiliated with the Temple University Law School, Unit in Law and Psychiatry. (My sister used to work as a secretary in that unit in the 1960s when she attended Temple University; she worked for Dr. Sadoff and others.)
My case has broader implications than presented by any simple job termination. How could lawyers in the DOJ read my blog for a two month period (Nov 2009 to Jan 2010) and conclude otherwise?
The case says a lot about the role of psychiatrists in American law and the role of psychiatrists in American society.
Thurman Arnold's book The Symbols of Government proposes that there is an unacknowledged mythology that underlies the law, without which the law would have no power over human behavior.
I would propose that the power of the myth and symbol of psychiatry in the law played an important role in the Court's decision in Freedman v. D.C. Dept. of Human Rights, D.C.C.A. no. 96-CV-961 (Sept. 1, 1998).
Thurman Arnold was the founding partner of Arnold, Porter & Fortas, and a federal judge (U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C.). Abe Fortas, Arnold's law partner, was a Supreme Court Justice and a Jewish Texan -- like Bob Strauss.
I learned about Thurman Arnold's book from E. James Lieberman's book: Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank.
Dr. Lieberman is a retired Washington D.C. psychiatrist, and clinical professor of psychiatry at GW. In 1989 I sent Dr. Lieberman a copy of my self analysis "The Caliban Complex." Dr. Lieberman sent me back a humorous note.
I formed the belief that Akin Gump spoke with Dr. Lieberman in the summer of 1989 and that he said I did a good job with my self analysis. But then, I have paranoid schizophrenia. I have a lot of strange thoughts.
Dr. Lieberman writes (at 370-71) the following in Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank:
In February [1936] Rank discovered Thurman Arnold's Symbols of Government (1935). Called a cross between Voltaire and a cowboy, Arnold was a Wyoming native who became one of the most influential aw professors at Yale; he served in the Roosevelt administration, after which he became a judge and a founding partner of the famous Arnold, Fortas and Porter law firm in Washington. At Yale, Arnold enjoyed interdisciplinary seminars at which Harry Stack Sullivan, among others, participated. Like Rank a pragmatist who scoffed at the professionals' hope of achieving illusionless objectivity, Arnold was more concerned with myths and symbols than with facts. "Law," he wrote in the preface to his book, "is primarily a great reservoir of emotionally important social symbols." His appeal to a mind like Rank's can be seen from his concept of the rule of law: "the belief that there must be something behind and above government without which it cannot have permanence or respect. Even a dictator cannot escape the psychology of his time." Rank wrote [social worker Jessie] Taft that he was "dazed" by the book, something which did not happen to him often.
But--believe it--I've found a book that does the same thing with (or to) law that I did for therapy and education: that is, first separating all content from dynamics and then stating the fundamentally dualistic principle inherent in the dynamics: showing what it is and pointing out why it has to be that way, good and bad. It's profound psychology although he doesn't know it and calls it [an] "anthropological" approach.
Why is it that non-Jews (and many Jews) feel no guilt about not following Jewish dietary law? They don't subscribe to the myths and symbols of Jewish law, that's why.
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