Sigmund Freud.His Conception Of Mental Illness - Essay Example

Sigmund Freud.His Conception Of Mental Illness. Sigmund Freud is well-remembered by history not for coming up with the right answers—his theories have not stood the test of time well—but for asking the right questions. His conception of mental illness as something that could be understood, engaged with, and treated transformed our conception of the mentally ill or mentally disabled, and led to gradual improvements in the treatment of sufferers, both of emotional disturbance and cognitive disability. For a long time, mental handicaps were seen as completely insurmountable, just something that nobody could engage with or do anything about. In the 20th century, though, that began to change. The notion that mental illness was treatable began to become widespread, and mental hospitals because places of treatment rather than mere confinement. A good example of the changing attitudes is the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel of the same title. In it, Randle McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, is transferred from prison to a mental institution, where he challenges the way the institution is run. Prior to his arrival, the institution is essentially a holding pen, a place where people are kept because society doesn’t want to deal with them. There is no real expectation that anyone ever will, or ever can, leave the institution or be cured of their problems. Indeed, McMurphy initially goes there because he thinks it will be an easier place than prison to serve out the remainder of his sentence, only to discover that one he’s in the institutional system, he can be kept there indefinitely against his will. However, by engaging with the other patients as human beings, McMurphy challenges the authority of the institutional system. He reveals that most of his fellow “nuts,” in his phrase, are capable of functioning at a higher level than they are given credit for, and even the mysterious Chief Bromden has been completely misdiagnosed. He’s not deaf and mute; he’s just very quiet. The story is a larger metaphor about the emasculating effects of institutional systems (it is not by accident that Nurse Ratched is female) but the very fact that it was set in a mental hospital reveals a serious change in attitudes toward the mentally ill and disabled. The 1960s were a fertile time for changing attitudes, and the liberation of McMurphy’s compatriots should be seen in that context. In 1968, the Special Olympics were founded, as parents of mentally disabled children were encouraged for the first time to take pride in their offspring despite their disability. Prior to this era, such parents were frequently told to have their children permanently institutionalized, and tell people they were dead. As another example, three years prior to the release of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, there had been a famous television exposé of the Willowbrook State School, a grossly abusive and inadequate institution for mentally disabled children and youths. It led to a public outcry and a series of reforms in how such institutions were run. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in that sense, is chronicling an unfolding cultural narrative about the treatment of mental handicaps; it’s a story about changing attitudes that came out in a time of changing attitudes. There is often an easy narrative applied to the Civil War, one in which evil, racist Confederates are opposed by virtuous, non-racist Union troops. Few would phrase it in exactly that way, but that is the basic structure of the model many people absorb from pop culture and conventional wisdom. Like most such good-vs.-evil narratives, it is a gross oversimplification that misses much of its own point. Reality is, as ever, more complex. At another end of the spectrum, one finds those who insist that the war had nothing to do with slavery, that that was a mere incidental issue. Considering that every state that seceded wrote an elaborate proclamation of their reasons, and that every one of those documents cites slavery as their central ideological issue, the slavery-was-irrelevant view may safely be disregarded. While the Civil War was complicated and had multiple causes and issues involved, it can safely be said that slavery was definitely one of them, at least. The film Glory is an interesting counternarrative to the racist-South-nonracist-North frame, in that it depicts quite clearly that racist attitudes were taken entirely for granted among Union troops, and that even those supposedly fighting for the freedom of African-Americans flatly did not consider them equal to whites. The black troops are repeatedly denigrated, dismissed as not real soldiers, and relegated to menial labor. This is not depicted as unusual or the province of some particularly racist commanders; it was simply taken for granted as normal at the time. Indeed, it was considered scientific fact: objects in motion tend to remain in motion, the earth orbits the sun, and black people are inferior to white people. The legacy of this certainty continues to bedevil us today, unfortunately. So if not the fault of wicked racist Southerners, and if not entirely due to slavery, whence cometh the great evil of the Civil War? As in so many other endeavors, it helps to follow the money. In the 1850s, the Industrial Revolution had taken hold, and economies were shifting rapidly. The North adopted a diverse industrial trade base, but the South, for various cultural and environmental reasons, wound up largely dedicated to a single crop: “King Cotton,” as it was called. The invention of the cotton gin had enabled cotton to become a massive cash crop, and the South was ideal cotton country. Unfortunately, the more cotton they wanted to sell, the more slaves were required to harvest it. Thus, the South ended up economically committed to slavery because it was so deeply economically wedded to cotton. The full-throated ideological defenses of slavery on moral and religious grounds that Southern opinion-makers were prone to were nothing but a post facto rationalization. They couldn’t give up slavery because without it they had no economy. The South went to war to defend a dubious single-crop agricultural economy, which happened to be based on slavery. The outcome of the war was a demonstration of what happens when a single-crop agricultural economy goes to war with a broad industrial manufacturing base. Works Cited Glory. Dir. Edward Zwick. Perf. Edward Zwick. 1989. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Dir. Milos Forman. Perf. Milos Forman. 1975. Read More