Main description:

We think we know what healers do: they build on patients' irrational beliefs and treat them in a 'symbolic' way. If they get results, it's thanks to their capacity to listen, rather than any influence on a clinical level. At the same time, we also think we know what modern medicine is: a highly technical and rational process, but one that scarcely listens to patients at all.

In this book, ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading. They show instead that healers are interesting precisely because they don't listen to patients, using techniques of 'divination' rather than 'diagnosis'. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer. Modern medicine, for its part, is characterized by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment.

Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom.

Contents:

Contents
Editor's Note
1. Towards a Scientific Psychopathology - Tobie Nathan
I. The Benefits of Folk Therapy
Scientific Therapy and Folk Therapy
Solitude
Diagnostics or Divination
Statistical Categories vs. Real Cultural Groups
The Construction of Truth
Risky Psychopathology
A Clinical Illustration
Continuation of the Consultation
II. Medicines in Non-Western Cultures
Prolegomena on Thought and Belief
The Idea of the Symbol
The White Man's Medicines
Thought is in Objects
Concepts of the Savage Mind
Active Objects
In Conclusion
2. The Doctor and the Charlatan - Isabelle Stengers
Recovering for the Wrong Reasons
The Power of Experimentation
Who defines the causes?
A Practical Challenge
3. Users: Lobbies or Political Creativity? - Isabelle Stengers
Is another kind of medicine possible?
Disease mongering
A machine
Condemnation?
Hands Off!
4. Doctors, Healers, Therapists, the Sick, Patients, Subjects, UsersE- Tobie Nathan
Therapist
The Sick
Patients
Subjects
Users
Pharmaka
Notes