WHY MANY PEOPLE ARE DISGUSTED WITH DOCTORS, LAWYERS AND EDUCATORS
(Many professionals are afflicted with a specific and ultimately anti-social “reaction formation”)
WHY MANY PEOPLE ARE DISGUSTED WITH DOCTORS, LAWYERS AND EDUCATORS
(Many professionals are afflicted with a specific and ultimately anti-social “reaction formation”)
By
David Gottfried
Most people I know get sick of their lawyers and their doctors. I don’t think this is accidental. I think many doctors don’t really want to heal, many attorneys don’t really want to advance a client’s legal interests and many educators enjoy making their students feel stupid. I think this is because of what I call the reaction formation theory of the professions.
First, I must define a reaction formation: A reaction formation occurs when one tries to conceal one’s socially unacceptable tendencies by purporting to believe in, or aspire to, the reverse of that tendency, e.g., one tries to conceal one’s desire to be a drag queen by purporting to be like John Wayne. In the professions, one tries to conceal one’s hostile or frowned upon tendencies by working in a field which seeks to attain the opposite of one’s hostile desires. Consider a few examples:
A) EDUCATION: If you want to make people feel stupid, you conceal this desire by purporting to want to educate people, and you become a teacher, where the high point of your day is screaming at a student and telling him he is stupid. In my time as an inmate in the New York City Public School System, my teachers routinely screamed, “I get paid whether you learn or not so just shut up.” When they tried to teach, they made it almost impossible to learn. Although I did very well in school, on occasion I did not grasp the material. These times were terrible because of the galling, demeaning, demanning way my purportedly benevolent teachers tried to help me or any other student. While the class was still in session, they proceeded to give the poor student a one-on-one tutorial. They spoke in a loud voice so everyone could hear that the backward student was being given special help because he was stupid. They spoke very, very slowly, the better to convey the notion that the pupil was a dunce. They made certain that everyone knew the unfortunate child had trouble learning.
Consider Another example of how teachers want to make students feel stupid: When students do poorly, they are given bullshit awards such as certificates of attendance. They know the award underscores their academic ineptitude. Everyone knows this. All the smiles and cooing, high-pitched, infantilizing words of encouragement make everyone in ear shot know it and proves that the teacher knows it. And why does the teacher do it? Because she does not want to teach; she wants to demean.
B) PSYCHIATRY: If you want to drive people crazy, you become a psychiatrist (Consider the results from the Eysenck study: Two third of neurotics who don’t go to therapy get better over time, but only 44 percent of those neurotics who go to analysts get better).
Actually, so many of the methods practiced by psychotherapists appear to increase the risk of schizophrenia. For example, a Dr. Bleuler said, many years ago, that 4 traits were emblematic of schizophrenics. In my view, Three of those four trait are engendered by psychoanalysis (Admittedly, analysis is much less popular today). The traits include a) autism, or being concerned about oneself to the exclusion of the world, and this is inculcated because you talk to the doctor about your life ad nauseum, b) loose associations or jumping from one topic to another in a seemingly incoherent pattern, and this is fostered because patients are told to free associate in sessions, c) and inappropriate affect, or a disconnect between the content of your speech and the manner of your speech. For example, if one said that one wanted to murder one’s best friend, and one said it in a serene, emotionless voice, that would be indicative of schizophrenia. This can be induced by psychoanalysis because after talking about issues for years, your speech may be drained of all color and feeling. Bleuler had another signal trait for schizophrenia, ambiguity, or rather having extremely ambiguous feelings about something, but I haven’t figured out how that may be engendered by therapy.
C) TREATING PHSYCIAL ILLNESSES: If you want to hurt people physically, you conceal these socially unacceptable desires by becoming a doctor of physical illnesses:
i) The first class of anti-neoplastic drugs were derived from the mustard gas of World War One. These drugs can be highly effective, but what prompted doctors to first look for a poison when crafting drugs to fight cancer? Did it never occur to them to consider therapies that might boost the patient’s immune system.
ii) Electro Convulsive Shock Treatment was introduced into Bellevue straight from Mussolini’s Italy. Doctors were never quite certain how electrocution of the brain allegedly proved therapeutic, but they used it just the same. Perhaps the bombast and belligerence of Il Duce gave shock treatment a violent, sexy aura they couldn’t resist. (This also fits in the section of this essay on psychiatry.)
iii) 100,000 Americans die every year from infections contracted in the hospital.
iv) A doctor from the Mayo Clinic Warns that this country will have 25,000 additional cancer deaths per year because of the excessive use of CT scans, which emit 400 to 500 times as much radiation as a chest x ray.
v) Years ago leeches were attached to patients’ skin to suck their blood.
vi) In the 19th Century, A Prussian doctor named Diefenbach performed Hemiglossectomy, or a partial removal of the tongue, to treat stuttering. He held that the procedure had to be done without anesthesia.
vii) The administration of tar water, or water infused with tar, was a particularly nauseating favorite of medical practitioners in 19th Century England as Charles Dickens writes, in “Great Expectations” that people “had a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness.”
D) LAWYERS: Finally, if you want to lie and deceive, you become a lawyer, and purport to seek justice, and the best lawyers are those who lie with great ease and avidity, e.g., the OJ Simpson defense team. But I am not going to talk about blatant lies that lawyers commit. I am a lawyer. Instead, I will note that legal concepts are sometimes deft contortions of reality that enshrine lying. If you want to do something you should not do, you say your corporation committed the foul deed. If you don’t want to pay your debts, you incorporate, the corporation won’t pay its debts and your individual assets will be inviolate. Perhaps the bedrock notion of corporation law, the notion that the owner of a corporation is not personally liable for anything the corporation did except in special, limited circumstances, generates the feeling that one can do whatever one likes and is the jurisprudential essence of Donald Trumpism.