Download Author: Edelson, Marshall M.D. Ph.D.

2 eBooks available.

The Idea of a Mental Illness

This book investigates four questions. How does a psychiatrist think about man? What idea of mental illness follows from a view of man as the symbolizing animal? What is the relation of symbolic process and consciousness? How is the treatment of mental illness affected by a focus upon symbolic processes and levels of consciousness? Dr. Edelson’s discussion, using the lecture form, will inform and affect the attitudes of the physician, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychologist, psychotherapist, and student.

Freud, working as he did within the framework of nineteenth-century positivism, imposed physicalistic formulations upon his great empirical discoveries—essentially one great discovery, psychic reality. Nevertheless—and largely because of Freud’s work—today we tend to accept the significance of symbolic process, language, the world of value as well as the world of fact, and the problem of meaning, for understanding man. This book does not contain a systematic reexamination of psychoanalytic theory. However Dr. Edelson suggests some ways in which Freud might have reformulated his explanations of psychological phenomena, given the scientific milieu of our own day.

(212 pp.)

The Practice of Sociotherapy:A Case Study

The sociotherapist is a new kind of clinician. A psychiatrist, psychologist, nurse, social worker, nursing aide, administrator, group worker, or activities therapist–he faces tasks requiring special conceptual tools and skills. Most often an active member of the staff of a psychiatric hospital organized as a therapeutic community, his analyses and interventions are oriented to the social—rather than the personality—system. This book presents both the theoretical framework and the day-to-day working of the sociotherapist.

The analysis of a small psychoanalytically oriented psychiatric hospital and a two-year log of its daily community meetings focus on the vicissitudes of intergroup relations and organizational life and illustrate the skills and knowledge required of the sociotherapist working there. The debates and struggles concerning sex, noise, the control of space and facilities, the use of drugs and alcohol, and the response to deviance and alienation, are representative of communities within psychiatric treatment centers–and ubiquitous throughout our society. Dr. Edelson’s conclusions are tempered by his recognition that it is difficult to find clear-cut choices and to make lasting changes in even a simple social system. They serve as a realistic introduction to the painful value dilemmas of the therapeutic community. (798 pages)