![]() When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from the lazar house, he becomes infuriated. You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. It was perceived as a psychiatricide, but it was a description from history. I like to write first volumes, and I hate to write second ones. Madness and Civilization was intended to be a first volume. At first I accepted things as necessary, but then after three months (I am slow-minded!), I asked, “What is the necessity of these things?” After three years I left the job and went to Sweden in great personal discomfort and started to write a history of these practices. It was the time of the blooming of neurosurgery, the beginning of psychopharmacology, the reign of the traditional institution. I was free to move from the patients to the attendants, for I had no precise role. After having studied philosophy, I wanted to see what madness was: I had been mad enough to study reason I was reasonable enough to study madness. To take a simple example, I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. For one or another reason I had the occasion to feel and live those things. I have to imagine that it was this latter phenomenon of formerly accepted scientific discourses falling out of favor and becoming the target of ridicule that inspired one of Foucault’s most famous quotes (which I have cited previously on numerous occasions): “A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.” Here is the same quote with more context:Įach of my works is a part of my own biography. “A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.” Michel Foucault As the old orthodoxy passes out of fashion it often falls either into neglect or may become the target of criticism as vicious as that directed at new and innovative research. Given time, that orthodoxy will be displaced as well, as more innovative work demonstrates new ways of acquiring knowledge. If the innovative science is eventually accepted, it eventually also becomes the basis of a new orthodoxy. Most innovative science breaks the established rules of the time. Robert Hinde did approve her thesis, even though she returned with all of his corrections with the original names and anthropomorphizing. Her colleagues and classmates thought she was “doing all wrong”. Jane also used descriptive, narrative writing in her observations and calculations. Jane’s major mistake was naming her “subjects”. Her adviser, Robert Hinde, said her methods were not professional, and that she was doing her research wrong. She is one of only eight other people to earn a Ph.D. Although Goodall’s work represents a major advance in ethology, it did not come without criticism. One of the greatest contributions to science in the twentieth century was Jane Goodall’s study of chimpanzees in the wild at Gombe, Tanzania.
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