Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Schuyler W. Henderson,
MD, MPH
Assistant Editor
Alienations
sychiatrists were once called alienists. Its an interesting word, in some ways more accurate than the
Greek portmanteau word psychiatrist, which combines
doctor (iatros) with a diffuse evocation of spirit, soul, and
mind (psyche), a reminder of the uncertainty about, and the
magnitude of, what were treating.
Alienist speaks to the absolute stigma of difference
afforded the mentally ill: strangers, the estranged, visitors
from another world who do not belong, less familiar than
animals. There is a careful positioning that occurs in the
word psychiatrist, rooting the practitioner in a profession
of doctors and uprooting the afliation with a patient population. The refusal to identify our patient populations as
aliens or strangers is positive, but the refusal to identify
so closely with our patient populations might hint at the
phenomenal fear of contagion in stigma.
In this months Book Forum, we encounter people who
are reputedly alienatedthe traumatized, the autistic, the
hated parentfrom writers defying pat notions of alienation and reconsidering the boundaries of recognition. The
books speak to the commensurability of experience, of
language, and of healing with supposedly alien others. The
Roman playwright Terence famously said, Homo sum,
humani nihil a me alienum puto (or, Im a humannothing
human is alien to me). It might be a mission statement
for alienists.
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