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Justifying Coercion through Religion and Psychiatry

State University of New York, Upstate Medical Center, 750 East Adams Street, Syracuse, NY 13210.

Before the Enlightenment, religious "truth" was generally regarded as a legitimate justification for coercion; since then, psychiatric "truth" is generally so regarded. In this article, I try to reconstruct the bygone mind-set that saw the controlling of deviants as a way to do good in God's name, and I compare it with the contemporary mind-set that sees controlling deviants as doing good in the name of mental health. I conclude that "we in the West have long repudiated the legitimacy of violence in the name of God. So long as we do not similarly repudiate the legitimacy of violence in the name of Mental Health, the very term 'psychiatric help' will carry an impossible load of ambivalence, rendering it useless, if not obscene."

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 2, 158-174 (1987)
DOI: 10.1177/0022167887272004


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