Thomas Scheff: Emotions and Politics 

Absolutely incredible. Never would have expected this to be so powerful, and it’s not just what he said, but his emotional presence in saying it. Made me weep, and sweat and shake, and I still have chills.

Wow. Thank you! So enlightening.

This is a wonderful presentation that covers the mysterious world of shame and violence .Personal and emotional stories from the presenter's own life history make this presentation highly interesting moving and original. Highly recommended.I give it an A+

Thank you very much sharing this sprch openly. Thank you from Germany, Berlin

I found this video interesting.

@CocteauDalighari I am in accord with your take, on this, the alligning of state and medicine (psychiatry). However-and not to contradict the mainstay of your argument-modern psychiatry and state has been one marked by the steady accretion of power, certainly as reflected in the passing of mental hygiene laws, to the detriment of Constitutional guarantees of civil liberties. I think that the MH profession's insistence that mental illness is physical, is an expedient and rationalizing notion.

@CocteauDalighari You seem to be missing an important ingredient throughout this historical account of psychiatry: that psychiatry and state are inextricably bound and mutually serve the other, as in that of extralegal punishment. What Laing might have set out to dismantle within institutional psychiatry, and reshape in his own image, he only managed to reassert, through his own conceit and hypocricy. I do, however, very much respect your input and insight.

Opened my eyes to why some people decide to gang stalk. Not to mention war crimes.

@CocteauDalighari First off, thanks for your thoughtful response. You make an interesting point and, I suppose, the various camps have seen fit to marshal to their respective sides. "He who holds the power of the discourse.", might seem a bit too Foucaultian, however, I think in the political sense, medicine (psychiatry) and state are fair game for the frustrated, lefty types: the pseudoliberals, like Laing, who said one thing and did another. These very renegade "reformers" were real Statists!

I didn't mean to imply that Laing saw himself the renegade; the media were only too happy to oblige him that epithet. Are you asserting that R.D. Laing, a mediocre medical student and doctor, held such high esteem of the scientific method in his work? I might suggest you read Thomas Szasz's "Anti-psychiatry:quackery squared". Laing was a tragic clown, even within a profession of clowns. His was the Marxist, anti-western animus of the family and "society". But he knew who would foot the bill!

@haakavish What is so "mysterious" about shame and violence, unless of course, your assertion rests on the mystificatifations engendered by the reductiveness of biopsychiatry? I think that psychiatry is not a rational enterprise, no matter the pseudoscientific and quasi-medical blandishments. The "mechanisms

@CocteauDalighari I beg to differ slightly on this "arm twisting" take. I think that there was certainly that, however, there is a great deal of complicity, at present, between the state and psychiatry, as it was with church and state of medieval Europe. Mutatis mutandis. Still, it seems to me that any meaningful critique of the coercive aspects of psychiatry are little discussed. All the real reformers of the 1960s are aging and dying off, and biopsychiatry is here to stay for the time being.

@CocteauDalighari This "something" is the mind, a verbal, but no less strategic to the psych enterprise as "something" corporeal, as in mental illness, a disordering of thought (mind). The poverty of the science and the degree to which scientism informs the mainstay of the psych profession, my precepts concerning the myth of mental illness can be none other.

Gotta say, the discussion of hitler very much makes me think Trump is driven by shame, and that his political movement is very much a parallel to the hitler’s promise to remove ‘the shame of being German’. Think about the slogan ‘make America great again’: it suggests America is presently in a state of disgrace, it imagines a time in the past when America was proud. Trump offers pride to the ashamed, at great cost, similar to the way that hitler did. Also it seems pretty obvious to me that trumps narcism is the other side of his deep sense of shame and insecurity. All the attempts to ‘shame’ him further just make him more narcissistic, and send his followers deeper into delusions of shame-denying self assertion. Tactics of political shame just fuel the fire.

There remains the persistent ambiguity over the term "anti-psychiatry". At one point a member of the audience, no less a professional psychologist, makes the category mistake of lumping the psychiatric abolitionist Thomas Szasz, with such hucksters as Laing, and Cooper. Such an error, of assuming the latter figures as psychiatric "reformers", and kindred spirits of the Libertarian-Humanist Dr. Szasz, has been a source of considerable confusion over any meaningful critique of the MH profession.

What is Thomas Scheff's agenda? Scheff has named "the male gender" as the principle source of violence. So what innovations in law, jurisprudence, governance, public policy, etc, would Scheff be willing to support in light of the position he has taken? It is a point to ponder.

@CocteauDalighari I'd call that the Therapeutic state. I strongly suggest you read the book of the same title, by Thomas Szasz.