@richard mcnair,
Even if we do not "raze it to the ground", we can at least "put it in brackets", and do the philosophical work of imagining what the world would be like if medical psychiatry did not exist.
What, if anything, ought to spring up in its place?
Some authoritarian and ignorant medieval organised religion, perhaps?
Put all that nonsense - that insanity, indeed! - in brackets as well.
Cast out the casters-out of demons. Burn the burners of witches.
(I'll keep Jesus, though, if you don't mind - or even if you do. I can't get rid, these days, of a conventional and no doubt unrealistic image of a bearded man with sad eyes staring reproachfully at me across two thousand years, as I stare back at Him and ask, "How can you be God, when, if you were anything at all, you were a man of your time, who believed all sorts of things we now know to be false, and had no inkling of a lot of things we now know to be true?")
(But I've carefully put Him, too, in parentheses, for the benefit of all you atheists out there!)
And while we're at it, let's stuff those increasingly crowded parentheses with Michel Foucault, and all the other poststructuralists, postmodernists, and other postmen.
And I'll have none of those Nietzschean Supermen, either.
Stuff 'em all in those brackets. Lock them all up in my parenthetical asylum.
What remains? Is there room yet for sanity?
