Customer Reviews

Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry

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While this book reflects the concerns and influences of its time, including cybernetic-information theory and the desire for a unified theory of behavior, it remains among the most important works for anyone interested in developing a coherent theory of human experience and behavior under the rubric of communication. It is the first comprehensive statement introducing communication as a discipline of study, following upon Edward Sapir's entry term "communication" in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences in 1931, William Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry, Continental philosophy (especially Edmund Husserl), psychoanalysis, and American pragmatism (especially C. S. Peirce, though sometimes tacitly seen through the incorrect reading of the former by Charles Morris). That someone might not comprehend the importance of this work to contemporary study of discourse is owed not so much to ignorance as to a repressed history of the human science of communication. Later research (most particularly Paul Watzlawick, et. al. and numerous message-centered specialists in information theory) followed upon the Palo Alto School model and would, therefore, unwittingly accept the unfortunate definition of communication as the study of behavior and messages. These latter scholars, in behaviorist and media research, conveniently ignore the probative consideration of the tensions between and among culture, society and person that constitute conscious experience and which were thematic not only of the 1951 book and Ruesch's later work but also the entire history of pragmatism and European human-cultural science which are grounded in semiotic phenomenology, now understood within the encompassing and coherent discipline, Communicology. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry is perhaps the best available book for entry into the human science of communication. (see [...])
--Isaac E. Catt

This book is not about communication at least not primarily and not in the common sense of communication. It is a grandiose view of US psychiatry from the perspective of cybernetics and similar theories. It is full of ideas. A lot of ideas are still worthwhile to work out.

It is kind of hard to read but worthwhile not only from a historical perspective.