Customer Reviews

Haunted Children: Rethinking Medication of Common Psychological Disorders (S U N Y Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Roemmelt presents some fascinating case studies of children whose lives were distorted by family and environment; children very difficult to reach, but for whom the force of a human relationship with Roemmelt was enough to keep them from a life of medicated confusion and increasing fragmentation.

This book is a counter argument against the belief that all neurotic behavior, or most, has a biological component that should be manipulated medically to correct emotional problems and inner conflict.

In the spirit of Karen Horney and others, Roemmelt takes the position that neurosis is essentially a problem in human relationship -- that many deep inner problems are rooted in conflicts arising from relationships between ideals ( the fact of what we are vs. what we 'ought to be'), self, and others.

Clearly some problems of neurosis and many of psychosis are biologically oriented, and all ultimately have a biological representation -- yet it is not the position of this book that drugs should be described as a first resort, but as a last resort.

The feeling of being truly alive -- that comes from pain, persistence and the desire to overcome ones limitations, as much as from any other set of feelings -- can be canceled out by the regulatory and often harmful side effects of medication. Many doctors hand it out like candy. (Drs. can be as bad with medication as they can be with therapy.)

This book is not about "touchy feely" as another critic suggests, but a testimony to love in the spirit of awareness; and also in the spirit of the warrior -- the fighters being the children who made it back to the other side.

Some people clearly need medicine. Some really don't -- they need a shot at a real life. Could Roemmelt really provide that chance for some of his Haunted Children -- read the book and decide.

'If you don't feel it, you're not getting it. '

Yet another book deriding the new biologically-oriented psychiatry as dry and heartless.

Contains several case histories of classically autistic children who are deemed to be deeply emotionally disturbed (the fault of their parents, of course) and subjected to ludicrous psychoanalytic interpretations. Where has Roemmelt been since the sixties? Has he not yet noticed not only that autism has been conclusively demonstrated to be neurological in origin, but that a number of high-functioning people with autism (such as Temple Grandin and Gunilla Gerland) have backed this up and started describing their experiences, which, needless to say, bear no resemblance to Roemmelt's wild imaginings?

Any attempt to present psychoanalysis as the warm, humane, "touchy-feely" alternative to biologically-oriented psychiatry is doomed if it displays this much ignorance and lack of interest in the actual minds and opinions of the people it purports to be studying.

One reason, after all, for the surge in biologically-oriented psychiatry in the last decade is the massive number of lives that were shattered by psychoanalytic dogmas (such as the groundless claim that autism was an emotional disturbance caused by unloving parents).