Reading between Philosophy and Clinical Social Work

 The next post or two will go in a different direction from previous posts. I recently wandered into my city’s main public library with an hour to kill and ended up in the mental health section, enjoying the pleasure of browsing. One of the books I pulled off the shelf was journalist Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Diversity . At over 500 pages, including notes, NeuroTribes is probably the heftiest non-academic history of autism (or, rather, of the concept of autism) one will find. Silberman made a name for himself as a tech journalist, and it was through his Silicon Valley connections that he first became interested in autism, with his article “The Geek Syndrome” appearing in Wired in 2001 (p. 10).   One could say a lot about any book of this length. In my mind, NeuroTribes is at its best in the chapters covering the rise of the parents’ movement, especially around such figures as Navy psychologist and parent of an autistic boy Bernar...

 My previous post criticized Nancy Nyquist Potter’s Mapping the Edges and the In-Between: A Critical Analysis of Borderline Personality Disorder (2009) for lack of methodological clarity. In this post, however, I would like to extract what I think is the most interesting part of her book, her suggestion that there is a specific virtue of “giving uptake”—and that this virtue is particularly important to clinicians working with patients with BPD. She develops this argument in Chapter 8 but also foreshadows it in Chapter 2, “The Problem with Too Much Anger.” Consider first the concept of virtue in the Aristotelian tradition of moral philosophy, in which Potter positions herself. An ethical virtue is an excellence of human character, a settled disposition to do the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons. In contrast to the Kantian tradition, with its stern insistence on human reason over and against “pathological” determination by the emotions, A...

I picked up Nancy Nyquist Potter’s Mapping the Edges and the In-Between: A Critical Analysis of Borderline Personality Disorder (200 9 ) with great interest, for, as far as I can tell, it is the only book-length work by a philosopher on BPD. Potter states, moreover, that she worked for five years as a certified crisis counselor, sat in on a treatment team while writing the book, and observed psychiatrist-patient interactions, so the book promises to avoid the usual pitfalls of abstraction and irrelevance to practice that philosophy suffers from. Unfortunately, I found the book mainly disappointing, on two counts. First, it became quickly clear that it was mostly a pastiche of previously published journal articles and book chapters (see the Acknowledgements page, which mentions 10 previous publications). Second, and more interestingly in my perspective, the book suffers from inadequate reflection on methodology, which, in turn, drives what I think is a questionable choice of subject ma...

My previous three posts moved through a recent defense of dimensional approaches to personality disorder to a set of philosophical questions about selfhood, identity, character, and moral responsibility that arise from any serious reflection on the concept of personality disorder. Going forward, I would like to turn to recent philosophical work on and around personality disorder. Right now, I plan to discuss the work of Nancy Nyquist Potter and Hanna Pickard , both of whom have their doctorates in philosophy but also have some direct practice experience working with people diagnosed with personality disorders. I will probably do some bibliography snowballing along the way and take some detours. If I am feeling up for it, I may also go back to Karl Jaspers’ classic book and try to make sense of what he has to say about personality. For today, though, I thought I would get my bearings by looking at a recent textbook on philosophy of psychiatry by Sam Wilkinson . I read this book abo...