Whatever other criticisms may be justly directed against psychiatry, there is no doubt that this one, variously expressed by C.S. Lewis in these two excerpts from his letters, is very important: namely, that the idea of �goodness� or �health� held, perhaps unconsciously, by the psychiatrist can make his work quite destructive.
Letter to a Former Pupil, 26 March 1940
Psychoanalysis. In talking to me you must beware, because I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable. I may therefore have been betrayed into statements on this subject which I am not prepared to defend. No doubt, like every young science, it is full of errors, but so long as it remains a science and doesn’t set up as a philosophy, I have no quarrel with it, i.e. as long as people judge what it reveals by the best human logic and scheme of values they’ve got and do not try to derive logic and values from it. In practice no doubt, as you say, the patient is always influenced by the analyst’s own values. And further, in so far as it attempts to heal, i.e. to make better, every treatment involves a value-judgment. This could be avoided if the analyst said, �Tell me what sort of a chap you want to be and I’ll see how near I can make you�: but of course he really has his own idea of what goodness and happiness consist in and works to that. And his idea is derived, not from his science (it couldn’t) but from his age, sex, class, culture, religion and heredity, and is just as much in need of criticism as the patient’s…
Letter to Mrs Frank L. Jones, 23 February 1947
Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to �cure� it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers. Often they have never given the question any serious thought.