Keen, a professor and practicing psychotherapist, addresses the essential distinction between the truly serious questions involved in human life and the superficial aspects so generally engaging people's concern-and often professional treatment-which he terms, triviality. He considers how contemporary practice of psychotherapy often fails to admit to the critical difference, fails to recognize it in practice, and subsequently treats patients for irrelevancies while neglecting core, essential issues.

Keen addressed his concern about the prevalent practices among psychological/medical practitioners vis-a-vis the prescriptive drug control of mental problems in earlier publications. In this work, including a therapy case study, Keen's position-an important one warranting wide attention in the medical and helping professions-stresses that pharmacotherapy threatens our access, and openness to ultimate issues. For professionals and scholars in medicine, public health, clinical psychology, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists.

Silently orienting us to the world are traditions embedded in our language. These traditions shape how we understand the necessities and possibilities of life and truth. Dualism, a metaphysical theory, is such a tradition, and, in Keen's view, the separate discourses of science and morality create double meanings in our experience. Psychopharmacology is a critical intersection of these two worlds, where physical compounds are used to change mental life. Increasingly, the language of neurochemistry formulates that treatment. To control ennui with chemicals is to direct our attention away from what is wrong in our lives and to focus instead on what we can control easily, by taking a pill.

Mental life has become marginal in biologically reductionistic discourse. While the demystification of human consciousness is surely a cornerstone of modernity, in excess it indulges a world design where nothing is sacred and everything becomes just another phenomenon to which we owe nothing. Our practice of manipulating consciousness as an object surrenders the complex reflections of moral ambiguity and struggle. Following the example of our doctors, Keen asserts, we the population neglect what is wrong in our lives. Like the rest of nature, our minds become exploitable. And properties of consciousness become commodities sold by prescription in drug stores. A provocative analysis of psychopharmacology this will be of interest to treatment professionals, from psychologists, psychiatrists, and nurses to social workers, as well as the interested public.

Most studies of depression focus on the psychiatric or medical interpretation of the experience. Sadness and guilt are human experiences, Keen argues, not disease symptoms. They involve the intricate layers of enacting a style for others, of coping with moral crises, and enduring disappointment. Depression tells us of life and death, good and evil, but not sickness and health.

Keen begins with human consciousness, in contrast to the non-reflective consciousness of animals. It becomes clear that the social meanings of being depressed complicate and may even obscure the experiences of sadness and guilt that must be lived through and survived in human depression. The uniquely human and moral content is highlighted; the dysfunction of disease is demystified. Of particular interest to practitioners, professors, and students involved with psychology.

This history of ideas in American psychology divides 11 decades into three periods, marked out by specific themes central to psychologists over the years. Initially, the legacy of mind-body dualism challenged scientists to make coherent a single universe of mental and physical phenomena, but efforts were hampered by languages that embody mental, physical, and metaphysical commitments. This struggle began with James, whose work remains enormously relevant, is exacerbated by Titchener, whose mentalism provokes a reaction by Watson, whose physicalistic bias provoked a vastly expanded realm opened by Gestalt.

The second period, from Freud to Skinner, shifted the focus from mind and body to experimental and clinical settings for the acquisition and application of psychological knowledge. Tolman, Hebb, Rogers, Hull, Piaget, and Skinner each sought to create a psychology that could bridge these two settings, often reducing one to the other, but often inventing ideas for psychology that vastly changed the earlier preoccupation with mind-body dualism. In the third period, feminists, phenomenologists, and post modern thinkers recentered psychology. The cultural acceptance of psychology as a point of view on virtually any issue led to a proliferation of diversity even greater than in the second period. The integration of psychology into employment roles in most segments of society made psychology more diverse and less unified than ever. An important resource for all scholars, students, and researchers involved with the history of ideas and American psychology.

The current practices of prescribing psychotropic drugs, according to Keen, are both inconsistent and irrational. Overprescription alone is epidemic, and is driven largely by popular demand and professional convenience. The fact that mental life is being affected with physical agents leads to theoretical complexities no simpler than the metaphysics of mind-body relationships. These deeper questions are being ignored, Keen asserts, in favor of pragmatic attitudes driven by convenience, cost, popular demands, insurance protocols, and theoretical preferences. Keen first examines some of the reactions of psychiatry to the advent of pharmacotherapy. Parallels to the enthusiasm with lobotomy and deinstitutionalization are then explored. He argues that the treatment of the mentally ill must find some other way to mix pharmacotherapy with psychotherapy, for the theoretical and assumptive basis of the treatment profession is not settled. He asks how we can understand chemicals and experiences in the same theoretical framework, who exactly ought to prescribe, and whether ritual and placebo aspects of what is done by therapists are as likely to determine outcome as are chemical factors. In the last section of his book, Keen analyzes the implications of these issues for the rest of American society. A controversial book that will be important reading for teaching as well as practicing psychologists.

Originally published in 1975 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, this volume introduces phenomenological psychology and is intended for the beginning student as well as for professionals in the field. It includes the historical status of the major concepts mentioned, a brief summary of the major philosophical contributions of phenomenology, and numerous references for further investigation.