MixedTablet MagAviv approaches her critiques obliquely and suggestively, through in-depth reports on individuals based on their letters, diaries, interviews with family members, friends, medical records, doctors, and, when possible, the subjects themselves ... Strangers to Ourselves adds anecdotal and emotional weight to a growing body of evidence that the progressive narrative of mental health is largely fictitious ... Aviv then takes things a step further—and perhaps too far: She suggests that our faults are neither in our stars (our biology) nor ourselves (our minds in response to our environment) but in the stories medical professionals tell about those faults and how willing we are to accept them ... Aviv would never go so far as to endorse a revival of R.D. Laing’s and Thomas Szasz’s radical anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s. Nor is she a cheerleader for more recent efforts spearheaded by the journalist Robert Whitaker to combat America’s pill-industrial complex ... Aviv appears to hedge her bets when it comes to the question of whether even florid cases of mental illness are \'real\' ... For Aviv, society is therefore to blame, except when it isn’t ... At its most cogent, Strangers to Ourselves appears to be making a case for the equal agency of those with mental health issues to determine their own treatments ... Yet this Jamesian libertarianism, however delightful in theory, remains subject in practice to the strong gravitational pull of other force.
Richard Wollheim
PositiveBookforumWollheim is a great noticer and maker of lists—the passage about his father’s possessions is exemplary—and another of Germs’s frequent pleasures comes from its psychogeography of suburbanism in the early days of that phenomenon ... Wollheim’s titular \'germs\' are mainly intended to mean seeds, the beginnings of a growth process. He leaves it to the reader to state the obvious: that the germs that grew into the freedom-loving, art-loving philosopher began with other literal germs ... We have our own germs. Even so, Wollheim’s effort to notice as much as possible while judging rarely can still be a fruitful example, and inoculating against all kinds of routine drill.
