At 01:17 PM 13/09/00 -0400, Mike wrote of my comment:
>> greater than chance tendency of psychiatrists and other
>> health professionals to go crazy
>> leading to standard jibes about `physician heal thyself'
>I was under the impression that most, or at least many, shrinks go in to the
>business as a result of their own mental illness.
That's what I just said, dismissing it: standard jibes about `physician
heal thyself'.
It might even be true in some measure, in the same way that it might be
true surgeons are lightly-disguised sadists with a deep-seated wish to hack
and mutilate human flesh. Then again, that claim, while perhaps so in small
part, might be a rather silly and cheap Freudianism.
But what's interesting about the viral model is that it lacks the jeering,
sneering connotations of this sort of suggestion. (I realise that Mike
might have been offering it as a simple statement of cause-and-effect, with
no added editorializing--but that's not the way it's usually raised.)
I think, along parallel lines, of the cases of teaching members of Xian
religious orders who end up fondling their hapless charges, or worse. You
could speculate that they entered this supposedly celibate company of men
because of their crypto-homosexuality/fear of sex/etc, and then found
themselves in pig heaven. It seems to me much more likely that most of the
poor sods joined up prior to a full unfolding of their own sexuality, and
in this demented social construct found their sexual urges rising to the
surface in `deviant' and indeed actually quite repellent ways. In that
case, their paedophilic yearnings are presumably neither in-born nor
`memetic'; they're a sort of bent adjustment to an intolerable deprivation
of warmth and sexual bondedness. I do doubt, though, in this case, that
it's viral. :)
Damien Broderick
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