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Psychiatry’s Resistance, An Interview
CHAPTER S I X
SANDWEISS: PSYCHIATRISTS have learned a lot about normal personality development and effective treatment approaches by studying severely disturbed people. Do you think we could gain even deeper insight into the human condition by studying highly evolved people—people who show heightened awareness or higher levels of consciousness? For instance, do you think that learning about higher levels of consciousness with in-depth studies of the lives of saints or mystics might be relevant to modern day psychiatry?
Doctor A: Relevant to me as a person, yes; as a psychiatrist, no. I suppose that the phenomenon of higher levels of consciousness is an important human phenomenon, but as a psychiatrist I don’t think it relates to my clinical practice. Lots of things don’t, of course. I can think of other things that I don’t understand that interest me as a person, from extrasensory perception on one hand to astronomical speculation on the other, and they really have nothing to do with
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