Psychiatry gets no respect, least of all, it would seem, from psychiatrists. Ever since its inception, psychiatry has been the subject of takedowns from within, critiques that have attacked its foundational beliefs. Freud's disciple Ferenczi in the 1920s and '30s, Erich Fromm in the 1950s, Thomas Szasz and R.D Laing in the '60s and Jeffrey Masson in the '80s all characterized established psychiatry as everything from ineffectual and corrupt to destructive and sadistic.

The latest and in some ways the most subtle as well as the most devastating of these critiques is conservative writer (and former prison psychiatrist) Theodore Dalrymple's "Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality."

Dalrymple's aim is twofold: to evaluate the successes of various forms of psychological treatment, from Freudian analysis to behaviorism to CBT to neuropharmacology, and to trace the harmful effects of half-digested psychological concepts upon human character and society.

If all Dalrymple's copious writings have a central theme, it is the destructive power of bad ideas. And for Dalrymple, the most destructive bad idea of all, common to utopian political thinking and some schools of psychiatry, is that we can reshape human nature. To reshape human nature means that we can transcend the limitations of our personalities, avoid both the need to take responsibility for our actions and the necessity to make judgments, and above all, eliminate unhappiness.

As Dalrymple points out, the word "unhappy" has been all but banished from the language. Instead, we say that we are "depressed": If someone admits to unhappiness, it might be that his own ill-conduct, foolish or immoral, has contributed to it, but if he is depressed he is the victim of an illness, of something which, metaphysically speaking, has fallen from the sky.

Writing about Freudianism and its absorption into everyday thought, Darymple acutely observes:

"A doctrine or philosophy insinuates itself into a culture by means of rumor as much as by persuasion occasioned by reading its founding, or even subsequent, texts."

In other words, people who have never read Freud or could even define what he meant by the "return of the repressed" or "sublimation" have nonetheless internalized a shared and debased idea of Freud's thought: that human desires acted in a hydraulic fashion, and like liquid could not be compressed, so that if they were not fulfilled they would make themselves manifest in some other, pathological way, hence frustration of desire was futile and dangerous.

For Dalrymple, psychology not only undermines morality by giving us a new linguistic arsenal that we can use to evade responsibility but acts as an impediment rather than an aid to self-understanding.

Elevating ordinary forms of discontent such as the winter blues ("seasonal affective disorder") and ingrained personality traits like shyness ("social anxiety disorder" or "avoidant personality disorder") into psychological disturbances not only allows us to assume that we can have a life free of unhappiness, it also leads to a tendency to medicalize everything.

The modern desire to medicate every form of discontent and the radical expansion of psychiatric diagnoses lead to an inability to distinguish between real suffering and mild unhappiness.

Dalrymple points out that the emphasis upon the treatment of mild unhappiness and such concepts as self-esteem draws psychiatry away from those areas where it is really needed: in helping the severely disturbed, the schizophrenic, the catatonic, those afflicted with dementia.

Dalrymple, who is that very conservative thing, a cheerful pessimist, has written pungently in an essay on Shakespeare that "There is no technical fix for the problems of humanity." For him, it is in Shakespeare, rather than in Freud, Peter D. Kramer, Skinner or other psychologists, that we find real insight into our devious natures.

Twenty years ago, Kramer's "Listening to Prozac" suggested that we were on the verge of "cosmetic pharmacology," we would be able to reshape or customize our personalities through medication. The enormous claims for Prozac have since been shown to be without foundation. We are stuck, it appears, with human nature as it is.

NONFICTION: PSYCHOLOGY

"Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality"

by Theodore Dalrymple (Encounter Books)