Abstract
Paired with thoughtful responses by Australian psychiatrists Carolyn Quadrio and Ed Harari, Don Browning's entreaty that psychiatry acknowledge and heal the soul has tapped a rich and important vein. It forces us to confront some of the philosophical allegiances of psychiatry; it also reveals the way these allegiances shift between the American and Australian contexts.
Browning's concern is how psychiatry can position itself in relation to other, particularly religious, ‘conceptualities, institutions, and traditions’, which address the positive concepts of health, purpose and responsibility which are sadly neglected by contemporary psychiatry. His solution: psychiatry ought to adopt a public philosophy; and since, ‘all American psychiatrists are philosophical pragmatists in their hearts, just by virtue of being Americans’, he nominates American philosophical pragmatism.
Will Browning's program transplant to Australia? Quadrio draws attention to one glitch: Australians, patients as much as clinicians, are a godless lot. (Browning equivocates on the religious and the spiritual, and spirituality may yet be a trait as Australian as American.) Harari's doubts lie elsewhere: in place of the philosophical traditions to which Browning appeals, he offers the atheistic and tragic world view of Nietzsche, Freud and Ricoeur.
If Browning's program fails to take root in the Australian climate, I suggest, it will not be because Australians are without religion, nor because life is tragic and without meaning (though both may be true). It will be because Australians are not philosophical pragmatists. Thus the cross-cultural significance of Browning's observations lies in his off-hand remark about pragmatism, quoted above.
Australians may not be religious. But nor are they religious by dint of pragmatism. This means the mental health benefits of religious belief, cited by Browning as by William James before him, will not be an incitement to faith. Nor, for that matter, will any other pragmatic considerations concerning religion. When it comes to the moral life, or the life of the mind, or even spirituality, broadly understood, the religiosity of pragmatists offers an improvement on the godlessness of non-pragmatists only to pragmatists. This fundamental difference in philosophical orientation, not its implications for religious belief, is where the salient cultural disconnect resides. Even if psychiatry does need a public philosophy, Australian psychiatry will need to look elsewhere.