Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

Theodore Dalrymple is a British psychiatrist who has spent a lot of time counseling people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. He's also a penetrating author with a terrific prose style. He's worth reading for the style alone.

In this book Dalrymple asserts the strong thesis that modern psychiatry is not only largely a waste of time, but actually counterproductive. He's not talking about the cases of obvious pathology, where he is fully willing to concede that psychiatry has made genuine and valuable contributions. He is talking more about psychiatry as it tends to expand into a general philosophy or comprehensive view of human nature in the form of Freudian psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.  Dalrymple holds that in these forms psychology either teaches things that are trivially true and well-known, or novel ideas that are inherently destructive. Chief among the latter is the idea that some controlling force - be it childhood trauma, our genes, or our conditioning, etc. - dictates our behavior.

Dalyrmple is a master of the pithy phrase. Opening the book at random: "Psychoanalysis, like death, is a bourn from which no traveler returns."

Highly recommended.