The rage of party: a glorious revolution in English psychiatry?

THE creed of science as value-neutral, and our experience of medicine's capacity to be perverted into a demoralizing "discourse of power", together strengthen our wish that psychiatry should be free of politics, as from Szasz to Solzhenitsyn, we confront the evils of conditioning and the disabling of dissidents as disturbed and insane.' But four hundred years ago, official dogma, the Elizabethan world-picture, proclaimed that the ordering of the commonwealth and of the self were indeed properly all of a piece, mirroring each other, interacting.2 When the time was out of joint, men went out of their minds. When authority crumbled, the storm broke on the heath, and King Lear went mad all in one instant, the audience knew this was no mere melodramatist's trick, but the workings of the cosmic unity of macroand microcosm. Drawing on the philosophical psychology of Antiquity, especially Plato's, doctors and humanists from the Renaissance to the Augustans characteristically depicted the psyche as possessing its own well-tempered rule. Reflecting cosmic order, the body natural, like the body politic, ideally comprised a constitution in which the four humours the sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic complemented and balanced each other.3 The