About the Book:Our lives are dominated by technology. We live with and through the achievements of technology. What is true of the rest of life is of course true of medicine. Many of us owe our existence and our continued vigour to some achievement of medical technology. And what is true in a major way ofgeneral medicine is to a significant degree true of psychiatry. Prozac has long since arrived, and in its wake an ever-growing armamentarium of new psychotropics; beyond that, neuroscience promises ever more technological advances for the field. However, the effect of technology on the field of psychiatry remains highly ambiguous. On the one hand there are the achievements, both in the science and practice of psychiatry; on the other hand technology’s influence on the field threatens its identity as a humanistic practice. In this ambiguitypsychiatry is not unique – major thinkers have for a long time been highly ambivalent and concerned about the technological order that now defines modern society. For the future, the danger is that the psychiatrically real becomes that which can be seen, the symptom, and especially that which can bemeasured. Disorders and treatments might become reduced to what can be defined by diagnostic criteria and what can be mapped out on a scale.About the Author: James Phillips is in the private practice of psychiatry, with a focus on medically oriented psychotherapy, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the Yale School of Medicine. He is Secretary and member of the Executive Committee of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy andPsychiatry, and is editor of the AAPP Bulletin. He has written extensively in the area of philosophy and psychiatry and is on the editorial board of the journal, Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology. He is co-editor (with James Morley) of Imagination and its Pathologies (MIT Press, 2002. Since 2004 hehas been involved in developing and supporting a psychiatric clinic in Ayacucho, Peru, a rural Andean city, and he travels there regularly.