Roy S
former DC ME/CFS lobbyist
- Messages
- 1,376
- Location
- Illinois, USA
Thanks for taking the time to write this. Maybe we should have a new term -- "Wesselyesque".
Claiming something is "revisionist" due to "lack of context" is thoroughly vacuous. It is impossible to provide an account of anything that doesn't exhibit "lack of context" in some form or fashion or from some perspective. Any study of historical documents and accounts places prime importance on reading through a lens of proper context. That you apply this universally applicable attribution ("lack of context") to this account in isolation says far more about your need to debase and undermine the book than any failings of the book itself.
On the subject of revisionism, I should note that it's no surprise that you employ virtually the same methods that the Wessely School does in undermining (revising) the subjective accounts of others in order to shape them around their theories. Wessely and colleagues rewrite and discard the experiences of others by first denying them their own personal agency and ownership over these experiences, then re-branding and re-characterizing these experiences as inherently irrational and unstable to induce feelings of shame, before finally replacing them wholesale with their own (hypocritically, equally subjective) narratives. So the immediately experienced symptoms of patients are not in fact valid symptoms but rewritten as an over-reactive imagination of weak-willed or malingering individuals. This is literally a method of brainwashing used in various cults: undermine one's most immediate perception of reality, associate it with humiliation, then offer your own "correct" alternative as a means of rehabilitation.
In the same way, you first undermine historical reality of the patient community (experiences, memories, accounts, etc) as inherently and uniquely unstable and of unreliable agency (by isolated application of universally applicable cautions and caveats). Then you characterize these collective experiences in unnecessarily derogatory and dismissive terms: "obsessive," "like old warrior's tales of past battles endless refought on the kitchen table," and "remberances of rejected lovers." Ultimately you seem to want us to discard this collective experience and instead adopt the a-historical, authoritarian perspective (which is inexplicably and miraculously not subject to these same instabilities) of those who largely contributed to these experiences in the first place. Having to account for the past is only a requirement for the powerless. The powerful can always extoll the "virtues" of "looking forward, not backward."
Like pastor, like acolyte, I suppose.