S ince the publication of Listening to Prozac there have been many debates about how and why

Prozac and other similar drugs are prescribed. The articles that follow take up debates about what
conditions such drugs can and should address, questions about authenticity in using drugs for
psychic well-being, and concerns about what means we morally endorse in projects of self-creation.
The contributions from Carl Elliott, Peter Kramer, James Edwards, and David Healy derive from a
project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
“Enhancement Technologies and Human Identity.”

Pursued by Happiness
and Beaten Senseless
Prozac and the American Dream

by CARL ELLIOTT

Psychiatry, like the Prozac it prescribes, aims to enhance the patient’s internal psychic well-being. Yet

what ails many may be not an internal state like depression or anxiety, but alienation. And the experts of

the self to whom we turn cannot “cure” our collective form of life in which alienation takes root.

2) Alec is forty-two, single, and for most of his life has

L
et us start with cases. These come from an essay by
the psychotherapist Maureen O’Hara and Walter
Truett Anderson. The names have been changed,
but the patients, they tell us, are real.
1) Jerry feels overwhelmed, anxious, fragmented, and
confused. He disagrees with people he used to agree
with and aligns himself with people he used to argue
with. He questions his sense of reality and frequently
asks himself what it all means. He has had all kinds of
therapeutic and growth experiences: gestalt, rebirthing,
Jungian analysis, holotropic breathwork, bioenergetics,
the Course in Miracles, twelve-step recovery groups,
Zen meditation, Ericksonian hypnosis. He has been to
sweat lodges, to the Rajneesh ashram in Poona, to the
Wicca festival in Devon. He is in analysis again, this
time with a self-psychologist. Although he is endlessly
on the lookout for new ideas and experiences, he keeps
saying he wishes he could simplify his life. He talks
about buying land in Oregon. He loved Dances with
Wolves.
felt lonely and alienated. He’s never cared much about
politics, considers himself an agnostic, and has never
found a hobby or interest he would want to pursue con-
sistently. He says he doesn’t think he really has a self at
all. He’s had two stints of psychotherapy; both ended in-
conclusively, leaving him still with chronic, low-grade
depression. Nowadays he’s feeling a little better about
himself. He has started attending a local meeting of
Adult Children of Alcoholics. People at the meetings
seem to understand and validate his pain; he’s making
friends there and believes he “belongs” for the first time
since he left the military. But he confesses to his thera-
pist that he feels “sort of squirrelly” about it because he’s
not an adult child of an alcoholic. He is faking the
pathological label in order to be accepted by the com-
munity, and he’s not too sure he really buys into their
twelve-step ideology either.
Carl Elliott, “Pursued by Happiness and Beaten Senseless: Prozac and the
American Dream,” Hastings Center Report 30, no. 2 (2000): 7-12.

March-April 2000 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 7

 3) Beverly comes into therapy torn
between two lifestyles and two
identities. In the California city
where she goes to college, she is a
radical feminist; on visits to her
midwestern home town she is a
nice, sweet, square conservative
girl. The therapist asks her when
she feels most like herself. She
says, “When I’m on the airplane.”1
Spiritual emptiness, the search for
a sense of self, alienation in the midst
of abundance: are there traits any
more American than these? These are
themes that characterize some of the
most memorable American art of the
middle and late twentieth century: in
the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Sylvia
Plath, in fiction from West and
Salinger through Bellow and DeLillo,
from the plays of Tennessee Williams
to the documentary films of Ross
McElwee, from the songs of Woody
Guthrie to those of the Talking
Heads. If we are to believe Toc-
queville, this kind of spiritual restless-
ness has been with us since the early
days of the republic. “In America I
saw the freest and most enlightened
men, placed in circumstances the
happiest to be found in the world; yet
it seemed to me as if a cloud habitu-
ally hung upon their brow, and I
thought them serious and almost sad
even in their pleasures.”2
In the decade or so since the de-
velopment of the selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors, many thoughtful
(and some not so thoughtful) voices
have urged caution, or at least a
damper on our enthusiasm for the
drugs, most notably in the debate
prompted by Peter Kramer’s splendid
book, Listening to Prozac. Scholars
have worried that Prozac treats the
self rather than proper diseases, that it
alters personality, that it feeds danger-
ously into the American obsession
with competition and worldly suc-
cess, and that it offers a mechanistic
cure for spiritual problems of the sort
predicted by Walker Percy in his
novel Love in the Ruins, in which the
psychiatrist Tom More treats existen-
tial ailments with his Ontological
8 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT
Lapsometer. But in the years since I
first read Kramer’s book I have begun
to suspect that the problem may go
deeper than Prozac; that the problem
is not merely Prozac but the stance of
psychiatry itself. Wittgenstein once
wrote, “The sickness of a time is
cured by an alteration in the mode of
life of human beings, and it was pos-
sible for the sickness of philosophical
problems to get cured only through a
changed mode of thought and of life,
not through a medicine invented by
an individual.”3 He was talking about
philosophy, not psychopharmacolo-
gy, but the point is apt either way. At
least part of the nagging worry about
Prozac and its ilk is that for all the
good they do, the ills that they treat
are part and parcel of the lonely, for-
getful, unbearably sad place where we
live.
u n u
I am slightly reluctant to use the
term “alienation,” coming as it
does with baggage that I do not nec-
essarily want to take with me, but so
be it: here, I think, it can serve a use-
ful purpose. Alienation seems to de-
scribe at least some of the symptoms
that bring people to the attention of a
psychiatrist. How many patients this
is, and whether Prozac actually cures
them, remains to be seen. It may be
very small in comparison to, say, the
number who use Prozac for depres-
sion. But I take it from my psychi-
atric colleagues, from the case histo-
ries in Kramer’s book and others, and
from my many friends and acquain-
tances who have used the drug, that
whether it affects alienation is at least
an open question.
Alienation, it seems to me, differs
from most of the kinds of descriptors
that psychiatry ordinarily uses for
psychiatric patients—descriptors like
anxiety, obsessiveness, even unhappi-
ness. These descriptors describe inter-
nal psychic states. They are about (to
use a slightly misleading metaphor)
what’s in my own head. Relationships
with things outside myself can affect
my happiness or unhappiness, or for
that matter, my depression or my
anxiety or my obsessions; if I am in a
miserable job, or if my relationship
with my wife is on the rocks, or even
if (as we say down South) I am not
right with God, I might be more un-
happy, or more anxious or depressed.
But the concepts themselves are by
and large measures of my internal
psychic well-being.
This makes them different from
alienation. Alienation generally de-
scribes an incongruity between the
self and external structures of mean-
ing—a lack of fit between the way
you are and the way you are expected
to be, say, or a mismatch between the
way you are living a life and the struc-
tures of meaning that tell you how to
live a life. Alienated people are alien-
ated from something—their families,
their cultures, their jobs, their Gods.
This isn’t a purely internal matter; it
isn’t just in the alienated person’s
head. It is about a mismatch between
a person and something outside him-
self. This, I think, is why it makes
some sense (although one could con-
test this) to say that sometimes a per-
son should be alienated—that given
certain circumstances, alienation is
the proper response. Some external
circumstances call for alienation.
Alienation comes in many vari-
eties, or so I think, many of which
blur into one another. For the sake of
simplicity, let me mention three, with
the caveat that these divisions are ar-
tificial and overlapping. The first is a
kind of personal alienation, a sense
that you don’t conform with social
expectations of someone in your par-
ticular circumstances. It might be
that your character doesn’t quite fit
into place as it should, so that you
feel ill at ease among the other
Princeton men or Milwaukee Rotari-
ans or suburban high school cheer-
leaders. It may be that you feel alien-
ated from the social role you are ex-
pected to occupy. You are not cut out
to be a Washington political wife, or
a Virginia gentleman, or the inheritor
of the family hardware business. Or
perhaps the direction your life is
moving simply doesn’t mesh with the
way it’s expected to move, like a New
March-April 2000
Hampshire housewife who at the age
of fifty says this isn’t the life for me,
divorces her husband, sells the house,
and goes off to Swaziland with the
Peace Corps. For North Americans,
these may be the most familiar kinds
of alienation. They seem to be char-
acteristic of times when a person’s
identity is in question or under re-
evaluation, such as when we are in
our early twenties and are expected to
decide what to do with our lives:
What should I do for a living? Where
should I live? Should I marry? If so,
whom? Or in mid-life, when we start
to look back on the decisions we have
made and how they have turned out:
Why did I marry him? Why didn’t
we have children? How in God’s
name did I wind up in accounting?
A second type of alienation that
comes to mind, related to the first, is
cultural alienation. This often in-
volves the sense that a particular form
of life is changing beneath your feet,
and that you no longer have the
equipment to manage in the new
way. Something like this kind of
alienation seems to be a motivating
force behind a lot of social criticism.
You step outside of your own social-
ization (or you are pushed) and look
at your own culture from a stand-
point of detachment. Perhaps the
most extreme example of this kind of
alienation would be characteristic of
colonized and displaced peoples—
Native Americans whose traditional
ways of life have been erased, Hmong
refugees marooned in Minnesota, Pa-
cific Islanders colonized by the Amer-
ican military so that instead of fishing
and harvesting tropical fruit they sub-
sist on a diet of imported canned
foods. I take it that this is also part of
what Cornel West is getting at when,
writing of the disappearance of tradi-
tional African American social insti-
tutions, he states that “the major
enemy of black survival in America is
neither oppression nor exploitation
but rather the nihilistic threat—that
is, loss of hope and absence of mean-
ing.”4
Walker Percy hints at this sort of
alienation in The Last Gentleman,
March-April 2000
which takes place at a time when the
old South of honor and agrarian liv-
ing and racial inequality is giving way
to a new, Republican, Christian
South of golf clubs and subdivisions
and Old Confederacy car lots. For
Will Barrett, Percy’s protagonist, the
result is a kind of disorientation, a
sense of not quite knowing how to fit
into this new culture and what he is
supposed to be doing there. In Bar-
rett’s family, Percy writes, “The great-
grandfather knew what was what and
said so and acted accordingly and did
not care what anyone thought.” But
over the generations Barrett’s family
lost its knack for action, no longer
knew just what was what. Barrett’s fa-
ther said he didn’t care what other
people thought, but he cared. He
Part of the nagging worry about Prozac and its ilk is
that the ills they treat are part and parcel of the
lonely, forgetful, unbearably sad place where we live.
wanted to act honorably and to be
thought well of by others. “So living
for him was a strain. He became iron-
ical. For him it was not a small thing
to walk down the street on an ordi-
nary September morning. In the end
he was killed by his own irony and
sadness and by the strain of living out
an ordinary day in a perfect dance of
honor.”5
But cultural alienation need not
involve cultural change. In fact, per-
haps the most recognizable symbols
of American alienation are houses in
the suburbs, which are seen as alien-
ating precisely because of their static,
anonymous conformity. In Richard
Ford’s novel Independence Day, the re-
altor Frank Bascombe says that buy-
ing a house comes with great anxiety
because of that “cold, unwelcome,
built-in-America realization that
we’re just like the other schmo, wish-
ing his wishes, lusting his stunted
lusts, quaking over his idiot frights
and fantasies, all of us popped out of
the same unchinkable mold.”6 In a
society that values uniqueness and in-
dividuality, that says a fulfilled life is
one in which you look inside yourself
and discover your own particular val-
ues and talents, that valorizes the
rule-breaking, anti-establishment,
boundary-transgressing anti-hero,
there is something terrifying about
looking deep inside and discovering
that you’re no different from the guy
next door. That your life is just an av-
erage life, and your story so ordinary
it is not even worth telling. Anything
that reminds you of this fact, any-
thing that betrays the illusion that
you are really, deep-down, quite an
extraordinarily unique individual, is
going to cut very close to the bone in-
deed. It is enough to make you think
about an antidepressant.
Which leads to a third variety of
alienation, one that I will call (with
some trepidation) existential alien-
ation. This kind of alienation in-
volves questioning the very terms on
which a life is built. By virtue of
when, where, and to whom we are
born, we inherit a sense of what it is
possible to do with a human life,
what kinds of lives are honorable or
pointless or meaningful. To be a
Southerner, a Jew, a Quebecoise, an
Irishman, is to be born into a certain
way of seeing and being in the world.
This is part of what makes us who we
are. But what happens to us, our
sense of who we are, when we come
to believe that the values we have are
really nothing more than the values
we have—not God’s will, nor the in-
evitable consequence of history, nor
the product of enlightened reason?
Calling into question your own form
of life involves calling into question
your own values, the very stuff out of
which you are built. This is not just
realizing that your own particular cas-
HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 9
 tle is built on thin air. It is realizing
you are built out of air yourself. It is
radically disorienting: the ultimate,
dizzying high-wire act, like Wiley
Coyote after he runs off a cliff,
glances down, and realizes where he is
standing.
Many of the case histories sur-
rounding Prozac, like those at the
start of this essay, gesture at this kind
of alienation—the sense that not only
don’t you know what to do with your
life, you don’t know what could pos-
sibly tell you what to do. The struc-
tures that might have given life its
sense and meaning are now contested
or in question. The result is not just
the feeling that you are ill-suited for
your own particular form of life, or
that your form of life is fading away;
rather, it is a calling into question of
the foundations of any form of life.
Why this job, this church, this coun-
try, this house? Why this particular
way of going on when I get up in the
morning? Why any particular way?
The result of these kinds of questions
can be the sense that no form of life
can really have the kind of justifica-
tion that you feel you need. It is a
sense that there is no rhyme and rea-
son to your form of life other than
the exigencies of biology and history,
that the big picture is really nothing
more than a big picture.
Erik Parens has suggested to me
that the account I have given here
does not do justice to every sort of
alienation, at least as many philoso-
phers have understood it; that the
most important sorts of alienation
may be not from anything external to
the self but from features intrinsic to
human life. Rousseau, for example,
thought that we are alienated from
our sexuality. Heidegger thought that
we become alienated from our essen-
tial nature as human beings when we
do not face up to the fact that we will
die. I think that Parens is for the most
part right—and right in an especially
insightful way—yet right only up to a
point. There is no getting around the
fact that we will all die, but alienation
from our condition as mortal beings
is never simply that; it is always a re-
10 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T
sponse to what our particular culture
and age have made of our condition
as mortal beings. To say, as Heidegger
does, that living well requires anxiety
in the face of not Being presupposes a
framework of understanding that sees
death as not Being (rather than, say,
eternal life in the presence of God, or
reincarnation, or any of the many
other ways that people have thought
of death). The fact that we modern
Westerners are alienated from our
sexuality or our mortality does not
mean that all human beings at all
times have been or must be alienated
from them. When we are alienated
from features intrinsic to human life,
we are never alienated solely from
those features themselves but from
the meaning that our culture and age
have given them.
Alienation of any type might go
together with depression, of course,
but I suspect that the two don’t nec-
essarily go hand in hand. I used to
talk about alienation and depression
with Benjy Freedman, my friend and
colleague in bioethics at McGill Uni-
versity who died in 1997. Benjy was a
loyal friend, ferociously intelligent
and darkly funny, a complicated man
of deep moral integrity. Yet for the
first couple of years I knew him, he
would periodically descend into very
black moods. He would come into
his office, close the door, draw the
blinds and sit all day in semi-dark-
ness. Sometimes he was irritable and
would get into bitter arguments even
with his close friends. I don’t think
Benjy would disagree with me when I
say that he was probably clinically de-
pressed. In fact, he once told me as
much himself. He had recently suf-
fered the deaths of two close family
members. But Benjy was also a
deeply devout Orthodox Jew. He was
as secure in his faith as anyone I have
ever known. He loved his family and
was at home in his community.
When Benjy and I talked about exis-
tential questions like these, questions
about alienation from your culture
and not knowing who to be or what
to do with your life, he would just
shake his head and laugh. He told me
once he had no idea what I was talk-
ing about. These were questions with
which he just couldn’t connect.
Which is not to say that he wasn’t de-
pressed or anxious or worried. He
worried a lot about doing his duty,
about whether he was doing sound
intellectual work, whether he was
doing a good job as a teacher. But for
him, the broader structures of mean-
ing within which these questions are
located were uncontested. Unlike me:
I was vaguely lost without (at least at
that time) feeling particularly unhap-
py about it; an expatriate Southerner
with a German wife living in Quebec
and thus expected to be somewhat
dislocated; a Walker Percy reader and
thus strangely at home in the com-
munity of the alienated; undepressed,
perhaps, but unlike Benjy, utterly at
sea when it came to these broader
structures of meaning.
u n u
W hat is left for those of us who
are lost at sea? Apparently we
have to make do with secular exper-
tise, the professionals that Percy
called the experts of the self. If we are
alienated and impoverished and can’t
figure out why, we turn to doctors,
psychologists, advice columnists, self-
help authors, personal trainers, alter-
native healers, philosophical coun-
selors, or (let us admit it) ethicists,
who will set us on the path to right-
eousness, personal fitness, and sound
mental hygiene. Why are you unhap-
py? Because you (1) are fat, (2) are
shy, (3) dress badly, (4) do not own a
house/sport utility vehicle/cell phone,
(5) don’t like to cook or keep house,
(6) have never been on television, (7)
are unable to converse on a variety of
topics, (8) have not settled on a
meaningful career, (9) do not have
stimulating hobbies or fulfilling
recreational activities, or (10) have
not yet found the five steps to uncov-
ering your inner capacity for childlike
joy and wonderment. Experts of the
self create facilities such as the Geri-
atrics Rehabilitation Unit in Percy’s
Love in the Ruins, where old folks
March-April 2000
often grow inexplicably sad despite
the fact that their every need is met.
“Though they may live in the pleas-
antest Senior Settlements where their
every need is filled, every recreation
provided, every sort of hobby encour-
aged, nevertheless many grow de-
spondent in their happiness, sit slack
and empty-eyed at shuffleboard and
ceramic oven. Fishing poles fall from
tanned and healthy hands. Golf clubs
rust. Reader’s Digests go unread.
Many old folk pine away and even
die from unknown causes like a
voodoo curse.”7
Here is the key to the problem
psychiatry has with a notion like
alienation. The measure of psychi-
atric success is internal psychic well-
being. The aim of psychiatry is
(among other things) to get rid of
anxieties, obsessions, compulsions,
phobias, and various other barriers to
good social functioning. Within this
framework, where the measure of
success is psychic well-being through
good social functioning, alienation is
something to be eliminated. It is a
psychiatric complaint. It is a barrier
to psychic well-being. Whereas what
I want to suggest is that maybe psy-
chic well-being isn’t everything. Some
lives are better than others, quite
apart from the psychic well-being of
the person who is leading them. I
don’t mean this in any ultimate,
metaphysical sense. I’m not arguing
that God prefers some lives to others,
or that some lives are better than oth-
ers because they are more rational or
well-ordered. I just mean that the no-
tion that some lives are better than
others is part of the moral back-
ground to the way we live our lives.
We all recognize that it is possible for
a life to be a failure or a success, even
if we aren’t always able to say exactly
why. Percy himself puts it this way:
“We all know perfectly well that the
man who lives out his life as a con-
sumer, a sexual partner, an ‘other-di-
rected’ executive; who avoids bore-
dom and anxiety by consuming tons
of newsprint, miles of movie film,
years of TV time; that such a man has
March-April 2000
somehow betrayed his destiny as a
human being.”8
Well, maybe. When I hear phrases
like “destiny as a human being” I start
to squirm. But I take Percy’s larger
point seriously: by ignoring such
matters as how a person lives his life,
by steadfastly refusing to pass judg-
ment on whether the ideals he lives
by are worthy or wasteful or honor-
able or demeaning, psychiatry can say
nothing useful whatsoever about
alienation. It places itself in the posi-
tion of neutrality about the broader
structures of meaning within which
lives are lived, and from which they
might be alienated. What could a
psychiatrist say to the happy slave?
What could he say to an alienated
Sisyphus as he pushes the boulder up
the mountain? That he would push
What could a psychiatrist say to Sisyphus as he
pushes the boulder up the mountain? That he would
push more enthusiastically on Prozac?
the boulder more enthusiastically,
more creatively, more insightfully, if
he were on Prozac?
Already I can hear the protests.
Do you want to deny Prozac to Sisy-
phus? Who are you to criticize him
for taking it? Very well then. Perhaps
I spoke hastily. My purpose was not
to level any moral criticism. Sisyphus
may well be happier on an anti-
depressant. His psychic well-being
will probably be improved. Certainly
he is entitled to the drug, if his man-
aged care organization will pay for it.
I only wish to point out that his
predicament is not simply a matter of
his internal psychic well-being. Any
strategy that ignores certain larger as-
pects of his situation is going to
sound a little hollow.
Of course, taking account of the
larger situation is not as simple as I
make it sound. Neither pills nor psy-
chotherapy can fix metaphysics. In
his essay “Truth to Truth” Leszek Ko-
lakowski writes about his idea for a
spiritual “conversion agency” that
would offer religious and ideological
transformations for a fee. The most
difficult conversions are the most ex-
pensive—say, to fundamentalist
Islam or Albanian Communism.
Lower fees are charged for less de-
manding, more comfortable belief
systems, like Anglicanism or reform
Judaism. The agency itself, however,
needs to remain strictly neutral in
order to preserve the autonomy of
patients. “Psychologists and other ex-
perts of indoctrination shall then be
entrusted with the actual work,
which will in no way violate the free-
dom of the individual. The agency it-
self must remain strictly neutral reli-
giously and ideologically; it could be
named Veritas, ‘Truth’, or Certitudo,
‘Certitude’ (perhaps, ‘Happy Certi-
tude.’)”9
Kolakowski’s satire points out the
dilemma psychiatry has with these
larger questions. Of course it makes
sense to think that psychiatry should
remain neutral on matters of religion
and ideology. Show me a psychiatrist
who sees the verities of Baptist theol-
ogy as the solution to all his patients’
problems and I will show you a case
of psychiatric malpractice. What Ko-
lakowski is poking fun at, though, is
the notion that spiritual affairs are
matters on which it is possible to take
a truly neutral stance. Here, a neutral
stance is itself an ideological stance.
Any pose of strict neutrality is a mas-
querade. To view a change of reli-
gious frameworks as a potential
means of therapy (for, say, Sisyphus)
is itself a kind of ideology. In fact, it
may well be an ideology that is pecu-
liar to the postmodern condition, a
stance not unlike an academic class
on comparative religion. It is the
stance that Stanley Hauerwas is ges-
HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 11
 turing toward when he says: “The
story of postmodernity is the story
we told ourselves when we had no
story.”10 This ideology, the therapeu-
tic world view, sees every human
predicament as a problem to be fixed.
(And if you disagree, that is probably
because you are depressed.)
Kolakowski’s conversion agency is
also a satire of individualism, the
myth of the self-contained, self-deter-
mining individual. Conversions like
these would be impossible. A conver-
sion could (in theory if not in actual-
ity) bring about a change of belief,
and even a change in values—but our
moral horizons are much broader
than this. One cannot simply escape
culture and history. One cannot sim-
ply create or discard the frameworks
of meaning by which a life is judged
meaningful, or failed, or wasted. One
cannot fix everything just by chang-
ing one’s own individual outlook.
I suspect that part of the worry
many people have about Prozac has
less to do with the drug itself than
with the enthusiasm with which
Americans in particular have em-
braced it. Why we have embraced it
(apart from the merits of the drug it-
self, which are not at all inconsider-
able) is a matter for speculation: a
multibillion dollar pharmaceutical
industry, a native enthusiasm for
technology, an ethic of competitive
individualism, a constitutional right
12 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T
to the pursuit of happiness. Yet along
with that enthusiasm is the suspicion
that psychopharmacology alone can-
not account for the predicament in
which we find ourselves; that this
predicament is not something that
can be cured, as Wittgenstein says,
with a medicine invented by an indi-
vidual, but rather by a change in our
manner of living. And not by my
own personal manner of living, or at
least not solely, but by the way we all
live now, together: by what Wittgen-
stein might call our form of life.
Of course, it may be that anti-
depressants will often cure depression
without touching alienation, leaving
a person alienated but not depressed.
Whether this would be a good state
to be in or not will depend on how
you see our collective situation—
whether, as Percy would say, you
think we are in a predicament. Yet as
long as we fail to take any account of
these broader frameworks of signifi-
cance, we cannot take account of
alienation from them. Unless we
think about meaning, we cannot take
the measure of meaninglessness; un-
less we think about home, we cannot
take the measure of homelessness;
unless we recognize the fact of the
journey, we cannot take account of
the person who is lost. If, in Clifford
Geertz’s famous paraphrase of Weber,
we are suspended in webs of signifi-
cance that we ourselves have spun,
then it is only by looking closely at
how we are situated in those webs
that we can see how we may be
trapped there, or falling, or gazing
contentedly at the ceiling.
References
1. M. O’Hara and W. T. Anderson, “Psy-
chotherapy’s Own Identity Crisis,” in The
Fontana Postmodernism Reader, ed. Walter
Truett Anderson (London: Fontana Press,
1996), pp. 166-67.
2. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in Amer-
ica, tr. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988 [1848,
12th edition]), p. 536.
3. L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foun-
dations of Mathematics, ed. G. E. Anscombe
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), p. 57.
4. C. West, Race Matters (Boston: Bea-
con Press, 1993), p. 15.
5. W. Percy, The Last Gentleman (Lon-
don: Panther Books, 1985 [1966]), p. 12.
6. R. Ford, Independence Day (New York:
Vintage Books, 1995), p. 57.
7. W. Percy, Love in the Ruins (New York:
Ivy Books, 1971), pp. 12-13.
8. W. Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land,
ed. P. Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1991), p. 258.
9. L. Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless
Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985).
10. S. Hauerwas, “Sinsick,” plenary ad-
dress to the annual meeting of American
Society of Bioethics and Humanities,
Houston, Texas, November 1998. I am
quoting this from memory, which may be
unreliable.
March-April 2000