Abstract

Louis Charland's ‘Technological reason and the regulation of emotion’ focuses on a specific area, that of the emotions, in which he sees a problematic dominance of the technical attitude. He argues that our technologically oriented psychiatry has taken an instrumentalist approach to regulation of emotion that severely limits and distorts the role of emotion in psychiatric practice. A prominent example is the exclusion of moral judgments and values, emotion-laden aspects of experience, from psychotherapy because they do not fit the technical model. To illustrate his point, Charland both contrasts the modern notion of emotion with the traditional notion of passion, and our contemporary practice of technically regulated emotion with the ‘moral treatment’ of the nineteenth century.