by Liah Greenfeld
What most distinguishes Greenfield's model of the mind from so much else
in the field is that she brings together biological and cultural approaches
to mental illness inclusively rather than exclusively, in a way that
enlarges rather than diminishes both. While accepting the biological
reality of major mental illnesses, her analysis is focused not simply
on the brain, in a reductive sense, but on the mind as a product
of experience and learning as well as biology. Likewise, she applies
cultural concepts to psychiatry not in the reductive, purely social-constructionist
manner of Laing, Foucault, and Szasz, but so as to foster understanding
of cultural and historical variations in the incidence and expression
of mental illness that biology alone cannot explain.
-Harold J. Bursztajn, MD,
Harvard Medical School