The devil made them do it.

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.
• Position: Rhetoric - Editorial

THE STUDY OF RHETORIC and the relationship between situations and rhetoric have critical importance for understanding and criticizing some of the more invalid practices of psychiatry. None of these applications is more apt and more important than what perhaps is the most questionable extant psychiatric role in our society--support of the insanity plea.

Aristotle defined rhetoric--as interpreted by Lance Cooper, scholar of Greek and philosophy--as the study which discovers in a particular case what the available means of persuasion are. A more recent definition from another scholar in Philosophy and Rhetoric defines rhetoric as the struggle of persuaders to establish their own agenda and infuse it with their chosen spin for specific audiences, or the fight for determining for specific audiences what is salient and what the saliency means as well as its significance.

This view of rhetoric, focusing on the persuader as controlling, limiting, and depicting what the perceived situation is, rather than the situation having independent influence, accounts for the reality psychiatry has created: a world with many felonious miscreants who are not responsible for what they do. Again, if rhetoric is composed of persuaders' choices, constrained only by the extent to which an audience will accept them, then the rhetor's responsibility for what he or she chooses to make salient (his or her agenda) and the meaning he or she infuses in the chosen situation (the "spin") become that for which the persuader ethically is responsible. Therefore, citing law-breaking and claiming that it is perpetrated by unknowing, insane lawbreakers who may be prey to irresistible urges are rhetorical acts of creating perspectives, not discovering them.

There may be no better way to understand the persuasive use of rhetoric than to look at psychiatry's employment of the insanity plea. On its website, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) introduces the field of psychiatry as "science based." Richard Weaver's landmark Ethics of Rhetoric describes "science" as a god-term used persuasively to win adherents to a field that may or may not be using the conventions of scientific inquiry.

Much of psychiatry is, in actuality, an art, not a science that can be verified and conoborated. The APA's "Position Statement" on "The Insanity Defense" reveals the significant conflict within that body regarding its consensus as to the extent to which psychiatry accurately can infer people's--in this case, criminals'--state of mind when they commit a crime, or why criminals do what they do or feel what they feel...