Permissiveness: Allowing or characterized by great or excessive freedom of behavior. A permissive person, society, or way of behaving allows or tolerates things of which other people disapprove.
Apparently the quote “DO AS THOU WILT because men that are free, of gentle birth, well bred and at home in civilized company possess a natural instinct that inclines them to virtue and saves them from vice. This instinct they name their honor.” [François Rabelais, 1534] has been shortened by the psychological and psychiatric industries to the first four words.
From where does this radical permissiveness come?
“The biomedical model [the biological underpinnings of mental disorders] currently dominates psychiatric clinical practice and research.”
“Psychiatry’s growth and power during the twentieth century also can be traced in part to its alliance with Western science’s goals of control and domination of nature. … For example, during this century, capitalism has simultaneously needed to increase consumption and the technical control of social reality in order to maximize profits. This creates a paradox in which morality is slackened to increase permissiveness, and consequently, consumption.”
“Biological psychiatry’s rush to transmogrify much of human life into clinical or biological entities has become increasingly suspect on scientific as well as sociopolitical grounds.”
[“The Biomedicalization of Psychiatry: A Critical Overview“, Carl I. Cohen, M.D., Community Mental Health Journal, Vol. 29, No. 6, December 1993]
The problem with the biomedical model is that psychiatrists attempt to explain environmental, behavioral, social and spiritual phenomena with strictly biological factors. This is called “biological reductionism.” It places a heavy emphasis on the chemistry of the brain instead of searching for root causes of mental distress in areas that have more effective treatments. This leads to dependence on psychotropic drugs which have been shown to be addictive and harmful.
The transformation of psychiatry into a purely medical model was driven primarily by third-party reimbursement (insurance), the pharmaceutical industry, and government funding.
Freudian theory developed in the 1890’s called for radical permissiveness in sexual mores and child rearing, and left parents in constant worry of unwittingly perpetrating untold psychological harm upon their children.
[Chapter 3, Psychiatry The Ultimate Betrayal, Bruce Wiseman, Freedom Publishing, 1995]
To this day, thanks to the large-scale Freudian indoctrination of teachers, doctors, social workers, and others, many a mother and father is filled with dread, fearing irreparable mental damage, whenever some minor or major trauma strikes their child.
When lawyers turn to “childhood trauma” as a defense for criminality, it is assumed that the jury and the public will understand this: “everybody knows” that psychological damage comes from one’s childhood.
“The indiscriminate, ‘nonjudgmental’ approach, of dubious value with neurotics, amounts to a frank condoning of crime when applied to offenders and threatens to undermine and eradicate social and moral attitudes. This is the more serious, since this psychiatric-social work approach combines with the ‘permissive’ or ‘progressive’ upbringing of the home and school and a very lax enforcement of justice by the police and the courts.” The statement was made in 1962 by psychiatrist Melitta Schmideberg, president of the Association for the Psychiatric Treatment of Offenders.
[ibid. Chapter 8]
In 1966, schools began to be used as an ideological platform for the abandonment of self-discipline and morality. The assault on social values came with the textbook called Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students. Children were asked to abandon values instilled through family, home and church, and substitute new values which they were free to make up.
This “therapeutic education,” or “behavior modification,” gradually replaced academics in favor of feelings and emotions, eroding discipline and promoting permissiveness, redefining and replacing earned self-esteem with psychological doubletalk like “anger management” and “mental health.”
The undermining of traditional education and values can be traced to a German psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University, who founded “experimental psychology” in 1879. Declaring that man is an animal with no soul, he claimed that thought was merely the result of brain activity — a false premise that has remained the basis of psychiatry until this day.
Wundt was a strong advocate of Gottlieb Fichte, head of psychology at the University of Berlin in 1810, who believed that “Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”
Influential educational psychologist Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Meumann, professor of philosophy and education at Leipzig University and student and assistant of Wundt, sought to radically change schools by the “oppression of the children’s natural inclinations.” His book discussing Mental Hygiene in the Schools became required reading for several generations of education students in Germany and he propagated the idea that schools should be used for “preventative mental health functions.”
For more information download and read the CCHR report Harming Youth — Psychiatry Destroys Young Minds — Report and recommendations on harmful mental health assessments, evaluations, and programs within our schools.