Category: Psychology

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The Latest DSM

The latest DSM manual will now assert that grieving the death of a loved one is a dysfunctional condition that calls for treatment.

As in, paid for by your benefit plan.

Your therapist will almost certainly prescribe a drug. In my opinion, what the drug does is not all that different from what marijuana or cocaine or methamphetamine does. The difference is all in the packaging, including the “therapist” and the doctor and the pharmacist, the rigid doses and schedule, and everyone soberly declaring that this substance can correct some kind of deficiency in your brain cells which is the cause of your unhappiness. Except that death is not a chemical deficiency, so we have an unusually naked moment here: hell, let’s just call a spade a spade: people who are sad should do drugs.

If you packaged marijuana in the same way, you could convince just as many people that this is some kind of impressive therapy that addresses a real medical condition. Exact dosages, on a schedule, with monitoring. The difference is, marijuana would not have as many side effects and would not be nearly as expensive. The difference is that marijuana is not patented.

There, done. While we’re at it, children who have discovered that school work is “work” should do drugs. Every teenage girl in the country who worries about how she looks should do drugs. Every mother who wishes she could put her feet up and watch tv all day while strange men fall over themselves to buy her gifts should do drugs. Every businessman who thinks the competition is competition should do drugs. Every liar should do drugs.

As you read the previous paragraph did you think of the fact that, for all practical purpose, they are all doing drugs, with nice names and prescriptions.

I have my own suggestion: every executive at every pharmaceutical company should do drugs, just as every congressman should go through the long lineups at the airports and every congressman’s firstborn child, male or female, straight or gay, should enlist.

And every Ayatollah who believes in the Intifada should be the first to strap on that explosive belt. Lead the way!

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You Need a New Drug: Blindspot

“Blindspot” by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald is about this wonderful diagnostic test, the IAT.

The IAT reveals, to the interviewers and social psychology researchers, what you really think. Not what you say you think. Not what you think you say you think. And– God forbid– not what you think you think you think. But what you really think. “Ah ha!”, the researchers exclaim. Now I know the truth: you are a racist. Malcolm Gladwell took the test: busted! Or so he admitted to Oprah, while pointing out that his own mother was black.

These researchers– these “social psychologists”– are generous on one level. They believe that people who say they don’t judge people according to their race or age or physical appearance really mean it and think that they really mean it. So when they administer a test that proves that they do judge people according to their race or age or physical appearance, they believe they have uncovered a terrible secret about humanity and you, lucky reader, get to be let in on it.

There are a lot of problems with this bullshit, at many different levels.

  • people are often fully aware of the fact that they don’t mean what they say. In fact, I’d say it’s probably safe to say that most people don’t really mean what they say most of the time. Every good novelist and film-maker– and a lot of bad ones– knows this. Every job applicant knows it. Every politician certainly knows it but so do pastors and priests.
  • the IAT claims to bypass a persons’ self-censorship and reveal what a person “really” thinks. The trouble is, you have to assume, firstly, that most people don’t know that they think something other than what they claim to think. In other words, the IAT fails to take into account that most people are quite capable of consciously lying to an interviewer or to a form. Why wouldn’t they? The act of answering questions like “black people are more likely to commit crimes” will immediately push the “careful what you say” button, even if the interviewer thinks the subject has every reason to be perfectly honest with them, or with the form and no matter how often they tell the subject that their answers are confidential. You don’t think a subject can imagine dishonesty or a mistake on the part of a social scientist? In fact, you’ve got to be kidding if you think that for even one moment. Gladwell’s claim to be shocked at his own hidden bias must be taken as disingenuous: I don’t believe for a second that it was really a surprise to him. And if he really thinks that the IAT has proven that he has unconscious prejudices, he is even dumber than I thought.
  • the IAT seems to me to prove that people have an instinctive preference for young people (shocking!) or for people of the most privileged class (white people, who are objectively richer and more powerful than any other race on earth) or men, who are often bigger, stronger, and faster than women, and who, until now, have generally held more positions of power, wealth, and influence than women. Who do you want to hang out with? The guy most likely to be able to afford to buy you a drink and dinner? Do you think it’s more likely that a poor person would steal than a rich person? Duh. Do you think a black person, or a native, or a Latino, is more likely to be poor? Hello. Is it fun to listen to conversations about medications, adult diapers, friends who have recently died and how the world sucks now that public morality has slid into the cesspool?
  • There are other stereo-types: I’ll bet the average subject doesn’t think of the Japanese as drug-abusing burglars. But they probably do think they study hard. The French are disloyal. People with glasses are smart. Tall people like basketball.

The point is that the biggest lies in our society don’t involve facts and data, but how the information is presented: Banaji and Greenwald are shocked, so they say, to discover that many people who say they think they are not racists actually do “unconsciously” hold racist views.

Their “facts” prove it. Their facts, actually, prove that they are pretty clueless about how people actually process their words and actions in relation to their feelings and inclinations. And they are even more clueless than that: they are surprised that people don’t announce their racist, ageist, and sexist sentiments. They are surprised that no bigot thinks he is a bigot while knowingly holding bigoted views.

As it turns out, someone else’s research seems to show that the results from the IAT are unreliable.

We live in a culture in which people not only hide their unsavory feelings about others– we positively embrace hypocrisy on a monumental scale.

Unconvinced? Banaji and Greenwald note that we often answer “how are you?” with “fine” even if we’re not. They’re on to you!

Afterthought

I am happy to learn I am not alone in my skepticism.

Added 2014-10-04: A NyTimes article questioning the reliability of some “research”.

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Sherry and Ray

She is just aching to get laid by Ray but he won’t do it.

When I was in college I knew a young woman named Sherry. She was voluptuous. Her face wasn’t as cute as some other women I knew, but it was pleasant enough. I had always thought of her as a moderately attractive young woman until the day I was out cutting the grass on a tractor and she happened to be sun-bathing behind the faculty apartments and when I came around from behind the apartment building, she was startled and had to jump up and reattach the top of her bathing suit. She was voluptuous. The sinuous curve of her hips. Her full, upright breasts. She looked pretty peeved as I drove by.  It was actually her stomach that appealed the most to me: flat, with languorous curves. 

She was a conservative little American girl. I was a Canadian and the Canadians tended to be socially liberal– we drank and smoked and swore and used pot– and the Americans tended to be rather conventional. Some of them had never been in a bar until they left home to go to college. But not Sherry. She didn’t go to bars at college either. Good girls didn’t do that.

The American guys like to wrestle each other and horse around with each other and pat each others’ behinds while playing touch football in the courtyard.  The Canadian guys like to wrestle Canadian girls. The American girls thought Canadian girls were rather rural in that regard. I’ll bet they secretly envied them. I remember wrestling for an extended time with an attractive blonde named Janet in the student lounge and a couple of my American friends, afterwards, expressed envy. They thought it meant she wanted to get laid.

I will note that my experience was that many of my American friends went to a bar to get drunk, while most of my Canadian friends went out to a bar for a drink or two and to socialize. To our American friends, there was no difference between drinking and getting drunk: they were both sins.  The Canadians were used to social drinking but thought it was not smart to get drunk.

Sherry was engaged to Ray, who worked in the administration. Ray was even more strait-laced than Terry. He was square, man. He wore suits. He had short hair. If Ray was coming down the hallway in the dorm, you hid the grass. But I had heard from a number of reliable sources that Ray had sewn his wild oats profligately in his first three years at college: girls were wild for him. He was tall and good-looking and rich. But when he met Sherry, the love of his life, he decided to reform. He would wait until they were married before they consummated their mutual passion.

He wanted to marry a virgin. He wanted her to be pure.

One day, I was chatting with Sherry’s roommate Lisa about something and the Sherry and Ray relationship came up. I made some off-hand remark about something and Lisa said this: “Sherry is going absolutely crazy. She is just aching to get laid but he wants her to be a virgin on their wedding day.”

She used a less kind word than “laid”.

I had two theories about this. Firstly, I thought that Ray was a raging hypocrite.

Secondly, I thought that maybe the stories about him being promiscuous his first years at college were untrue. Certainly, they were impossible to confirm. Maybe he really was pure.

Later, I talked to a young woman who had been a Resident Assistant at the time Ray was allegedly sewing his wild oats.  Oh yes, she said, everybody knew about Ray.  There were girls who had to leave college after he got them pregnant.  He was an asshole.

An American told me, if a girl put out, you took it, but you didn’t want to marry a slut.  He said it as if it was common sense, not that old double-standard we all know and love.

 

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And Then He Joined the Marines

One youth Aspche counseled, who physically assaulted staff members at a mental health institution, was reacting to his own fears, Apsche theorized. His parents had subjected him to unimaginable abuse. After receiving MDT counseling — which combines behavioral science with concepts of acceptance and mindfulness, derived from Eastern and Western meditative practices — the boy changed, Apsche says, eventually enlisting in the Marines.
Washington Post, 2012-10-21

Jack Apsche has written a book about his new method of treating violent youth. It works really well: this one lad changed, and then enlisted in the Marines. He says he “hopes” to have the book published.

I don’t know if the humour there was unconscious or unintentional, but it is indeed hilarious. Unless you think the Marines might be poorly served by a boy with violent tendencies.

This is possibly even more fitting than you can imagine. Jack Apsche’s book is partly about his association with Gary Heidnik, the famous serial killer (and inspiration for the Buffalo Bill character in “Silence of the Lambs”). Heidnik also joined the army. He was rated, at basic training, as “excellent”. But somehow he lost his way and took to capturing young women and imprisoning them in a pit in the basement of his Philadelphia row-house where he tortured, raped, and abused them. Two of the women died and he was convicted of murder and eventually executed.

 

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Dr. Robert Sadoff and Jeffrey MacDonald

“I see no evidence for psychotic thought progresses either present or underlying, no evidence for hallucinations or delusions. He does not reveal evidence for serious psychoneurotic disorder with poor self control. He does not show evidence for a longstanding characterological disorder or a sociopathic personality disorder with acting out processes. He denies the use of drugs of any type, which could have stimulated an acute toxic psychotic state, resulting in loss of control and explosive violence.” Dr. Robert Sadoff quoted in Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Errors in regard to Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who was later convicted of murdering his wife and two young daughters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, February 17th, 1970.

That statement should be disturbing to all of us.

Firstly, if you believe that Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald murdered his wife and two daughters on February 17, 1970, then you have an allegedly reputable psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Sadoff, offering a ridiculously inept misdiagnosis of a violent psychotic killer, a man who stabbed his own daughter with an ice pick and battered his wife’s head with a club of some kind and stabbed her 21 times with the same ice pick and then devised some preposterous story about drug-crazed hippies conducting a Manson-like slaughter in his home to tell the military police investigators.

No symptoms of any “characterological” disorder, according to Dr. Sadoff.

But if you believe MacDonald was railroaded, Dr. Sadoff’s comments are no less disturbing. Are you blown away by his scintillating use of pseudo-scientific jargon? Just what is a “characterological disorder”? Is this something you can measure or calculate based on anything other than a conversation? A conversation which is an exchange of words which is judged by man with credentials and then presented to the public and the courts and the investigators as some kind of scientific conclusion?

Is there a necessity for the phrase “longstanding characterological disorder” or for the phrase “sociopathic personality disorder with acting out processes”? What if Dr. Sadoff just said this:

“Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald seemed like a nice guy. I liked him. He didn’t yell or get angry or threaten me in any way. I thought he was swell.”

Ah, you say. No court would accept that as “expert” testimony. It would have no authority, no cachet. The attorney’s would not nod their heads knowingly or consult their table of characterological disorders to see if all the criteria were met.

Dr. Sadoff would probably admit that he is not God. He does not see into anyone’s mind. He does not have any special gift for un-encrypting the myriad complexities of nuance and suggestion and subtle inference and implication and allusion and random snatches of impulse and vocabularic irregularity (if he can make up words with dubious meanings, so can I). He had a conversation with Jeffrey MacDonald. He knows no more than any smart person could possibly know from a conversation with a suspected killer. He merely knows how to produce psychology theatre and, unfortunately, many people are convinced that there is a secret script that can be decoded by magical people with degrees and certificates.

 

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Fatal Revision: Jeffrey MacDonald

The problem with Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald is that it really looks like he dun it. The bigger problem is that few people seem to care about the idea that constitutional protections against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment matter. Even fewer people are willing to pay the price to ensure that those constitutional protections are actually respected by the government. I’m serious: very few Americans, who sing hymns to freedom and democracy at the tops of their longs, actually care about freedom.

They are far more excited by punishment.

And let me walk back a bit from my opening statement: the evidence by which many people, like myself, have concluded that Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald probably murdered his wife and his two children is not reliable. As everyone knows by now– even the prosecution– the emergency crews and investigators from the army mucked around MacDonald’s apartment at will, moving evidence, touching items, removing items (including, apparently, MacDonald’s wallet), and generally destroying the credibility of any conclusions drawn by subsequent forensic examinations. You just can’t trust any of the forensic data because no serious effort was made to ensure that evidence had not been tampered with. The chutzpah of the FBI (check) team that allegedly “reconstructed” events in the apartment the night of the murders is beyond belief.

Dr. James Brussel, appointed by the Judge to “examine” Dr. MacDonald, came to the conclusion that MacDonald was a homicidal psychopath. He didn’t actually meet with MacDonald. He just read the case files.

Dr. Brussel was famous for having diagnosed the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo.

Who turned out, of course, to not be the Boston Strangler.

And that’s that.

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The Trapped Chilean Miners Get Nannied

According to “60 Minutes”, the Chilean miners nearly mutinied against their erstwhile rescuers when they discovered that their messages to and from their loved ones were being censored by therapists who were determined to maintain an upbeat, positive atmosphere in the mine.

In an age in which psychobabble repeatedly seeks to assert itself as a new religious orthodoxy (and in which heretics are as roundly punished as medieval free-thinkers), I found this particularly disturbing. Who decided to claim this authority? Who took control? Why did anyone think that that person had the authority to do this? What kind of psychologist would cooperate with this kind of emotional putsch?

Some answers: The plan, according to the rescue effort’s lead psychiatrist, Alberto Iturra Benavides, is to leave them with “no possible alternative but to survive” until drillers finish rescue holes, which the government estimates will be done by early November.

“Surviving means discipline, and keeping to a routine,” Iturra said.

So when the miners do get moments to relax, they can watch television — 13 hours a day, mostly news programs and action movies or comedies, whatever is available that the support team decides won’t be depressing. They’ve seen “Troy” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” with Brad Pitt and Jim Carrey’s “The Mask.” But no intense dramas — “that would be mental cruelty,” said Iturra.

I cannot imagine mental cruelty more brutal than watching “The Mask” or “Troy”. However…

The news the miners see — which in Chile includes frequent reports about the miners themselves — also is reviewed first by the team above, said Luis Felipe Mujica, the general manager of Micomo, the telecommunications subsidiary of Chile’s state-owned mining company.

“Of course to do that you need to watch the news first and effectively limit access to certain types of information, or to put it vulgarly, censor it,” said Mujica. “This is a rescue operation, not a reality show.”

Though some miners have requested them, sending down personal music players with headphones and handheld video games have been ruled out, because those tend to isolate people from one another.  “With earphones, if they’re listening to music and someone calls them, asking for help or to warn them about something, they’re not available,” Iturra said. “What they need is to be together.”

So it was the mining company that made these decisions. But didn’t the worker’s rights take priority over this dictatorial impulse? What was the rationale? That the mining company owned the mine, and that the workers were their employees? Let’s just pass over that little detail about the negligence of the mining company causing the imprisonment in the first place…

I saw a website that questioned the strategy of the company psychiatrist, but not the essential point: who appointed this asshole to tell the miners what they would or would not be allowed to think or do while waiting to be rescued?

It is a stunning achievement: a discipline that has the success rate of witch doctors and palm readers has succeeded in appointing itself as an authority over mental/emotional issues. They have succeeded in convincing timid, gutless managers everywhere that they have some kind of magical authority that entitles them to decide what adult men and women may or may not see and hear.

Authoritarianism lurks all around us, just below the skin, even in so-called free societies. Even Hollywood movies adore it, giving us, time and time again, some asshole who “takes charge” and is supposed to be our hero because he tells people what to do, breaks the rules,  and because, in the fantastically rigged outcomes of Hollywood blockbusters, he’s the hero, the only one who can save us.

Mujica says “to put it vulgarly” as if it is only vulgar if you have to describe what it actually is, and as if his mind is not at least as vulgar as anything the miners could hear or see if someone was not trying to nanny them.

 

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West Wing: Sorkin’s Soft Spot For Militarists

I love “West Wing”. It is one of a handful of television dramas (“The Bold Ones”, “Hill Street Blues”, the first seasons of “St. Elsewhere” and “Mad Men” ) that was worth watching for it’s artistic value alone. It is, at times, brilliant; it’s always at least very good (at least up to the fifth season). It is occasionally — very occasionally– annoying. We’re hardest on the ones we love, aren’t we?

Bartlet is allegedly a liberal, and he generally holds liberal positions on most social and some fiscal issues. In fact, the show makes a point of Bartlet– unlike Clinton and Obama in real life– actually standing firm for certain enlightened, tolerant, liberal positions, instead of compromising in order to cut deals with red state Democrats or Republicans.

Real liberals, however, don’t have a lot of reverence for the military. They might or might not believe that the military and the police are necessary, but it’s a regrettable necessity, and real liberals can’t not be conscious of the fact that the culture of the military is decidedly anti-liberal. Real liberals want to make the world safe for wimps. Real liberals recognize that the culture of authoritarian militarism is a self-sustaining model for violence and repression.

But Sorkin’s projection, President Bartlet, is a post-Reagan Democrat. Post-Reagan Democrats like Clinton and Obama realized that to get elected, you had to outflank the republicans on law and order and guns and the death penalty. So Bartlet sucks up to the military.

I think it is a desperate attempt by a thin-skinned liberal to prove to the world that he is not a pussy.

Why it matters to Sorkin, that Bartlet is not perceived as a pussy, is beyond me. It’s obviously a touchy issue, for it is handled on “West Wing” with this awkward, prissy bravado, as if Sorkin wants to make sure that no one suspects for even one moment that he isn’t willing to kill lots of people if it’s helpful to American interests, because, God bless us, we’re Americans. Behind that bravado can only be the absolutely godless and anti-liberal assumption that an American life is inherently more valuable than an Arab or French or African life.

In the episode entitled “What Kind of Day has it Been”, an American fighter pilot patrolling the no-fly zone over Iraq (part of the peace conditions after the first U.S. – Iraq War under Bush I) is shot down. Bartlett goes all mushy with concern about the pilot, his family, his pet hamster and goldfish, and at one point announces that if anything happens to this pilot he will invade Baghdad. He says this with great sterninity and gravitas. I am not a pussy.

No real person like this — Bartlet, at this moment– exists. A real liberal would have already been considering whether it would be wise to start an entire war requiring the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to get back at a man for causing the death of one American pilot. But Bartlet is, at that moment, utterly a projection of Sorkin’s insecurities about his liberalism: they might not think I’m manly!

Sorkin’s fussy compensatory projections emerge quite regularly, often expressed as awestruck respect for Secret Service Agents and Generals. The awful part of this is that some liberals, knowing that Sorkin is an enlightened liberal himself, might conclude that most military men really are quite sane and rational and, well, just so damn manly.

The most evil moment of this Sorkinese perspective came in Episode 72 (“Election Night”) when Donna fell hard for Christian Slater as an uber-manly military aide. Oh my gawwdd– he’s just so hot! At least, compared to the thoughtful and compassionate Josh Lyman. But then, Donna spent much of the first season complaining about having to pay taxes. West Wing’s incipient Tea Party leader.

At a meeting in the situation room to discuss the downed pilot, a member of the “individuals in suits who sit in the situation room to make it look like an important situation has developed group” lamely suggests they pursue diplomatic channels instead of considering a military rescue. Leo, oozing with manly testosterone, castrates the man with rusty nail-clippers. We are not prissy little pinafore-waving dilettantes! Not we! And, after all, this is an AMERICAN life at stake. But Sorkin betrays his double-standard: this straw man arguing for negotiation is a preposterous caricature of a liberal’s projection of what a conservative thinks a liberal sounds like. Follow me? And he is provided to us precisely so Leo and Bartlet can look manly by contrast, even though they are in favor of health care.

I admire Sorkin’s ability to present both sides of most hot political issues with credibility and conviction. There is a case to be made for a strong military response to certain events, to lower taxes, and to strong security. But why is he so afraid to show us the Donald Rumsvelds, the Richard Perles, the Westmorelands, the Gulf of Tonkins, the faked intelligence, the paranoid crypto-fascists, the torturers (who all came out of the woodwork– you think from nowhere?– during the Bush Administration)? It’s a glaring omission, especially since Sorkin is so careful to show us the faults in the liberal true-believers. I am convinced he doesn’t want to be accused of being a being what used to be called a “bleeding heart” liberal.

It’s all a grand tribute to how TV and Hollywood works– we all love to look rational and enlightened and compassionate but when the rubber hits the road, we are brutes and killers and always will be.

Sorkin’s other soft spot…

Is Sorkin, like so many other Hollywood celebrities, in therapy? In episode “Noel” (Season 2), Josh Lyman has a episode Sorkin must have snatched right from the dime-store psychology section. Lyman is anxious, easily angered, tense, nervous, and he can’t relax. Instead of going to a Talking Heads Concert,  he yells at the President. He cuts his hand. Leo orders him to see a psychologist, Dr. Stanley Keyworth. Keyworth can only be described as godlike, in his infinite wisdom and patience. He is the ultimate projection of every psychotherapist’s wettest dreams. He is also, in his absolute conviction that he is fit to judge the sanity of other people, the most arrogant character ever to appear on West Wing.

We are asked to believe that Josh didn’t notice that it was a window, not a glass that he broke with this fist– repression!– and that whenever music plays he actually hears sirens, or at least his subconscious interprets the music as sirens, or thinks that it sounds like sirens which subconsciously reminds him of real sirens— whatever. The smugness with which Dr. Stanley asserts these things, and the creepy way Josh goes Bedford in response (after the cliché-ridden resistance phase has passed), practically crawling on his hands and knees and licking Dr. Keyworth’s boots, was a low point of season 2. I mean, really, really low.

Even more creepily, Sorkin glibly presents Stanley with the power to label Josh as PTSD and, if he wanted to remove him from the White House staff, and even have him institutionalized, all on the basis of and with the only authority of his so-called “expertise”.

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Teresa Lewis

Teresa Lewis apparently has an IQ of about 70, which, according to some definitions, is borderline developmentally delayed. She met a couple of men in a line at Wal-Mart and, in exchange for sex and money, persuaded them to come to her trailer and kill her husband with two shotguns she purchased for the purpose. She also persuaded her daughter to have sex with one of the men.

The NYTimes Account

Within hours of the deed, she had confessed all to the police and was subsequently sentenced to die.

Some people who support the death penalty object to the execution of a woman. Why? If you like to have people killed– don’t fool yourself: that’s what it is– then why should you object to a woman being executed just because she is a woman?

The fact that the authorities want to execute a woman of borderline intelligence is obscene and repulsive.

The fact that the two men who actually pulled the triggers got off with life sentences is unjust.

Her defense lawyers argue, as a mitigating factor, that Lewis is afflicted with “dependent personality disorder”. Hallelujah, thank the Lord, we have a label!

Do the readers of the story in the New York Times and elsewhere automatically believe that this is a real mental illness and that she could be treated and possibly cured of it given time and effort? Why? Just because some two-bit lawyer with the connivance of some amateur psychologist decided that there must be such a thing as “dependent personality disorder”? And that this is not the same thing that we more commonly know as “needy”? Oh no– needy won’t cut it.

“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, we ask you to find her not guilty because, even though it is proven that she hired someone to kill her husband and son, she was, after all, very needy at the time.” No no. It’s, “my client was confused. She had lost control of her life. She could no longer make rational decisions, because she suffered from Dependent Personality Disorder.”

Teresa Lewis should be spared execution because capital punishment is an act of savagery and revenge, not because she is woman.

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Self Esteem

Psychology is a religion. Like most religions, it has a core of beliefs –kidnapped from the vault of public cultural wisdom– that are at least partly true. Many of these insights can be fully apprehended in the work of good writers. Shakespeare wrote his plays hundreds of years before psychology became a formal discipline, but his works are filled with insights into human behavior that remain, often, more profound and more revelatory than any psychology text book. Mark Twain, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan… all great artists as a matter of course demonstrate remarkable insights into human behavior. Few of them would pretend that they have mastered a “science” that provides them with reliable knowledge about why people do what they do. Even Karl Marx had tremendous insights into the human mind, and he was far better at predicting human behavior than Freud ever was. (Ask yourself how often a persons’ actions, beliefs or attitudes reflect, intimately, his or her economic interest?)

Psychologists insist that their field of study is a “science”, like math, and physics, and chemistry. Here’s the problem: a reasonably competent engineer using the principles of physics and math and geometry could build a bridge that would, with reasonable certainly, support the weight of a specified load. Is there a reasonably competent psychologist out there who could take an anxious, depressed teenager, and guarantee that he or she will be happy with the application of a treatment based on his theories of human psychology? Could a reasonably competent psychologist even assure you — with justified confidence– that she understood exactly what the problem was? Could he examine your failing marriage and prescribe a course of action that will certainly save it?

Any psychologist might tell you that a particular woman is insecure and has low self-esteem and requires a husband who can be like an approving father-figure in her life. An economist might tell you she’s looking for someone with money. Neither of them will be right all of the time, and probably not even most of the time, but I would bet on the economist most days.

Psychologists do a lot of labeling because it’s a tool of the industry. Without the named syndrome, there can be no treatment paid for by insurance companies. Without a named syndrome, there is no authority, no industry, no power.

Like all religions, it claims to know who is saved (the sane) and who is not (the mentally ill). Unlike most religions– in North America and Europe, at least– it has been able to insinuate itself into government institutions and the justice system so that the weight of government authority can be brought to bear against heretics. No court would accept the testimony of a priest that a particular individual is a sinner, but it would accept the conclusion of a psychiatrist that a particular individual is irrational. I’m not sure that the psychiatrist’s testimony is really any more authoritative than the priest’s.

A heretic is someone who either doesn’t meet the psychologist’s standard for “normalcy”, or rejects the authority of psychology altogether. Heretics can be detained indefinitely, deprived of life and liberty and property, and condemned to perpetual incarceration. They will be labeled: “unstable”, “neurotic”, “schizophrenic”, “obsessive-compulsive”, “depressed”, “PTSD”, and so on. Labels are very powerful. Most people are convinced that these labels actually correspond to a real set of standards and rules that meet the criteria of scientific “evidence”. They don’t.

Consider this: if a bridge collapsed killing or injuring dozens of people and there was legal action and the court heard from engineers about the structure of the bridge and the materials used and the design, you could be reasonably sure that the information presented is soundly based on tested and proven scientific information. You could bring in any number of engineers and they would all agree, at least, on the basic principles of design and material. But when a psychologist testifies, for example, that a man has “psychopathic tendencies” and is lacking in “empathetic response” or a woman (Teresa Lewis) has “dependent personality disorder”, we have no idea if these are real, objective syndromes, or just his opinion all dressed up in polysyllabic babble. It would not be difficult at all to find another person with the title “psychologist” to testify that the subject has no syndromes at all: he’s just bad, or she’s just “needy”.

In fact, in the past few decades, it has become almost impossible to have a suspect classified as mentally ill during the commission of an offense in U.S. courts. (I don’t agree with this development either– for different reasons– among other things, for example, Teresa Lewis has an IQ of 72.).

Like religion, psychology has had it’s schisms and heresies. Freud, Jung, Adler, Skinner, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Moslem…

Unlike most religions, psychology tries to claim it is a science. It is a religion claiming to be a super-religion, so far above subjective experience that all competing religions must bow before it. In that respect, it is very much like a religion: all other religions are false. A devout psychologist believes he has an explanation for religion that is based on his scientific knowledge of how your mind works. He’s partly right. It’s the way your mind works. And the way his mind works, with it’s compulsive obsession with creating for itself the illusion that it understands why people do what they do or feel what they feel.

Psychology is no more a science than Calvinism. Like Calvinism– and a broken clock– it’s get things right twice a day.

Like religion, psychology is used by those in power to exploit and oppress the powerless, to pay itself, to charge people for its service of declaring a person sane, or cured, or recovered.

Like a religion, most of the assertions made by psychologists can’t be proven or disproven. This man is schizophrenic. This man is possessed. This woman is in denial. This woman is self-righteous. This child has a trauma. This child is guilty. This person is depressed. This person is in despair.

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