A Critique of Psychology by an Outsider

 

            Psychology studies the mind.  All of us laymen know that.  It gives us a sense of comfort to know that over there, somewhere, there are scholars and researchers and good-works-doers who know a lot about the mind and are practicing the magic derived from that knowledge on a daily basis.

 

            Of course it may shake our confidence somewhat if we decide to undertake a round of therapy and it gradually dawns on us that the counselor with the wise look on his face is as puzzled about our mind as we are.

 

            It may make us wonder a little when some “expert” stands up on the radio or TV and weighs in on the events of the day or preaches the latest breakthroughs in psychological science:  “Victims of Hurricane Katrina, having lost loved ones or many personal possessions, were found to exhibit symptoms of depression.” or “Advanced clinical research has indicated that patients who complained of loneliness were sometimes able to obtain significant benefit from talking to someone who showed interest in them.”  Wow.   

 

            We may wonder why Aunt Mathilda, who used to be so lively and witty, just sits in the little room of her rest home and talks to herself or stares out through the window and doesn’t recognize us anymore – and we find that the caregivers are shooting her up with some addictive, mind-altering psychiatric drug, because that’s the orthodox treatment for old people nowadays.

 

            But those doubts fade in the jumbled reality of 9 to 6 jobs and screaming children and finding out what’s going to happen in the next installment of Heroes or Let’s Make a Deal.  It’s more comfortable and reassuring to maintain our hope, our faith, that there is still, after all, a science of the mind, that my mind and the minds of my fellows are in good hands, that a bright, shiny future awaits, just around the corner, a bright shiny utopia created by those breakthroughs in the study of the mind that the learned psychologists have touted year after year after year, but which just haven’t quite come to fruition yet, not just yet.

 

Psychology Studies the Mind, Right?

 

            The core subject of psychology is the mind.  It says so right in the name:  Psyche-ology.  Its primary focus must therefore be the human mind.  Its primary function or activity must be to understand the human mind.  Its central mission must be to help people with their human minds.  Stands to reason?  Right? 

 

And since modern psychology has been around for well over a hundred years – as long as the automobile has been around, by the way – and nearly as long as Darwin’s Origin of Species – then we would expect that psychology’s understanding of the mind would have advanced considerably in that time.

 

            So, let’s see what psychology does know about the mind.  On page 580 of the new APA Dictionary of Psychology,[1] I look up the definition of mind.  Let’s see.  Oh, my!  There isn’t one definition; there are ten.  This is more complicated than I thought. 

 

Definition 1 goes on for 14 lines.  It seems to be saying that the mind is equivalent to just about every thing that psychology studies.  Hmm.  That’s like saying that a car is its body is its horn is its tires is its engine is the person driving it is the aerodynamic principles of its chassis is the chemical formula of gas is …  Doesn’t sound like a definition to me, but more like a muddle.  Maybe the other definitions will be more helpful.

 

Definition 2 and 3 are more along classic lines.  Definition 2 refers to the “content of … mental and psychic properties”, whereas definition 3 talks about “consciousness or awareness”.  Makes sense.  (2) My mind has things in it, and (3) I am conscious or aware of those things.  Only problem is, these definitions represent opposite ends of the same process.  Which one is the mind:  the content, or the thing that is aware of the content?  Or perhaps the mind is somehow the combination of the two – the content plus the awareness of it.  Doesn’t say that, though.

 

Definition 4 calls the mind “a set of emergent properties automatically derived from a brain that has achieved sufficient biological sophistication.”  Hmm.  I get it.  The mind is a kind of super-complex car that has learned to drive itself. 

 

Definition 5 is the classic philosophical definition of mind a la Descartes:  “human consciousness regarded as an immaterial entity distinct from the brain.”  I like that one.  Good and vague and non-refutable.  Also a nearly perfect opposite of Definition 4.

 

Definition 6:  “the brain itself and its activities.”  I don’t know about you, but there’s no brain in my mind.  Maybe the psychologists are right that my mind is somehow a product of my brain, but if so, the process is completely invisible to me.  All I know about is my mind – or more exactly, the contents of my mind. 

 

The last four definitions are more specialized.  We can probably leave them out of our discussion.

   

Well, those definitions are all very interesting and informative.  Only problem is, you know, I still don’t feel as though I know what a mind is.  In fact, I feel more confused than I did when I started.   Here I thought the mind was one thing, and now I find out that it is ten (or six) different things.  And you know, I would have thought that psychology, the custodian of the mind for over one hundred years, would have settled on one definition by now.  That’s what a true science does, you know:  It simplifies over time.

 

Perhaps we’re just not looking in the right place.

 

Beside my desk in my little “study” on the second floor, I have 12 of the 20 most popular beginning psychology texts.[2]  Piled on top of each other, they are gradually creating a depression in my floor.  I have posted a sign on the first floor:  “Subject to cave-in.  Do not walk under this section of ceiling.” 

 

Scanning the indexes of all twelve of these tomes, I find only one or two references to ‘mind’ in each book.  Upon closer inspection, every one of these references is either historical or subsidiary.  It would seem that, despite each book’s considerable mass, the subject of the mind is not considered worthy of much attention. 

 

You know, I’m beginning to think that psychology doesn’t study the mind anymore. 

 

 

Psychology Doesn’t Study the Mind?

 

            Of course, that’s precisely the case:  Psychology doesn’t study the mind anymore.  As Everhart Sraem observes:

 

mind, n. the turf staked out by psychology and psychiatry, which they continue to defend fiercely, even though psychology has long since vacated the premises and psychiatry has flatly denied that it exists.

 

Ever since introspection was discarded as a scientific research method, direct study of the mind has been largely abandoned.  Researchers and theoreticians found the concept too fuzzy, too overlaid with folklore, too difficult to study objectively. 

 

Freud and his intellectual disciples made some attempt to study the mind, but despite their considerable influence on the therapeutic method, their findings and approach to research were largely pushed out of the mainstream.

 

Some would argue (as in the APA’s Definition 1) that the study of the mind has not been abandoned, but simply divided up into its components.  Psychology now studies the brain and perception and consciousness and memory and learning and motivation and intelligence and human development and personality and a whole host of other subjects.  The components get more specialized every day.  But do those things really add up to a mind?  I don’t think so. 

 

If you wanted to know how a car works, it might help to tear it apart.  It might help to investigate the chemical structure of the plastic and rubber and metal that makes it up.  It might help to analyze the circuitry of the electronic components and the configuration of the drive train and the fluid mechanics of the engine.  It might help to run an engine or a transmission or a starter motor on a workbench and see how those components operated by themselves.  But if you really wanted to understand what a car was and what it was for and how you operated one, you would want to drive a car – or be a passenger in a car – or at least talk to someone else who drove cars.

 

Yes, a car has many parts, all of which can be studied.  But at the end of the day, a car is a single thing in its own right and can only be really understood by viewing and studying it as a whole.

 

Likewise, my mind sure as hell looks like a single thing to me.  My mind is the single mechanism that allows me to see and hear and taste and touch and remember and imagine objects in some kind of world, whether real or imaginary.  Many inputs, perhaps, but one mechanism – one spotlight that shines on my sensations and emotions and thoughts and memories and brings them to life for me. 

 

Does your mind seem like a single thing to you, too?  Or does yours seem to be divided into many different pieces, as psychology seems to want us to believe?  Many spotlights instead of just one.  Believe it or not, I’m actually asking.  Maybe your mind, unlike mine, is broken into all kinds of little parts.  Maybe you have a vision part and a hearing part and a taste part and a remembering part and an imagination part and so on.  If so, your mind must be far more complicated than mine.  Congratulations.

 

 

Getting down to Cases

 

            Of course, even a single mind might appear to have multiple parts.  Let me introduce you to two imaginary friends of mine.

 

Julie has a bad fear of snakes.  Every time she sees a snake, she can barely keep from running away screaming.  

 

Julie is not some wimp or some high-strung valley girl.  She is a senior manager at a major U.S. Corporation.  She is also rational enough to recognize that she has an irrational fear of snakes.  Obviously something is wrong with her thinking apparatus.  It’s as though something from outside here awareness invades her consciousness whenever she sees or thinks of a snake. 

 

She is a rational, self-possessed sort of person and she wants to react to snakes in a rational, self-possessed fashion. 

 

“Shouldn’t take long for an expert to address a simple fear of snakes,” she advises herself.  “I’ll set aside a few weeks and get this handled.”

 

Julie starts with a psychoanalyst.  “Something invades my mind,” she tells him.  After some free association, he tells her authoritatively, “Snakes are a phallic symbol.”   Being a pragmatic person (and a bit skeptical), Julie decides to visit the zoo to test his diagnosis.  She spies a garter snake sleeping innocently behind its glass cage, and immediately starts shaking uncontrollably, the way she always does. 

 

Cross off psychoanalysis, then.  The symptoms should have at least dimnished if snakes were truly a phallic symbol.  For her at least, it must not be true.

 

Julie next goes to a client-centered therapist, a disciple of Carl Rogers.  “Something invades my mind,” she tells him.  He says with an empathic warmth that is irresistible, “We will work to adjust the incongruence between your self-concept and reality.  After a few years of therapy, you will feel much better about snakes.” 

 

Cross off client-centered therapy, then.  Julie is quite sure that a few years is far too long, thank you, just to feel better about snakes.

 

So Julie goes to a psychiatrist.  “Something invades my mind,” she tells him.  He tells her learnedly that she has a phobia called Ophidiophobia.  He tells her that phobias are caused by a chemical imbalance in her brain.  (He doesn’t, however, test for a chemical imbalance, because there is no such test.)  He prescribes a minor tranquilizer.[3] 

 

This quick chemical fix does dull Julie’s fear of snakes.  Unfortunately it dulls other things as well, including her judgment and her reaction time and her ability to concentrate.  So she cracks up her Mercedes.  Then she almost loses her six-figure job and her family, because the tranquilizer also dulls her motivation and her energy level.

 

In one of her few remaining moments of rational self-possession, Julie recognizes that the cure for Ophidiophobia is destroying her life.  She goes to rehab and kicks the minor tranquilizer habit.  She decides that she’ll just have to live with her Ophidiophobia.  She also decides that psychology must be a very strange subject indeed to have so many dubious approaches to a simple problem like fear of sn`akes.

 

            What’s the problem here?  The problem here is that not one of these therapists is listening to Julie.  She says that something foreign invades her mind whenever she sees a snake.  Instead of taking her statement at face value and helping Julie grapple with the (to her) naked reality of something invading her mind, instead of addressing it head-on, they explain it away (Oedipus Complex), they ignore it (“adjust the incongruence between your self-concept and reality”), they label it (Ophidiophobia), they anesthetize it with a tranquilizer.  In short, they dodge it. 

       

            Now let’s meet Ralph.  Ralph yells at his wife whenever he finds out she spends more than a hundred dollars on clothes.  He’s yelled at her before, and he always feels terrible after it happens.  You see, he really does love his wife and he knows that yelling is counter-productive.

 

In fact, in a calm moment, Ralph realizes that his mind isn’t functioning quite right.  Thinking back on his outbreaks of rage, it’s as though he momentarily became somebody else.  It’s as though some personality from deep down inside him, some angry thing had suddenly taken over his body and made him say and do things that Ralph himself would never say or do.   It doesn’t help when his elder daughter tells him afterwards, “I hate it when you yell like that, Daddy.  You act just like Grandpa when he gets angry.” 

 

            Ralph goes to a therapist.  Unlike Julie’s therapists, this one – we’ll call her Elizabeth – actually listens.  Elizabeth immediately connects with what Ralph is saying about a demon taking over his mind.  She’s seen these momentary possessions happen with other patients.  It’s not always an angry demon, though.  Sometimes the persona who takes over is unhappy or scared or lost.  Truth be told, she’s seen something rather like it in herself.  For instance, whenever she goes on a date, she inevitably ends up feeling like a little girl – as though she were three years old.  Puts a real damper on her love life.

 

            Elizabeth suspects that there’s something going on in Ralph’s mind that isn’t properly covered by any psychological text she’s ever read.  For just a moment, this gentle, thoughtful man turns into something else, something angry.  Sometimes Elizabeth wishes she were an exorcist instead of a therapist.  Maybe there was something to exorcism after all.  Sometimes she gets so frustrated she wants to shout out, “Demon, I cast thee out of this poor man!”  Instead, she can only try this and try that and hope that something clicks.

 

 

More Cases

 

I could throw countless more examples at you of people who have trouble with their minds:

 

• Samantha simply can’t learn mathematics
• Marie and John now hate each other when once they were deeply in love
• Winnie always picks boys who will cheat on her
• Louise is normally friendly and self-assured, but in social gatherings, she is paralyzed with shyness.
• Abby suddenly erupts into sobbing fits for no apparent reasons
• Bill has wild mood swings from feeling very high to very low, and the very best atypical antipsychotic[4] for bipolar disorder makes him suicidal

 

I’m sure you could think of many examples of your own. 

 

            Due to space limitations, I’ll just take up one of these cases.  Poor Winnie always chooses the wrong guy.  We find out that whenever she gets into these wrong-guy-picking situations, she has a voice that commands her, “That’s the one.”  She has to obey the voice, of course, because it sounds just like her grandmother. 

 

            A psychiatrist would label Winnie as a schizophrenic and the voice as an auditory hallucination, but neither label opens the door to understanding Winnie or her voice.    They are ways of not investigating the voice (it doesn’t exist) and ghetto-izing Winnie (she’s crazy). 

 

            Again quoting from Everhart Sraem:

labeling, n. 1. (psychology) a modern version of the primitive belief that knowing the name of a demon gives you power over it..

Winnie actually hears that voice.  Just because we can’t hear it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  Rather than hanging a set of labels on Winnie and feeling very learned, our actual task should be to understand the mental mechanism behind hearing voices.  We should be trying to answer such questions as: 

 

• How did the voice of her grandmother get into her mind? 
• Why do these particular circumstances cause it to manifest itself? 
• Is the voice only the surface manifestation of a complete personality? 
• If so, how could a mind contain the complete personality of another person?

 

Only by answering questions like the above would we be able to actually help Winnie and the other thousands (millions, billions) who also hear voices.[5]

 

            As I said, each of the individuals would have his or her own story.  I’m sure you could invent them as well as I – and if you did, you would discover two common denominators to each case:  

 

1. Each individual is talking about a malfunction of their mind, a perception that their mind isn’t working the way it is supposed to work. 
2. Each such malfunction seems to be coming from a part of the mind that is hidden from, or inexplicable to, the individual.

 

 

The Breakthrough that Never Happened

 

            I think many of us have an intuitive suspicion that the human mind in general – and that our own minds in particular – contain a conscious and an unconscious part.   Sigmund Freud was not the first psychologist to enunciate this idea, but he certainly popularized it. 

 

Freud did another important thing.  He provided persuasive evidence that an unconscious mind actually existed, that it could cause mental disorders, and that those disorders could be alleviated.  His evidence was the simple, observable fact that people got better when they brought to consciousness those experiences that had previously been unconscious.[6] 

 

            I have personal experience with this.  When I was a teenager I was terrified of horses.  The psychiatrist, with his physician’s love of high-sounding Latin terms, would have labeled that fear equinophobia.  To me, it wasn’t something high-sounding and Latin:  It was something very down-to-earth.  I wouldn’t ride horses.  In fact, I wouldn’t go anywhere near them.

 

            Then one night late in my teens as I was going to sleep, I unearthed an incident that had happened when I was 10 years old.  There was a private horse pasture next to our house. One day I was riding one of the horses in that horse pasture and he threw me.

 

            That incident had remained hidden for seven years.  I don’t remember precisely what caused that incident to re-surface at that later date, but I do recall being completely astonished by the discovery.  During all those intervening years I hadn’t had a clue that that horse accident had ever happened.  All I knew was that I was afraid of horses.  If you had asked me if I’d ever been thrown by a horse, my immediate answer would have been a decisive, “No.”

 

            More pertinent to the current discussion, as soon as I did recover my memory of that incident, my equinophobia went away.  I was able to ride horses again.

 

            If you were to ask me now why I had forgotten that incident, I wouldn’t mouth some psychobabble about protecting myself from feelings of guilt or hostility – or that I was in denial.  I would tell you that I had forgotten that incident because I wanted to forget it, because it had scared the hell out of me and hurt a lot and that my instant, knee-jerk reaction was to not remember it.

             

            A great deal of mileage has been made of the fact that Freud did not achieve total success with his unconscious mind theory.  I don’t think this was because he was wrong, but because he did not go all the way.  He never adequately explained what the unconscious mind consisted of and how the material in it became unconscious in the first place.  Lacking this basic understanding, his techniques were too spotty, required too much cleverness on the part of the practitioner, and relied too heavily on that greatest of psychotherapeutic sins – authoritatively telling the patient what was wrong with her mind rather than letting her discover it for herself. 

 

            But Freud had broken the ground and laid the foundation.  It was not unreasonable to expect that someone among those who followed in his footsteps would build upon the foundation and find out conclusively:

 

1. what the unconscious mind consists of
2. exactly how and why certain experiences get shoved into it
3. what makes it so hard for the content of the unconscious mind to be brought to consciousness again. 

 

From such a breakthrough would inevitably spring a broadly workable psychotherapy, the first of its kind. 

 

It is obvious that such a breakthrough has not been achieved by any psychologist:  Had such a breakthrough occurred, the consequent explosion in therapeutic successes would have been trumpeted far and wide.  Instead, best I can tell, therapy takes just as long as it took in Freud’s hands – and has achieved no higher success rate. 

 

The only logical explanation for this lack of progress is that psychology has been looking in the wrong place.  Freud pointed the way, but nobody followed.  In fact, a great deal more effort has been expended over the years to belittle Freud and his methods and his unconscious mind than to actually carry forward his research.  It’s almost as though the whole field of psychology were repressing the subject of the unconscious mind[7] in the same way that Freud said an individual represses his personal unconscious mind. 

 

 

Betrayal

      

            Ironically, while psychology as a field seems to be shying away from the subject of the mind, and particularly the unconscious mind, thousands of therapists are faced daily with the reality of other people’s minds.  If they are earnest and not completely slavish to whatever discipline they happen to be espousing at the time – and if they are willing to look and listen – then in their own small way they are attempting to carry forward with the central mission of psychology:  to understand the mind. 

 

The field of psychology is letting those therapists down.  Where is the concerted effort by the psychological community to understand the mind, particularly the unconscious mind?  There ought to be at least a sub-field dedicated to this quest.  I find no hint of such a sub-field in any of my twelve beefy psychology texts.  All I find in those books is a rehash of Freud and other guys long dead.  Perhaps there is such a sub-field, tucked away in some corner of some university somewhere, but if so, it certainly does not command center stage.

 

Doesn’t it make sense that the study of the mind would command center stage in a field named for the study of the mind and which purports to help people with their minds?

  

 

Psychology Must Get Back to its Core Business

 

Therapy must deal with people’s minds.  What an obvious statement, and yet how neglected it is in practice.  The mind is the raw stuff that presents itself in therapy, it’s the raw stuff that patients want fixed, and is therefore the raw stuff that must be studied if therapists are going to be successful.  A study of other things such as brains and perception and childhood development and even consciousness are no doubt interesting and may have some applicability outside of therapy; but in therapy and for the foreseeable future, only a direct approach to the mind itself has any promise of yielding real results.

 

People don’t want help with their brains.  They want help with their minds.