A Critique of Psychology by an Outsider

by Franklyn L. Wright

Introduction

 

Intellectual Imperialism

 

Over the last one hundred years, psychology has been quietly, gradually taking over every field of human activity.  Perhaps you haven’t noticed.  Or perhaps you have noticed, but you haven’t considered it a cause for alarm. 

 

Education is the prime example.  We have given our schools to psychology, lock, stock, and barrel.  A teacher cannot get certified anymore unless she or he has at least a minor degree in psychology.  All the textbooks are continually being rewritten (at great expense) to conform to the latest psychological theories.  The curricula are drawn up (at great expense) by psychologists employed by local or state school boards, and the whole operation is governed by the US Department of Education, which is dominated by psychologists.   

 

And what have we seen in our schools since giving education to psychology? 

• plummeting academic statistics
• skyrocketing drug use
• increased sexual and moral looseness
• school shootings

 

Spokespeople for our schools howl that it’s not their fault.  They put the finger of blame on parents, on video games and excessive violence in the movies, on inadequate funding, on any number of other causes.  The funny thing is that all those other causes were either present long before psychology began its take-over of our schools or they appeared on the scene years after the decline in our schools first began to be undeniable.  Of course, it could all just be coincidence.  Or could it be that psychology has some other agenda for our children’s education than what we thought we hired them for?

 

Likewise, the legal system is under assault by psychology.  Take the insanity defense – or the diminished responsibility defense – now standards in the courtroom.  Take the fact that shrinks are always popping up in the courtroom as expert witnesses. Not to mention the practically unbridled power bestowed upon psychiatrists to have people committed to a psychiatric facility “for their own good” or “for the good of society”. The entire legal process, including the right to a fair trial, gets trumped by the laws regarding commitment (just like they did it in the good old USSR).  And casting a pall over everything, we find the growing acceptance of such psychological ideas as “No one is really responsible for their actions” and “There is no right or wrong.”. Hard to run a court system with ideas like those floating around.

 

Or take business.  The Human Resources (HR) Department is now a fixture in every mid-sized and large corporation in the Western World.  As one who has worked at more than a dozen major US corporations, I can attest to the growing influence, the growing interference, from this psych-dominated department.  And the reach of psychology isn’t limited to large and middle-sized businesses.  The Labor Bureaus of every state and of the federal government are likewise run by psychologists, who consider it their mission to meddle in every business in the United States.  It is becoming increasingly dangerous for employers of any size to demand that their employees do actual work. 

 

We see similar psychological influence in the media, the arts, advertising, politics, warfare --  the list goes on and on.

 

The amazing thing – the truly mind-boggling thing – is that psychology has not demonstrated competence in any of these areas that they have been allowed to participate in.  They claim to be the experts on the mind, but they don’t study the mind anymore.  They say that they are experts on mental disorders, but they can’t cure any one of them.  They say that they are experts in early childhood development and learning, yet the schools that they run show only decline and deterioriation.  They say that they are experts in evaluating people, yet HR Departments continue to hire – seem almost to favor – applicants who are incompetent or unwilling to do real work.

 

In fact, it could be argued that the only field in which psychology has demonstrated any competence is advertising.  They have demonstrated an uncanny ability to sell the public products that they don’t need, politicians who are amoral idiots, policies that will do them in,   Probably the only reason that psychologists have been given such a free hand in so many areas of human endeavor is just this knack for PR.  Psychology sells itself.  It sells itself very well.    

 

In all likelihood it has sold even you.

 

 

A False Paradigm

 

            The reason psychology has not worked is because it is based on a false premise.

 

Around 125 years ago, a motley group of scholars from various fields arose and elected themselves caretakers of the human mind.  Of course, the study of the mind was not new – it had been discussed and debated and agonized over by thinking men for thousands of years – but these individuals proposed to deal with it in a new way.  They were going to change it from a philosophical or religious study into a science along the model of the physical sciences.

 

            The immediate precursor of this aspiring science was a subject called Faculty Psychology.  It probably reached its culmination in the works of Sainit Thomas Aquinus in the Thirteenth Century (even though it was not called Faculty Psychology at that time).[1]  According to Aquinus, the soul had certain faculties, usch as sight, hearing, memory, imagination, judgment, and will.  These faculties were what made it possible for a person to see, hear, remember, imagine, render judgements, make decisions, pursue a course of action, and so on. 

 

            If you think about it, Thomas’s faculty theory was a formal expression of a very natural view of how the mind works.  To the bulk of mankind it is self-evident (at least until they are immersed in the beliefs of modern psychology) that the following statements are true:

 

I see.

I hear.

I feel.

I choose.

I remember.

I know.

 

These are things I do.   I am able to do them because I have the ability – the faculty – to do them.  They are not products of my body or some part of my body, such as a brain.  I do them. 

 

            Of course I see through my eyes, hear through my ears, smell through my nose, touch with my fingers.  But these sense organs are servants to me, in the same way that a telescope is a servant to my sight, a hearing aid a servant to my hearing.  They are not me, nor even really an extension of me.  My eyes and ears and nose and fingers are nothing more nor less than tools which I use to apprehend the world. 

 

            The new psychologists rejected this view.  They said that the positing of faculties explained nothing.  To say that I have a hearing faculty is simply a re-statement of the fact that I am able to hear.  Such statements do not lead to understanding.  They do not tell us what hearing is, how it is accomplished, what its constituent parts are, etc.   In the same way that the physical scientist labors to break down matter into its components, the new psychologist proposed to break down mental activities such as hearing or remembering into neurophysiological components or processess.

 

            It is important to notice that this was more than just a rejection of the Faculty Psychology approach; it was more than a well-meaning attempt to turn a speculative philosophy into a science; it represented a whole new paradigm.  The Faculty Psychologists, particularly their predecessors like Aquinus, started with the assumption that mental activities were the product of the soul or the mind, a non-physical thing.  The new psychologists started with the assumption that mental activities were products of a physical object, the brain. 

 

            Put in a more cynical light, the new psychology was plotting a land grab.  They had no real territory that was their own.  The brain was the province of physiology.  Mental healing was the province of either doctors or priests. They coveted the territory that traditionally belonged to the soul or mind.  One hundred years later, we find that they have largely succeeded in this aim.  Even priests and ministers are expected to study psychology these days.

 

In the first wave of incursion around 120 years ago, William James, one of the co-founders of modern psychology, acknowledged the existence of the soul, but left it as more or less a passive observer of functions carried out by the brain.  Figuratively speaking, James left the soul to drift on a tiny raft floating on an immense sea of physiology.  Modern psychologists have destroyed that raft and are busily at work doing away with the soul, the mind, experience, and any other vestige of a non-physical reality. 

 

It’s all done with the brain, they say.  All else is delusion.

 

            This is a very tidy theory,  But is it true?

 

 

Where do we go from here?

 

            In this book, I will be taking up the two points raised above in reverse order.  (1) Are the assumptions that modern psychology is based upon true or false?  (2) Has modern psychology worked?

 

            The first five chapters of this book will be devoted to such questions as:

1. What Is the mind?  Does it even exist?
2. What is experience?
3. Was there some validity to the idea that mental faculties operate through, but are distinct from, a body or brain?

 

In this quest for answers, I will be making my primary appeal to you, dear reader.  I will ask you to consider certain mental phenomena and call on you to evaluate for yourself what is true about them and what is not. 

 

In this, I confess to an ulterior plan.  I want to help you regain your intuitive perception – the one you may have lost, but probably had when you were a child – that you are the one who sees, hears, thinks, remembers, etc., that it isn’t all done for you by a brain. 

 

I will appeal to no authorities, except as they assist me in elucidating my points.  You are all the authority I ask for.  If I can awaken in you the idea that there might be something more going on in human experience than brains and nerves and hormones and bodies in general, then I will be very satisfied. 

 

            The balance of the book will be devoted to showing exactly how – jumping off from its false assumptions about mental function – psychology has directly contributed to disasters in every area of human existence that it has touched.

 

 

Let the War Begin

 

            Make no mistake about it:  I am on the warpath.  We have granted far too much power to this counterfeit science called psychology.  Their path is strewn on every side with failure after failure after failure.

 

            In my view, there are only two arguments potent enough to challenge the proud citadel of modern psychology:  (1) Is modern psychology based on assumptions that contradict what we know to be true about our own minds? and (2) Has psychology proven itself utterly inept in creating desirable effects in the areas that it claims to be the authority in?  As you can see, the two sections of my book align very nicely with these two lines of attack.  And of course, the two lines are interconnected.  The reason psychology has proven incompetent is because it is based on a rotten assumption.

 

            This may not be an entirely pleasant road to travel.  In the first section, I may ask you to expend more effort than you’re probably used to expending when studying psychology, simplistic subject that it is.  In the second section, I may expose you to scenes of destruction and degradation that are simply not pretty to look at.  I hope you have the guts to travel this road with me. 

           

My ultimate objective is to put psychology back in its place.  It has become too big for its britches.  It has annexed sections of human existence that it never had any right to – or if it ever had a right to them, it has forfeited that right by virtue of having done nothing with them.

 

            If I can pull this all off, then this may well turn out to be one of the most important books you will ever read.