Who is Studying the Mind?

But who has studied the rules and patterns of the mind?  You see this attempt being made by the early giants – Freud, Jung, Adler, James – an attempt to understand the patterns of thought, the mental causes of behavior (not behavior itself), the laws of the mind.  But you don’t see this so much today.  When I look for it in my twelve psychology textbooks, I find very little more than an homage being done to the work of those same early giants, with a little Maslow and Horney and Fromm thrown in.  Mostly to dismiss them as old-fashioned.  But where are the new developments.  Has psychology’s understanding of the mind gone nowhere in the last 75 years?

This is not to say that no psychologist is attempting to grapple with the mind.  But where do you hear about them?  Who even recognized their names except the few others who are doing likewise.  To put it bluntly, there’s no money in it.

Vast sums have been spent by governments in the areas of population control, brainwashing, making men more suggestible.  Even greater sums have been spent by private industry on drug research. 

But where are the developments in helping one’s fellows get along better with their spouse, with their children, with their co-workers?  They are practically non-existent, and even among those who are attempting to push forward in those areas, there is little agreement, little consistency, little unification.  Unfortunately research follows the money and there’s no money in understanding the mind.  There’s no money in sanity.

The mind is the central subject, the core subject, the foundation upon which all other studies of man and of men must be built.  Without that foundation, without that basic understanding, the other subjects become mindless, inhumane, matter-worshipping.