What's Wrong With Psychology?

...Thus, group therapy turns out to be just as (in)effective as the more vaunted and expensive one-on-one treatments...

...they just aren’t that clear...

...Conditioning or “behavior-modification,” as it is called, seems to work best only in controlled environments (like schools), when the desired behavior is specific (raise your hand before talking), with people whose learning is not very far advanced, and for relatively brief periods of time...

...Quite the reverse, as a rather wicked study by two University of Oklahoma researchers suggests...

...A Dr...

...For example, there are a lot of studies (of twins and adopted children) that seem to suggest that schizophrenia may be a disease rooted in genes rather than e m o t i o n s . A u t i s m , m a n i a , and depression are other “mental illnesses” that may be physically caused and cured...

...The psychiatrists who thought the man was a grocery clerk said he was mentally ill and probably beyond hope of recovery...

...Patients were accepted arbitrarily...

...Psychology remains a boom industry simply because people don’t know that...

...He is, the theory goes, both there and not therea neutral entity on whom the patient is supposed to be able to project whatever childhood emotions he summons up...

...They hired an actor to portray on tape a man of unusually good mental health, then played the tape for separate groups of psychiatric residents...

...We prefer to forget this forbidden love...

...The problem, I believe, is that psychology skipped its naturalistic, descriptive phase...

...Penn’s Lester Luborsky found that in 13 comparative studies, the score was: group therapy, 2; individual therapy, 2; no difference, 9.) Frequent sessions probably are no better than infrequent ones (groups of veterans who received variously four hours, two hours, and one hour of treatment every two weeks all improved about the same, reports the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychologjt...

...His conclusion: “The whole symptomatic act could be expressed t h r o u g h t h e v a r i o u s meanings of the one key word: ‘She clutches her clutch when she feels clutched-up in the clutch...

...The behaviors that behavioral psychologists value always seem to be on the order of quieter children and more docile prisoners...

...The successful, well-liked businessman may be impotent, the published author may have a mental block which prevents him from publishing twice as frequently...

...Fine...

...In fact, there is every incentive not to: the real money comes from “counseling” well-off people, many of whom are going to get better anyway, and it comes with a lot less effort...

...It is also the theoretical fount from which other leading therapies have sprung...

...The space that these and similar works occupied on the psychology shelves of this major scientific university’s bookstore-space that would preferably be filled with legitimate scholarly books if there were any reason to read them-may be the best index of all of how insane the hunger for psychology, in whatever bastardized form, is driving us...

...Since the patient must reveal his innermost secrets, it requires a person of honesty and integrity of purpose...

...Possible, but not yet shown...

...You say you chose psychology because you were interested in people...

...Psychologists don’t receive healthy salaries, attend symposia, and chair prestigious departments because people think they don’t do anybody any good...

...Back when I was coming through school,” recalls 59-year-old research psychologist John Holland, “everybody was pretty much disillusioned with just sitting around theorizing about the human mind...

...After a year the two sets of patients were reevaluated...

...Competing Cures It is possible, of course, that there are subtleties being lost here, that even if applied psychology as a whole is unsuccessful, some kinds of treatment work better than others...

...This diffident attitude could use a lot more public exposure and professional diffusion...

...For one, analysts can’t apply Freud’s theories the way homemakers apply Betty Crocker’s recipes...

...In fact, Leary was so straight while at Kaiser that he developed a personality test that the CIA, among other agencies, picked up, and that later was administered to Leary himself during one of his incarcerations...

...Yet after two years 72 per cent were back on the job without further complaint...

...each set of patients had shown equal rates of at least partial improvement...

...Though psychology kept on bragging about how well its clients were doing (which it still does, successfully in most circles), a few people began asking: “Compared to what...

...As Jerome Frank explains, “Most people come to psychotherapy when they are in the throes of a crisis or recovering from one...

...And treating people when they are children is no more successful than counseling adults...

...One reason is that those who practice applied psychology-the psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and other psychotherapistsdon’t have to push themselves...

...despondent, high-strung, suspicious, and unstable didn’t even come close...

...Unfortunately, asking the psychological profession to flaunt its own ignorance is a lot like asking the economists to admit they don’t know how to stop inflation...

...He turned up another report, this one from a medical, not a psychological, journal...

...That takes care of the two thirds whose wounds time will heal, and whose experience leads some critics of psychology to wish the whole field would just up and disappear...

...The Secret of Success In short, psychological counseling as presently practiced seems about as useful as a few beers, a good cry, and a day in the country...

...Naturally, they are “more distressed and incapacitated than they were a few months before or will be a few months later regardless of any [professional] intervention...

...The analyst, noting that as she spoke she made a fist as if “clenching an imaginary gear-shift lever directly over her pubic area,” decided that the pill represented “an illusory penis...

...Let’s dwell on this last finding for a moment...

...Where id was,” said Freud, “there ego shall be...

...To be sure,” says Jerome Frank, “practitioners of each method report successes with patients who had failed to respond to other methods, but since all can do this, the claims cancel each other...

...The “fight” ended in a draw, the judges ruled, but everyone else knew better, including Ali...

...Suppose, now, you’re a first year psychology graduate student at a typical major campus...

...Leary and a colleague saw an opportunity to learn samething here...

...After each group heard the tape, it was asked for an opinion...

...A remarkable thing about analysts is how little time they spend studying young children as they are going through their purportedly determinative stages...

...Back in his pre-visionary days, Leary was a rising star in psychologya s s i s t a n t professor at Berkeley, lecturer at Harvard, and psychological research director at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California...

...The trouble began 26 years ago...

...It might lead to a profession a little less willing to make grand therapeutic claims, and a little more open about testing and applying new knowledge...

...And what if that promise is largely illusory...

...In a different study, writes Martin Gross, a researcher “pressed college students into service as group therapy leaders at a mental hospital and compared their results with those of psychiatrists and social workers running similar groups at the hospital...

...That article opened the floodgates...

...To be sure, some of these ideal patients may have real problems...

...S k in ner ’s be h av i oral psycho 1 ogy , which holds that people act the way they do not for reasons of basic personality, but rather because of prods from their environment in the here-and-now...

...He s h o u l d have e x c e l l e n t emotional flexibility...

...The results...

...Remember that one?-the “World Martial Arts Championship” between Ali and clownish Japanese professional wrestler Antonio (“The Pelican”) Inoki, who spent the entire 15 rounds scooting around on his rear, firing scissors kicks Pt Ali’s legs...

...One psychoanalyst, Ralph Greenson, records in volume one of The Technique and Practice of Psychotherapj~a list of characteristics for analyzable patients that, as Martin Gross says, “seem better suited for screening candidates for an Order of the British Empire than a troubled soul seeking to spend $50,000 for psychic repair...

...But aside from these particulars, it was the same sort of affair...

...Unfortunately, the culture of academe-and of academic psychology in particular-virtually guarantees that it won’t...

...Because [I have] 12% hours’ work and no time and because the womenfolk do not back me up in my investigations...

...He should not be physically sick, be in the midst of an exciting love affair, or have a combative or angry husband, wife, or parent...

...After a l l , analysis is psychology’s top-of-the-line-applied Freud in the purest form, its practitioners only a generation or two removed from the master...

...lasted five years, not 15 rounds...

...he soon went back to beating Ken Norton and company and in time most people forgot the whole thing...

...Yet after the five years were over, the best psychology could claim was a draw...

...One rueful San Francisco analyst, Allen Wheelis, concedes that “a dozen psychoanalysts listening to t h e same material are likely to formulate a dozen different estimations of its meaning...

...asked Freud...

...For Ali, of course, the Inoki fiasco was a one-shot deal...

...They all kind of decided that to be scientific they needed to go get some data and let it speak for itself...

...What Bergin is saying is that the vacuousness psychotherapy displays to its patients (especially that truly sick one third) in the clinics, offices, and hospitals is a reflection of how little we really know about the mind and its disorders...

...The amenable problems, it turned out, more often involved rats than people...

...So while Freudians and their fellow travelers abound on the therapeutic front lines, the rat people control the universities...

...The continued well-being of the profession requires that it hold out at least the promise of effective therapy...

...Genuinely sick people, not surprisingly, are the last ones many applied psychologists want to fool with, especially if they are poor or working class...

...Lest Greenson be thought exceptional, here’s what happened when a sample of 421 psychotherapists was asked to check off which on a long list of adjectives described “preferred patients...

...Van Siclen, and sure is a lot better now...

...what they know is that their friend Gini was a wreck after the divorce, started seeing that nice Dr...

...Which brings us to the second, more important reason why applied psychology doesn’t work: the basic psychology-the scientific, intellectual foundation that any applied science needs to keep it going-just isn’t there...

...A Therapy-Starved Public Some psychologists will admit, if asked, that the human psyche is a complex thing, and that they don’t know very much about how it works...

...These people had received no subsequent help from professional psychologists, just general practitioners...

...Professor William Sewell, who observed 162 farm children over a period of time, found no link between such things as whether they were breast-fed, or how they were toilet-trained, and how they turned out later on...

...Of course, there is an alternative explanation of why nobody remembers their sex-obsessed childhood: they never had one...

...Analysis is the familiar stuff of Woody Allen monologues and “Grin ’11 Bear It”cartoons, so a brief description of what it involves should suffice...

...But 1 had no idea how far things had gone until 1 started browsing through the psychology section of the J o h n s Hopkins University bookstore this fall (it could as easily have been Harvard, Berkeley, or Bimidgi State, I expect...

...Armed with such interpretive revelations, psychoanalysts say, patients can understand themselves and thus handle life a lot better...

...Heading the charts were intelligent, alert, adaptable, frank, cooperative, sincere, sensitive, and curious...

...One group was told that the man was an $85-a-week grocery clerk...

...The Rat ImDerative One would expect, or at least hope, that the deficiency would be remedied in the psychological research departments of the major universities, where such basic knowledge is supposed to come from...

...Three decades of research had found over and over again that people who received psychotherapy of one kind or another enjoyed about a two-to-one chance of improving significantly...

...Some of us actually have learned to tolerate paperback bookstores that carry little more than the collected works of Werner Erhard and the hateyourway-to-success-and-power anthology...

...Assuming modern psychology adds little or nothing to the mental well-being of the truly disturbed, are we any worse off than we were before it came along...

...So the reasons why analysis doesn’t work ought to show us why applied psychology in many of its lesser incarnations doesn’t work either...

...those not chosen were put on awaitinglistbut all were screened first with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test...

...and matched psychologists and witchdoctors, not boxers and wrestlers...

...What that meant in practice was concentrating on the problems that were most amenable to data-gathering studies...

...Psychology has been Eve, Pandora, and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice rolled into one, freeing selfish excesses in the human spirit that it cannot hope to control or contain...

...Kaiser’s psychiatric clinic %had more applicants f o r treatment than it could handle...

...The “World Therapeutic Arts Championship” (or so they could have called it) took place in India, not Tokyo...

...Even the CIA can’t do those things with people anymore...

...Since the days of Freud, psychology had reveled in its cure rates...

...Both groups of therapists were instructed to Michael Nelson is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and a professor of political science at Vanderbilt...

...Schizophrenics who came in to the All-India Institute of Mental Health in Bangalore were divvied up, reports Martin Gross in his excellent book, The Psychological Society-half to the Institute’s Western-trained psychiatrists and half to some native Ayurvedic healers...

...That is why interpretations often are based not on anything that anyone actually recalls, but on the analyst’s “reconstruction” of events that he thinks “probably” happened during the patient’s early childhood...

...In 1952 University of London psychiatrist Hans Eysenck reviewed and duly recorded these studies in an article for the Journal of Consulting Psychology...

...infants simply don’t have the reasoning capacity to remember very much, good or bad...

...We sure are...

...But it still leaves the one third whom neither time nor psychology seems to be helpingthe really sick or, at the very least, the chronically troubled...

...Those who had been told he was rich said the man was perfectly fine as far as they could tell...

...He should be “verbal” and have the ability to communicate intelligibly about subtle mixes of emotions...

...Keep in mind, as you read this list, that Dr...

...Hans Strupp of Vanderbilt pitted five of his university hospital’s most experienced psychologists and psychiatrists against seven professors from the English, history, math, and philosophy departments...

...to be released in the bedroom rather than the battlefield...

...But even those who strenuously emphasize their differences with Freud often recognize that their approaches are variations on his theme...

...Followers of Karen Horney may have a more benign attitude toward women, Harry Stack Sullivan’s disciples a less rigid view of infantile determinism, and so on, but when you get right down to it, concedes John Briggs of the American Academy of Psychoanalysts (rival to the avowedly Freudian American Psychoanalytic Association), “We are Freudians...

...Eugene Levitt’s waiting-list study at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago turned up the same two thirds improvement rate for both treated and untreated children that Eysenck discovered in treated and untreated adults...

...Gross cites as not atypical a Michigan analyst’s journal report of a woman patient who took an amphetamine from her purse and, meaning to say it was a “crutch,” inadvertantly said “clutch...

...The patient really does lie on a couch or its equivalent, comfortable and free from distraction in order to encourage a relaxed regression to a childlike state...

...But it’s depressing to realize that a large segment of the profession spends so much time uncovering these hidden defects of the rich, when there are so many others babbling i n c o h e r e n t l y on city streetcorners or destroying themselves with drugs or alcohol...

...But even more important is that the basic theory on which psychoanalysis rests (and which, for reasons we will see later, has gone untested) may not make good sense...

...You guessed it-a banner day for M&M’s...

...Ours is the kind of high-pressure society that produces a lot of psychological victims-people who have been told that they are supposed to be happy and successful yet aren’t-and they are not going to get better by themselves...

...The analyst sits quietly, behind or off to the side-“impenetrable to the patient,” in Freud’s prescription, “and, like a mirror, reflect[ing] nothing but what is shown to him...

...If there was any consolation for psychology in all this, it was that at least it was losing to warm bodies...

...Anxious” was the only one to make the Top 25 that didn’t seem to describe the perfect computer date...

...Decades of braggadocio from psychologists have spawned, with less-than-happy results, a t h e r a p y - s t a r v e d p u b l i c t h a t professionals can neither serve nor satiate...

...I’m me...

...Why do I not go into the nursery and experiment...

...And the effectiveness of Skinner’s psychology as therapy is far from proven...

...But for psychology, the stand-off with the witch-doctors turned out to be just one in a series of similar humiliations...

...The reason is simple,” says one...

...But the research of Jerome Frank, an emeritus professor a t the Johns Hopkins University medical school, did not leave psychological professionals even that much to cling to...

...the other two thought he was either an office-supply salesman or a wealthy industrialist...

...Yet people who do work with infants and pre-schoolers-even child psychologists-rarely see any evidence of the supposedly universal Oedipal conflict...

...There amidst the Freud, Jung, and Horneydominating them, almost-were titles such as these: HOW to Get Angry Without Feeling Guilty, The Complete Bio-Cycle Book, Psycho-Cybernetics, Bej)ond est, The Body Language of Sex, Power and Aggression (“How to Recognize It and How to Use It”), and-steady now-S-M: The Last Taboo (“S-M allows our aggressive instincts...

...As drama, it can surpass any of the literary arts...

...They show that roughly two thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their illnesses whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not...

...Even psychoanalysis-t he four hours a week for five years variety-doesn’t seem t o work especially well, Professors Luborsky, Eysenck, and others have found...

...Greenson isn’t kidding: -The ability to endure waiting, frustration, and hardship...

...The result, he contends, is that “we get on the one side irrelevancies and trivialities produced with the aid of ultra-sophisticated statistical methods, while on the other, we have dogmas emanating from flights of disordered imagination,” namely, psychotherapies that don’t help anybody...

...After six months, they readministered the test to both groups, the lucky ones who had received psychotherapy and the unfortunates who had not...

...But Eysenck went one step further...

...ply their trades to the utmost...

...the professors were told to do just whatever came naturally...

...And then there is the basic decision: Do you want to study a lot of people, which means you will be able to quantify the little you have time to learn about them, or are you going to concentrate on just a few in the certain knowledge that no matter how deeply and well you explore their complex personalities, there is a journal editor just waiting to tell you that your article is too methodologically “ s o f t ” to be scientific...

...The memory of the incest wish is repressed and becomes unconscious...

...Tbis time the amateurs did better thaq the professionals...

...Doctors, witch-doctors, college teachers, college students, candy-all shown to be the equal of modern psychology...

...But if he doesn’t, the time bomb starts ticking, set to go off when adulthood brings back all the unresolved conflicts in new guises-the fellow who can’t get along with his boss because he was afraid of his father, the compulsively orderly person whose toilet-training wasn’t right, that sort of thing...

...It also leaves the victims o f p s y c h i a t r o g e n i c , or therapist-caused, damage-as many as one of every 10 who are treated, in Hans Strupp’s estimate...

...R. Denker, he learned, had dug into the claim files of the Equitable Life Assurance Society and found 500 cases of people who had been “totally disabled” for three months or longer by various forms of psychoneurosis...

...When you stoop, you are expected to conquer...

...This “seek pleasure, avoid pain” ethos, when it emerges from the laboratories of university psychology departments, has been put to some d i s t u r b i n g ends...

...On top of all that, because rats are so easy to get in large quantities and so subject to manipulations, you can measure their behavior, plug the measurements into the most complicated statistical models imaginable, and be fairly certain that the answers you come up with will make sense...

...F- you...

...Next you have to recruit your subjects-remember those ads on the school bulletin boards...

...The final product: a publishable article or, if you play your cards right, a dozen articles and a big government grant for your next research proposal...

...At the very least, these are plausible hypotheses, worthy of serious consideration by anyone whose business it is to understand the mind...

...Surely, though, psychology would prove better than nothing, wouldn’t it...

...The amount of improvement was the same for each...

...The only difference was that the witch-doctors tended to send their’s home about a week earlier than the psychiatrists...

...As we already have seen, though, nobody has found any evidence that analysis does any such thing, any more than its spin-off therapies do...

...We’ve all become used to hearing friends rhapsodize about the latest brand of pop psychology, be it TM, T-A, est, or even scream therapy (“F- you...

...The theory revolves around Freud’s notion of infantile sexuality, a notion which, to state it baldly, regards small children as veritable sex machinessucking, licking, stroking, and lusting their way through successive stages of oral, anal, then genital obsession with their parents and selves...

...The only fundamental theoretical challenge to Freud has come from B.F...

...As for “repressed” memories, researchers have found that it is doubtful they were ever retained in the first place...

...I’m entitled...

...incidentally, is what they scream...

...Each group was assigned 15 undergraduates suffering from anxiety or depression...

...What’s Wrong With Psychology by Michael Nelson It was, you might say, psychology’s equivalent of the Ali-Inoki fight of a couple years back...

...Psycho 1 o gy , ” ex p 1 ai n s Professor Allen Bergin, “is still a primitive discipline, in its pre-Galilean stage awaiting a breakthrough that will bring it closer to science...

...In his book, Persuasion and Healing, Frank describes an experiment he conducted to see what would happen if you gave some patients placebos (sugar pills described to the takers as a “new pill, not yet on the market”) and others six months of psychotherapy...

...This is notjust allegorical stuff-Freud wrote that the male child “wishes to possess [his mother] physically in such ways as he had divined from his observations and intuitions about sexual life...

...To be sure, not all psychologists are undiluted Freudians...

...In its sexual content, it competes with the best of Henry Miller...

...The main reason the two thirds of the patients who get counseling also get better is the same artifact of timing that the medical profession has profited from all these years: people start treatment when there is literally no place to go but up...

...You can do just about anything you want with rats-run them through mazes, keep them awake all night, pump them full of drugs, feed them when they respond and starve them when they don’t...

...Apparently this class bias hasn’t pervaded the profession to the point where therapists think that only those who can pay the bills are sick...

...The figures, Eysenck concluded, “fail to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients...

...Perhaps before theorizing and experimenting, we should have talked to grandmothers and mothers, watched children and adults, and simply described them...

...This goes on for a few years until, at long last, comes the c 1 i m a x , t he an a 1 y s t ’s “interpret at i o n . ” “In this intriguing detective game,” writes Martin Gross, “the analyst finds the clues in memories, word associations, dreams, fantasies, Freudian slips, traumas, the patient’s transference to the analyst, and even in his resistance to the analytic procedure...

...But psychology’s dirty little secret is that even if professional psychotherapists wanted to help the truly disturbed of all classes, it is doubtful that there is much they could do-the studies cited above, and the many more they represent-are evidence enough of that...

...Problems can crop up at any of these stages, but the most serious ones originate between ages three and six, when the famed Oedipal conflict occurs...

...The obsession with quantification,” writes social science critic Stanislav Andreski, “promoted mainly by the desire to claim the status of an exact science, has led an increasingly large portion of psychologists to abandon all the higher forms of human conduct and thought and to concentrate on the simplest forms of behavior of rats or even lower animals...

...Was psychology better than simply fending for oneself...

...It jumped into experimentation without first going through its job of simple observation...

...With any luck, the kid gets over it quickly and emerges from childhood unscathed...

...And the group in the middle came down in the middle...

...First there is the screening committee your university has set up to pass judgment on research proposals involving “human subjects” (that’s people)-you have to get by that, which is timeconsuming at best...

...The answer (and you’ve probably guessed it, too) came in a series of “waiting-list” studies, one of them conducted by, of all people, Timothy Leary...

...The therapy patients,” concluded Leary, “did not improve significantly more than did the waiting-list controls...

...I t is a culture that values scientific trappings above science, and worse yet, that encourages a blandness of thought and manner from its members that all but precludes any effective challenge to those values...

...If you care at all about your career in the land of publish or perish, you will either stick with the rats or learn to study people with as little subtlety as if they were rats...

...When we say that there is something wrong with a psychology that doesn’t help people in need, we are also saying just how much we need a psychology that does...

...surveys of the profession estimate that at least 90 per cent are not...

...And as long as psychotherapists see their purpose in life as saying “There, there” to slightly overwrought Y AVlSs (Young, A t t r a c t i v e , V e r b a l , I n t e l l i g e n t , Successful), it’s no wonder that the really sick people don’t get better...

...Nobody remembers any of these childhood feelings, but that doesn’t trouble the psychoanalysts...

...Why aren’t we getting it...

...Biology did that for hundreds of years...