STOP DOING PSYCHOLOGY
I don't believe in psychology. I believe in good moves. That's what chess is all about. - Bobby Fischer
A cohesive theme, a thesis, a direction, for this text, has emerged. I want to discard psychology and replace it with a tripartite construct: 1) neuroscience, 2) sociology, and 3) being-focused meditative transpersonal awareness. That way, "we" (contemporary Western society) can avoid the inherent hostility, tendencies to manipulation, and just baldfaced inaccuracies not only within the field and practice of 20th century insight psychology, but in psychodynamicism at large, as well as in the relatively new construct of "trauma" which is mostly a nominative replacement for the unscientific Freudian practices that persist -- in the face of longstanding and legitimate criticisms -- not only in treatment but broadly within general culture.
Modern, intuitive, personal analysis has three possible sources: 1) observation, 2) projection, and 3) "general mind." I suppose logic, experience, and/or wisdom would say that the source is almost always some combination, and that you can't really separate any of the above three, postmodern this, postmodern that. "General mind" is the common expectation of how a person, any person, would think and behave, based on experience, and also, more dubiously, based on literature (including movies, video games, and everything like that -- culture at large). "General mind" amounts to a kind of stereotyping and might even be less accurate than projection, which is bolstered by human brains being more or less the same shape. In the Freudian sense, "projection" means attributing your own behavior to someone else to avoid taking responsibility -- "I'm not angry, you're angry!" But in my usage, and I intuit in more common contemporary usage, projection is more like using familiarity with your own mind as a basis for understanding other minds, and as such is not all bad, undesirable, inaccurate, etc.
Doing psychology holds great appeal, and I have been over-exposed to it. Not only was my family into it as a general way of thinking, but I started a major in it three times, and I've had many therapists, psychiatrists, and psych meds, over my 50 years; I resonate with it deeply at this point. My family consists solely of "persons of letters" -- in other words, there is no one in STEM: no doctors, no programmers, no engineers, certainly no scientists; all of the SAT scores are higher on the verbal portion. I am basically like this. All these smart people who can't do math tend to read a lot of books, think about the books, and then write about the books. They hold conversations that are book-like. The narrative dominates, and psychology dominates. Psychology (along with law) is kind of the endgame for a person of letters because it promises untold power: it's basically Wiccan Magick, such that you can control, predict, understand, define, and own other people; you can apply a scientific or medical legitimacy to your own gaslighting, projecting, and stories, whether you're telling your friend why they forgot to meet you for coffee, or counting the people in Istanbul who do too much cocaine.
As I imply with that dichotomy, psychology is more than just psychoanalysis, and is in fact more than psychoanalysis's modern derivatives like psychodynamicism and trauma (i.e., your discontent and dysfunction are the product of your own erroneous thoughts -- especially about your past experiences). I'm not confusing broadly stated "psychology" for "I know you better than you know yourself" type of textual insight; in fact I am looking at both, and they are related enough that I don't always need to distinguish them, but for now, let's focus the latter.
Behavioral insight is driven by something I call the "linear causal narrative." I like silly examples: "You cut your hair short because your mother liked pomegranates." Many or most educated people seem to believe that there is a single narrative cause for others' behaviors, and I would propose that this tendency was scientifically legitimized and reified by Sigmund Freud instead of being challenged by evidence. We the people define ourselves and lives with stories, and we like it when reality seems to be story-like in the first place. Stories are baked into us, much as language is baked into us.
In fact, you cutting your hair short had a number of things that lead to it: it was hot, it felt weird, etc -- more situational or environmental contributors than a cause based on personal beliefs, emotional state, stories from your past, or some other personal encapsulation. According to the central conceit of psychology ("I can explain your behavior with my own narrative"), acting on these personal attributes is some hidden hand of the unconscious mind, a homunculus for which there is no evidence. The existence of the unconscious is a little bit like the existence of the "self" -- some driver-of-the-car apart from the rest of human neurology.
Related to the linear causal narrative is the fundamental attribution error, an extant concept that comes, ironically, out of (non-Freudian) psychology. Because people are such a social species, we tend to see a personality and will behind events; not only human behavior but lightning strikes, rocks falling from the sky, etc. The classic example is being cut off in traffic: the victim will make the fundamental attribution error that the supposed aggressor did the deed on purpose because he is bad or mean or etc, as opposed to just not paying attention or not caring. But fundamental attribution error goes beyond that: to religion, and to psychology. In religion, fundamental attribution error might responsible for a belief in God: "We're in drought? It must be because God hates us! Let's do a sacrifice." In psychological analysis and behavior explanation, fundamental attribution error on the part of the analyst generates these linear causal narratives that tend to miss the mark. Three illustrative vignettes follow.
My neighbor's bipolar, substance-abusing daughter and I were talking one day, and I mentioned I had tried computer programming but was not able to go beyond simple work. Her response was, "Oooh, why not? Was it FEAR?" This example rings of parody, but it's still good: "fear as a roadblock" is a common story in our catalogue of stories; you see it all the time and everyone knows about it. Instead, try "I'm just not smart enough to program," or more charitably, "I have cognitive roadblocks there."
I was thinking about morality earlier today, and later on the song by Led Zeppelin "Your Time is Gonna Come" played in my mind's ear. The connection seemed obvious: judgement day, morality, heaven/hell. That was my first thought, because I myself am part of the problem -- I am immersed in the culture of contemporary narrative psychology and I see stories like this everywhere. But after the psychobabble quit resonating I recalled that I was playing that song on the guitar a few minutes earlier, which is a better explanation for the earworm.
I'll save the best for last: in high school, my guidance counselor suggested I apply to Bennington College, because it was sort of free-form and creative, like she perceived me to be. So, I did, and told my friend about it. Also, it just so happened, then, that I lived in the "Bennington" townhouse development. My friend jumped on this: "It's so obvious that you applied to Bennington so you could feel like you were still living in Bennington, and never really had to leave home!" What do I say then? "No, you're wrong"? In my experience nothing can convince an analyst that their analysis is not valid; it sounds good, is poetic, literary, makes a good story, they are attached to it because they created it like any artist is attached to their own works, and it has value in and of itself whether or not it's true ("I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality" - Slavoj Zizek). Even if I had told my friend that my guidance counselor had suggested I apply to Bennington -- that it was not my idea -- he still would have come back with "yeah, but you still applied there!"
As soon as someone comes up with a psychological analysis it becomes true -- "if you say it, it's true" is sort of the essence of psychology. When a narrative is proposed, it enters the subject's mind. And because the actual cause of a behavior event is complex, predetermined, and impossible to nail down accurately, the listening subject then tends to take on the speaker or analyst's narrative. When a therapist or "therapist" tells you you cut your hair short because your mother ate pomegranates, since you can't or won't come up with a counter-narrative (or don't know enough to delegitimize all psychodynamic narratives), the pomegranate story is published and becomes part of your inner autobiography. I believe this complicating process is not helpful or healing, and that it is often harmful.
Freud’s theories of the unconscious, repression, and psychosexual development have had a tremendous effect on larger culture; if you went back in time to before "Studies in Hysteria (1895)" and told a farmer what he was feeling and why, he might be very confused. Now-a-days, we accept this sort of magical divination and the resultant manipulation in almost any setting, from therapy sessions to police interrogation to business management to family relations.
The conditioned response to critiques like mine is often to distinguish "pop psychology" from "real psychology," which includes addictions and other things apart from proposing irrefutable behavior narratives in clinical or informal settings, and then add that my criticism only applies to pop psychology. I would then reply that all psychology is pop psychology: it simply isn't rigorous. If you read the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the purported rigor seems to come from attempting to tightly control parameters of an ill-defined disease object: "In order to qualify for The Blues, the patient must feel 50% bad for at least 45% of the time on 60% of days of the week under the full harvest moon" (parody example). It's logic from absurd premises.
Thomas Szasz wrote a book called "The Myth of Mental Illness (1961)" that I think is somewhat misunderstood by the usual anti-psychiatry or anti-psychology crowd. The thesis is not that mental illness does not exist, but that it does not belong in the category of "diseases," because we don't understand it in the same way we do leprosy or sciatica or Covid-19. I haven't read the book but I can see that the common cold is different than bipolar depression in that the former has a clear beginning, middle, and end. A lot of it comes down to detectability (realness): we can see viruses and we know what they are like, unlike the "systems" affected by bipolar disorder (personality, mood, etc).
Academic practices point to a lack of standards. In 1964, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology replaced its psychology department with a department of "The Brain and Cognitive Science," in a seeming statement of psychology being too soft or too broad or too something, for MIT. And, at the University of California, Davis, an undergraduate degree in psychology is not required for admission to the PhD program in psychology, strongly indicating the lack of any canonical body of fundamental foreknowledge required for advanced study. Shifting to personal experience, during my third attempt at a psych major, I noticed that the department was very into the supposed scientific bedrock of their discipline. The weeder class, "Experimental Psych," was hard because of statistics. This is the only place where psychology can be rigorous: in epidemiology, or in counting people -- one and only one invented literary condition per person. You make up a disease, like ADHD or Hysteria or The Blues, and then you very carefully count the number of people who have it, one at a time, using all the pomp and circumstance of combinatorial mathematics to convince parents that their young psychology majors are studying something real, rigorous, and useful.
Some who are generally on the same page as me ammend that schizophrenia is different, because it translates into different brain matter configurations and is therefor rigorously definable. This is all a stretch, because all thoughts amount to brain matter, that we don't have the ability to measure or define meaningfully. At a deep experiential level, we're almost completely in the dark when it comes to neuroscience, and this may not ever change, just as the singularity or flying cars may never come. At root level, psychology may be amaterialistic or dualistic and quietly assert some ineffable spiritual object as the root of personality, behavior, and self.
People built psychology on top of neurology (the way the human brain is structured and functions); there are as many different ways of doing "psychology," or whatever that practice is locally called, as there are different countries or societies. In contrast, human brains are similar no matter where they develop. If a person suffers from a neurological disorder, such as a traumatic brain injury, then numerous "psychologies" (behaviors) can emerge and manifest themselves for treatment. Once some incidence of bad thinking is addressed in some way, another will soon manifest, because the underlying neurological problem was left unsolved. In short, psychological "treatment" amounts to paliative care.
Psychology is rich when it comes to creating and observing disorders, but that complexity falls apart when it comes time for treatment and they throw off-label pills at your brain and hope some of them stick, and/or have someone talk to you for an hour a week. Therapy is not regulated by an agency like the AMA or FCC that controls what can be said in session, and I suspect there's a lot of non-therapeutic audio text out there. There has been some pushback semi-recently against the "never-ending" aspect of therapy, and websites now say that therapy should have goals and an end in sight, but this doesn't fix the fundamental issue of words being an insufficient panacea. There's also the problem of people who interpret language differently, such as schizophrenics. This is a known issue: that therapy can be dangerous for them because they might misinterpret and seek destructive real world solutions. But I think the same caution should apply to everyone; just as there is no governing body for therapy, there is none for interpretation of language.
Finally, intrusive thoughts, verbal responses, and perhaps thoughts in general, are a lot like chatGPT or some other large language model. Everyone has been exposed to language their whole life -- they continually parse an enormous database of word and phrases, such that some are more likely to occur than others, based on the previous word or phrase. Our brains are then left in this kind of autocomplete situation where stuff comes up, and it has little to do with the unconscious mind in the sense of someone's true identity, deeply held beliefs, or any kind of solid target for psychology. These auto-playing words are confused with "the self" or personality, when in fact they only amount to brain echoes due to over-exposure -- some kind of neurological repetitive stress injury via text. Insight psychology, or therapy, or semi-Freudian analysis, is easily, maybe unavoidably captured by this phenomenon. What the therapist thinks is an insight based on observation of the subject is really an insight based on having seen too many movies. We're all running on autocomplete, and this is largely a cultural, rather than psychological, phenomenon.
You might be thinking (!) "this is not news; people know psychology is soft but it's the best we have because neuroscience is beyond us and does not offer everything" I agree, and I believe Freud and his systems have affected human culture in ways that have not been entirely, or at all, positive. Freudian insight is pervasive not only in clinical settings but also in everyday life. To a large degree modern discourse is fueled by the notion "I know you better than you know yourself, and in fact you cannot know yourself, because 'psychology' reveals your nature to me while simultaneously concealing it from you."
One of my grand assertions here is that the error of behavioral insight, or psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis, or psychodynamicism -- the linear causal narrative and fundamental attribution error in the form of "you do X because of Y reason" -- is shaped the same as a bullet list of ontological and scientific problems with and within the modern field of psychology. My support for this amounts to a diagram or photograph of the brain -- the gelatinous neuronal mass of gyri and sulci -- contrasted with the "hard problem of consciousness" (how does this structure give rise to our experience of experience?). I will modify the hard problem of consciousness into "the hard problem of psychology": how can the brain imply any linguistic category? We don't know what we're doing in neurology so psychology functions as a stand-in. My solution to both "hard problems" is that the subject of each is a poorly defined word and does not exist robustly, unlike the physical materiality of the human brain. The brain is the territory but psychology does not really even try to be a good map for it.
My other grand assertion is that Sigmund Freud basically re-wrote the whole of modern discourse, and no one really realizes it or accounts for it. We all live in a Freudian dream world, with everyone cutting their hair short because their mothers ate pomegranates, and no one thinks this is undesirable or weird.
But, philosophy and religion are as old as humanity and aren't all bad -- we're supposed to talk to each other and understand the universe, including our own brains and thoughts. It's just that when this practice is prematurely forced into a scientific container, the result is a field that is closer to religion than it is to science, as well as an intellectual class that is 100% sure that you cut your hair short because your mother ate pomegranates, and nothing -- no counter-narrative -- can persuade otherwise. It's very much like the Alcoholics Anonymous Catch-22: "You have an alcohol problem." "No I don't." "That's just what an alcoholic would say!" If there's no good proof available for a hypothesis, then the proof becomes Freud's medicalization, in itself: the existence of "psychology" as a robust, mature, and flawless field that cannot be questioned. So then whatever behavior narrative is proposed, not only by psychologists but by any "person of letters" with a liberal education, stands. It would be better to focus on awareness itself and by default whatever brain structures this is associated with, as well as applying this kind of calm introverted reflection to interpersonal behavior and relations.
The human tendency to practice psychology, in both professional and amateur capacities, may itself be neurologically built-in. Attempting to map behavior to language is a practice as old as history, and in fact might be history, or religion, or philosophy; "psychology" is the latest term for these sorts of self-referential narrative attempts to define and understand ourselves. Psychology is like religion in that it has an effect, but the effect is not what was promised; then, if this is pointed out, the response is "well in that case you didn't do it right."
For clinical settings, I recommend discarding the term "psychology" and with it the implicit and historical association with medicine, evidentiary science, certainty, and mathematical rigor, just like Thomas Szaz proposed in 1961 and MIT did in 1964. Instead, neuroscience can function in well-defined areas of behavior, sociology can function in poorly-defined areas of behavior, and meditative awareness can function in the spiritual realm -- in sense of self, in being, perhaps in a Jungian direction. The first two share the advantage, over psychology, of visibility, and as such, escape the central Szazian criticism, while the last might offer therapies heretofore unimagined.
Depending on whom you ask, psychology as a field has arrived there already. However, there exists a certain two-facedness with psychologists, who will tell you that they don't indulge in the kind of unsourceable Freudian narratives they used to, while continuing to operate that way behind closed doors. At that point -- if something can vanish into the shadows when it is attacked and then re-manifest when it, itself, is on the attack -- then...well, then, that's just not fair, man: psychologists (those who practice psychology) cannot simply respond to my criticisms with "yes I agree" and then continue their business as usual unless they also admit their practice, based on the invisible and what they simply pull out of a hat, serves no efficacious purpose and may do more harm than good. Psychology tells us, "The subject acts in such and such a way because they ARE such and such a thing." This might be a sort-of racist or racialistic way of looking at things; at best, it merely replaces one word with another and does not actually, real-ly, define or describe anything. At its worst, such labeling creates an underclass subject to mistreatment and abuse.
For everyday settings, people should stop explaining behavior with narratives, and stop believing they can explain behavior with narratives. Even seemingly obvious linear causal narratives like "I took my hand off the burner because it was hot" are ultimately inaccurate (you took your hand off the burner because of evolutionarily in-built mechanisms to protect you from harm), but more egregious, manipulative, and power-seeking examples like "You parked your car further away from the house because you don't like me" are more my focus in terms of the damage Freud -- and the entire field of psychology in spite of its attempts to apologize for and escape from Freud -- has inflicted on modern society. I don't hold high hopes for an immediate mass-cultural realization like this because neo-Freudian insight grants the analyst great power, in the sense of whatever narrative they come up with being legitimized by the suggestion of medicine and science -- by the word "psychology."
For both the clinical and the everyday, the task is and should be to throw away the ancien régime (rather than attempting to modify or correct the ancien régime to be in concordance with science) and look at reality -- what's in front of your face, whether it's neurochemical signal transmission or human relations. And, a look toward Dharmic or Eastern religious or spiritual systems like Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, or new age thought like the work of Eckhart Tolle, Rupert Spira, David Godman, etc, as a way of quieting the mind and addressing systemic mental "illness" generated from the incompatibility of the human brain, which evolved to hunt mammoths, with modern society, in which we write TPS reports.
Around the turn of the millennium I told a colleague at the gas station where we worked that I planned to study psychology. His response was "Is that a difficult field?" I don't remember what non-answer I gave but probably a better one would have been "Depends on what you make of it." I want to make something of it now.