Posted on 09/18/2006 1:51:27 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
Fascinating, Doc. I'm bookmarking the article for further study. Thanks so very much for the link!
Why should they be expected to exactly match? Shouldn't some allowance be made for Planck's constant?
Just wondering, Doc. Your thoughts?
Hey! You're supposed to dance with the one who brung ya.
I had an early fascination with psychoanalytic theory as well. I read Lindner's Fifty-Minute Hour at 15 or so. It's a collection of psychiatric case histories from a very Freudian viewpoint, with Lindner essentially cracking the case every time. I thought that psychiatry was the coolest kind of detective work, and I wanted to sign up. A few years later as a sophomore or freshman in college, I saw the movie Freud with Montgomery Clift. That very much reinforced the perception.
So I majored in psych. Got pretty far into it before I realized that psychoanalytic theory was far from the science I had imagined. It's all a crock. All the real progress in psychiatry has been messing with the hardware, mostly pharmacologically.
I think it will prove to have been a historically useful crock, however. Psychiatric medicine gained attention and respectability even if the early successes were ephemeral triumphs over such almost unheard of disorders as "classical hysteria." (Nobody has hysteria as Freud described it anymore. Nobody. Maybe it was peculiar to the repressed Victorian atmosphere. Maybe it was a Fig Newton of his imagination.)
Got that from a Newhart--the old show with Suzanne Pleshette where he's a shrink--episode, where Bob goes back to his alma mater to talk to his professor (played by Keenan Wynn). That's what the old professor really thinks of his own life's work, and Bob's.
I laughed and laughed.
In a "condensate" (sort of like water dripping of a glass of chilled Diet Doctor Pepper), the parts have to match up. The point of a Bose-Einstein condensate is that any number of BE particles may enter the lowest energy state (kind of like clowns in a Volkswagen). This is seen in Helium II where funny things happen.
Hi VR! "Messing with the hardware, pharmacologically," indeed. It's amazing to me how many young boys (especially) are diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder these days, and are getting their brains fried on Ritalin.... Jeepers, 20 years ago (or so) that "disorder" didn't even exist.... It was simply understood that "boys will be boys."
Ever heard of the psychologist Victor Frankl? His book The Doctor and the Soul is a wonderful read. Frankl is a proponent of logotherapy -- which does not emphasize the "hardware" aspects of mental disorders, but regards them as diseases of the psyche or spirit that pharmacology cannot be expected to reach. I gather he's little heard of these days; the Freudians and Jungians pretty much have the field to themselves....
Anyhoot. Brothers K. is one of my favorites of all time, a book about faith and nihilism, among other things. Plus The Devils (sometimes called The Possessed) is an absolutely riveting read about a couple of anarchists and their fashionable friends. Dostoevsky excels at penetrating to the deeper reaches of the human mind and its motivations: Evidently he was an amazingly astute psychologist himself.
I do remember that scene from the Bob Newhart Show! "It's a crock!" LOLOL!
Thanks so much for writing, VR!
Thank you so much for the explanation, Doc!
The occasional new system notwithstanding, there is still some interest in "the talking cure" for certain neurotic disorders, but it's obviously pretty limited. OK, I'm not keeping up at all anymore. Still, I can tell that pharmacology has practically taken over compared to my college days. That's not too surprising, since 1) we keep finding chemical imbalances and genetic predispostions in mental illness, and 2) the cure rate from psychoanalysis back when was about the same as the untreated spontaneous recovery rate.
Thanks for writing!
Pub. date on said book turns out to be 1963.
What's most astonishing about this article is its proud display of ignorance.
Shermer thinks he's explaining to Christians what's good about evolution for their religion !
What he's really doing is showing that he doesn't know what he's talking about: he thinks he can make Christians happy by showing how they might dispense with God. Now he's stepping into the realm of philosophy and theology.
The second most astonishing thing is that Scientific American considered this publishable !!
This isn't just Shermer speaking. When will the establishment discover that they're not making any sense--and they're certainly not making any points in debate-- speaking about things of which they know so little?
In my own opinion, Shermer's attempting to subtract GOD from
Christianity, just as Darwinism [Shermer's creed] is mechanized, atomized, random creationism.
Two eminently fair and reasonable statements here, VadeRetro.
I must say, however, that I find your hardware/software model of mental health highly suggestive, as when you earlier said, “All the real progress in psychiatry has been messing with the hardware, mostly pharmacologically.” The statement implies that the software side has been neglected, that in fact the “talking the problem through” therapeutic approach has had little if any actual successes to report. Indeed, it seems not to have any actual science to it.
And so maybe that’s a fair statement, too. Look at the “software tools” that have been proposed, e.g., that of Freud and Jung. Freud’s model of the human psyche is the complex id/ego/superego; the inference from which ultimately boils down to all human motivation being the result of sexual urges, usually repressed (i.e., consigned to unconscious levels of the psyche). Making these subliminal drives available to consciousness, and “talking through the issues” attended thereby, is what spells successful “treatment” for the patient. In short, Freud reduces all of human nature and behavior to the sexual impulse. Okay, fine: but he cannot demonstrate that on a scientific basis, and so it is not surprising that he never did.
Then you’ve got Jung, who seems to propose a theory of a collective consciousness that is somehow “normative” for human beings. If we tune ourselves into that, then we’ll be fine, psychologically speaking. But this is nutz: Who gets to define what is “normative” about a putatively beneficial “collective consciousness” to which we should all adjust if not the practitioner himself? Doesn’t seem very “scientific” to me. Rather it sounds like an invitation to any and all would-be self-appointed “healing” gurus to come out of the woodwork….
Well, not to put too fine a point to it, but both these approaches look idiotic to me. Not to mention that neither has a rigorous scientific basis.
I noticed, VR, that you didn’t respond to my assertion about the diagnosis of ADD being targeted against young boys especially. Personally, I find this a deeply disturbing social phenomenon. The way I think of it, the feminization of the public schools over the past few decades has resulted in a “denaturing” of young boys, which is fully aided and abetted by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical communities, to their great respective profit. I need not remind you that it is the “hardware approach” to the human psyche that enables this sort of thing.
As for what Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy might look like: I’ve been searching for his books (I have/had two of them) all day. Unfortunately, my personal library is strewn over four rooms, and I haven’t found it yet. So I have to reply from memory at this point.
As I recall, during World War II Frankl was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Somehow he managed to survive the ordeal. But while his personal circumstances were so desperate, he noticed that all around him he could see acts of human kindness, of self-sacrifice in the interest of friends, of solidarity among the prisoners as fellow human beings that had to stand together as a community against the oppression, so to declare and claim their own personal and common humanity. And Frankl concluded from horrific experience that man’s ultimate freedom is his freedom to choose, to declare how he wills to react/respond to potentially fatal conditions that he did not himself make, but in which he finds himself suspended, with his life at stake.
All of which observations, however, do not give us a clue about what an effective psychiatric logotherapy — treatment of the “software” — might look like. I have a few scattered ideas. But I’m interested in hearing your view, if you have one you’d like to advance now or later.
Probably that would help me to refine my own.
Thank you ever so much for writing, VadeRetro!
I've seen the charge that Ritalin and other drugs are being widely misprescribed for young people and have produced incidents like the Columbine shootings. I hope this is being looked at very hard but I haven't undertaken it myself.
The way I think of it, the feminization of the public schools over the past few decades has resulted in a “denaturing” of young boys, which is fully aided and abetted by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical communities, to their great respective profit.
I've also heard there's something in much of our food tinkering with the hormonal hardware. That's another thing I hope is being looked into, etc. etc.
I need not remind you that it is the “hardware approach” to the human psyche that enables this sort of thing.
As a former software guy, I know you can't fix a software bug in the hardware. The reverse is true as well.
I found this article condescending and dismissive of my beliefs. And I say this as neither a creationist or evolutionist.
As an impartial observer, I recommend dropping the use of bullsnot disclaimers.
2,000. Prime!
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