A Patient's Perspective

I've been over-exposed to psychology, I think. Not only was my family into it, but I started a major in it three times, and I've had a billion therapists and psychiatrists and psych meds. 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.

And here lies I think the biggest two issues that I see with psychology: 1) it's just text, and 2) it has great power to affect as well as describe. Already at MIT they have replaced the psychology department with the neuroscience department, and it might be that psychology is on the way out or on its way to a merger with religion or philosophy. The word "psychology" is Sigmund Freud's coinage and is an attempt to medicalize something that people have been doing for as long as they have had language: thinking with other people's heads using self awareness to extrapolate to other structurally similar brains.

Consider the Linear Causal Narrative, or LCN. I like silly examples: "You cut your hair short BECAUSE your mother liked pomegranates." I believe many or most educated people think this way: that there is a single narrative cause for others' behaviors. I disagree and think this sort of psychology is wrong. 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, and the result is the LCN for human behavior.

But the LCN is wrong. 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 psychology, acting on these personal attributes is some hidden hand of the unconscious mind, a homunculus for which there is no good 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 (LCN) is the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). Because people are such a social species, we tend to see a personality and will behind events; not only human behavior but nature, rocks falling from the sky, etc. The classic example is being cut off in traffic: the victim will make the FAE 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 FAE goes beyond that: to religion, and to psychology. In religion, FAE 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, FAE on the part of the analyist generates these LCNs that don't describe reality accurately..

Often LCNs come more from the culture at large than from attributes of the subject (if someone proposes an explanatory psychological narrative for your behavior, your defense can always be, "What, did you see that in some movie?"). My neighbor's crazy daughter and I were talking, and I told her I had tried computer programming but wasn't able to go beyond simple work. Her response was "Oooh, why not? Was it FEAR?" This example seems like 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. So, pulling it out as an LCN is easy and natural and reflexive -- preferable to doing an original multifaceted un-story-like 'narrative' perhaps grounded in the natural world (I'm just not smart enough to program, or more charitably, I have cognitive roadblocks there).

Another example: I was thinking about morality earlier and shortly thereafter 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 am immersed in psychology: I see these literary narratives everywhere. But after the psychobabble I recalled that I was playing that song on the guitar a few minutes earlier, which is a better explanation.

Psychology creates its own reality and affects as much or more than it describes: when one of its narratives is proposed, it enters the listener's head. And because the actual cause of a behavior event is complex (and perhaps predetermined) the listener takes on the speaker's narrative. When a 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 think this is mostly harmful. Psychology is a Western invention, and Westerners are known for their ego: creating stories and identities. Supposedly the Dhalai Lhama was confused when asked about the concept of self esteem.

When I mentioned to someone that I was thinking about a massive society-altering takedown of psychology his first thought was "Oh, you're a Scientologist!" Interesting, I thought. Scientology basically proposes an alternative psychology, but in my opinion it's not all that different: just a lot of unsupported text. I'm not well-read but I will assert that psychology is more robust than Scientology, although I do think they are equivalent in some way and that psychology is just "psychology" -- a word that camouflages something else as science or medicine.

During my third attempt at studying psychology, 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 bipedal hairless primate. 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 not-so-bright kids in the psych department are studying something real and rigorous and useful. Some people who are generally on the same page as me say that schizophrenia is different, because it translates into different brain matter configurations. I think this is a stretch, because ALL thoughts amount to brain matter, that we don't have the ability to measure or define meaningfully. 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.

Related to the science identity problem is the medical legitimacy problem. This one has some meat to it: Thomas Szasz wrote a book called "The Myth of Mental Illness" that I actually 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 (surprise) but I can sort of 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).

You might say "this is not news, mjt...people know psychology is soft but it's the best we got because neuroscience is beyond us." I agree, basically. But I think that Freud has had massive effects on culture that have not been entirely, or at all, positive. I think if you went back in time to 1855 and told a farmer what he was feeling, he'd be very confused.

And then we have a tail-eating snake problem: all this doesn't stand because what I'm saying is analytical, or "analytical" -- I'm psychologizing psychology. Furthermore what I'm talking about is more like pop psychology than psychology per se, which includes addictions and other things apart from proposing irrefutable behavior narratives in therapy sessions. In my defense, I would say 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." It's logic from absurd premises.

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 something 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 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. This however does not fix fundamental issues of words being insufficient panaceas. There's also the problem of people who interpret language differently, such as schizophrenics. This is a known thing: 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.

The thing with psychology is, there's nothing to it -- there are no big trade secrets. It's just someone with credentials and then under them, it's all projection, FAE, and LCNs. At UC Davis they don't require a bachelor's degree in psychology for admission to the PhD program, so it would therefor seem that there can't be a rigorous body of knowledge behind it. "Psychology" never needs scare quotes because it has built-in ambiguity, postmodernism, and epistemological nihilism. Psychology failing to qualify as a science is a common narrative, now, but I think this is not totally fair or accurate. Psychology has elements of science (studies, counting people), but then elements of divination or just relating to other people, understanding them, and thinking with their heads, in the same way we humans have always done.

Close to my central point is that a collection of stories is not how the brain works. But as I said philosophy and religion have been going on for a long time and aren't all bad, maybe -- we're supposed to talk to each other and make each other feel better. It's just that when you try to force this into a scientific container, you get people who are 100% sure that you cut your hair short because your mother ate pomegranates, and nothing -- no counter-narrative -- can persuade them 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, then the proof becomes Freud's medicalization -- the existence of psychology as a robust and mature and flawless field that can't be questioned. So then whatever narrative is proposed, not only by psychologists but by any "person of letters" with a liberal education, stands.