The state of psychology today is, if I may put it lightly, an embarrassment and a disgrace to everything that we in the 21st century know to be true about the way that people work, and is, or rather I suppose should be, a further embarrassment to the standards and values of our academic and educational endeavors as a civilization.
I must concede from the start that there is a great deal of truly marvelous work being done by research psychologists at various institutions, and that the pursuit of therapeutic psychologists and social workers to mitigate the problems of their fellow human beings and to assist in their amelioration is indeed a noble one, but the state of the psychological understanding from which they operate and the methodology available to them is one of truly grave misapprehension of fact and circumstance.
Dated and vexed theories such as behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis, which could not possibly be taken seriously in the context the known facts of today, are widely taught in the university level psychology curriculum, not as History of Psychology or as background for the currently held scientific consensus, but are offered up choisissez-vous as the best that modern academia has to offer on the subject.
And the unfortunate fact is that that is exactly what it is. In modern undergraduate psychology, the modus operandi tends to be that one is shown various phenomena and studies, some of which genuinely remarkable and revealing, whereupon one is usually given around four separate and incompatible explanations, some of which manage to glance at the truth of the matter, and some of which miss it so blatantly as to obfuscate the very pursuit of understanding.
I cannot tell the reader how many times I was presented confounds such as these in lessons, and after pressing with too many questions and witnessing an extremely brief moment of professorial panic, I was asked, as something of a statement, “Well, what do you think?”
Now I am sorry, but that is not the way that things should go in a scientific classroom. The question is, “has modern science investigated these things or has it not?” “Is there a scientific consensus on the subject or isn't there?” “What, with the information available to us, can we discern to be going on here?”
And, at least according to my experience, these are neither questions which modern psychological understanding is capable of answering, nor is their thrust one which is representative of modern psychological thinking.
If I were asking similar questions of a biology professor, I could presumably be answered either one way or another, or a different way entirely, or I could be told that either the professor themselves or the world at large simply doesn't know, and I would come away with some form of a concrete, bankable piece of information.
Of course, already I can hear critics of this critique diagnosing me with so-called “physics envy”, asserting that I am jealous of the “harder” science's clear-cut results, models, and experiments, and I concede that there must be at least a small latent element of this in anyone who deals in the messy and complicated business of the other sciences. And it's true that psychology is quite often referred to, somewhat defeatedly, as a “soft” science.
But I contend that psychology is soft not because of its subject matter but because of its methods, and particularly its methods of analysis and reasoning.
At the classroom level we have refused to decide what constitutes an explanation and which of our predecessors have contributed such a thing as it concerns the topic at hand. We treat Freud and Jung and Eriksson and Maslow as lawgivers who have unraveled the mysteries of the universe, and yet they have knitted these back into incomprehensible messes of their own, and I for one think that a smug little pyramid of needs, or a trifecta of id, ego, and superego, are useless if they cannot be interrogated to the full satisfaction of the facts which they seek to explain.
I do not envy the elegance and simplicity of the prism and the rainbow, or that distance = rate x time, so much as I envy the Krebs' cycle, or the process of ontogenesis, for example. Yes, the explanation may be complicated, with lots of different parts each of which may take a long while to explain, and there may be parts of it which are wrong (or, as it is said in science, “subject to revision”), but we must raise the bar for what it is that we consider an explanation at all, if only for our own self respect.
The four answers that we have for any given analysis, apart from four answers to one problem being absurd, barely make one answer between them, and this is representative of the void that exists at the heart of our study-- the lack of a single, unifying means of understanding the mechanics of human thought and experience, and to me this omission is nothing short of glaring.
The state of the pubic understanding is even worse. One can scarcely read an article or turn on the radio without being invited to entertain the most pedantic, ham-fisted, pseudopsychological nonsense, confidently propped up as enlightened and educated perspectives, which basically consist of “getting inside [someone's] head”, finding shadows of something vaguely nasty and creepy, or vaguely tortured, or perhaps even vaguely warm and fuzzy depending on the program, and then calling it a day.
Now, of course, I might never have a moment's peace if I used a survey of the national media as the barometer of human knowledge and understanding, after all there are some publications which will never stop printing horoscopes, but the simple fact is that even at the highest levels of our endeavor there is no clear alternative to these ideas.
It saddens me to think that even if there was undertaken the most wonderful campaign for the public understanding of psychological science this public would be no better off at the end of it, unless some friends were invited along to speak from the human biology department.
Many of my psychology classes have threatened, and not emptily, to go the entire semester without even mentioning the brain or how it arose, except of course for the token nods it demands when development comes up or for the attribution some complex function to a particular region, and so on.
This magnificent organ, far from being seen as the fabric of and basis for our entire lives and experience, is employed only as the deus ex machina which fills the gaps left in psychological theory. In fact, with one small and nearly dispensed with exception, every single thing that I have laid out as the foundation for the theory I have put forward in this book is material that was covered in exactly none of my psychology classes.
Psychology contends itself instead with philosophical life events and with their patently assumed consequences. These are loosely and vaguely defined, they are informed by the sociocultural milieu of the day, and they bring with them a scientifically unpardonable amount of bias, confusion, platitude, and truism.
It often seems that the goal of most psychological discussion is to reduce a situation of infinite complexity to a handful of tired clichés, or to use some opportunistic experimental data to prop up some inadequate existing concept, or at least to confirm the folk wisdom and biases with which everyone already views the situation.
This, put simply, is not the way that science works. The problems in our ideas that this way of thinking has bred could fill a book on their own, and before I decided that that on its own wasn't good enough, that was the book I was originally going to write.
There are so many things which people tacitly acknowledge as true without evidence, so many holes in the plot that so few seem to notice, so many nods to social convention and inherited ideas, and there are far too many easy answers.
Even if I'm ultimately wrong about what I have put forward here, that even if this work won't be seen in a hundred years' time as a major step forward in the history of psychology, then I hope at the very least to have gotten people looking in the right direction.
Not Enough an Art, Not Enough a Science
The state of psychology today is, if I may put it lightly, an embarrassment and a disgrace to everything that we in the 21st century know to be true about the way that people work, and is, or rather I suppose should be, a further embarrassment to the standards and values of our academic and educational endeavors as a civilization.
I must concede from the start that there is a great deal of truly marvelous work being done by research psychologists at various institutions, and that the pursuit of therapeutic psychologists and social workers to mitigate the problems of their fellow human beings and to assist in their amelioration is indeed a noble one, but the state of the psychological understanding from which they operate and the methodology available to them is one of truly grave misapprehension of fact and circumstance.
Dated and vexed theories such as behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis, which could not possibly be taken seriously in the context the known facts of today, are widely taught in the university level psychology curriculum, not as History of Psychology or as background for the currently held scientific consensus, but are offered up choisissez-vous as the best that modern academia has to offer on the subject.
And the unfortunate fact is that that is exactly what it is. In modern undergraduate psychology, the modus operandi tends to be that one is shown various phenomena and studies, some of which genuinely remarkable and revealing, whereupon one is usually given around four separate and incompatible explanations, some of which manage to glance at the truth of the matter, and some of which miss it so blatantly as to obfuscate the very pursuit of understanding.
I cannot tell the reader how many times I was presented confounds such as these in lessons, and after pressing with too many questions and witnessing an extremely brief moment of professorial panic, I was asked, as something of a statement, “Well, what do you think?”
Now I am sorry, but that is not the way that things should go in a scientific classroom. The question is, “has modern science investigated these things or has it not?” “Is there a scientific consensus on the subject or isn't there?” “What, with the information available to us, can we discern to be going on here?”
And, at least according to my experience, these are neither questions which modern psychological understanding is capable of answering, nor is their thrust one which is representative of modern psychological thinking.
If I were asking similar questions of a biology professor, I could presumably be answered either one way or another, or a different way entirely, or I could be told that either the professor themselves or the world at large simply doesn't know, and I would come away with some form of a concrete, bankable piece of information.
Of course, already I can hear critics of this critique diagnosing me with so-called “physics envy”, asserting that I am jealous of the “harder” science's clear-cut results, models, and experiments, and I concede that there must be at least a small latent element of this in anyone who deals in the messy and complicated business of the other sciences. And it's true that psychology is quite often referred to, somewhat defeatedly, as a “soft” science.
But I contend that psychology is soft not because of its subject matter but because of its methods, and particularly its methods of analysis and reasoning.
At the classroom level we have refused to decide what constitutes an explanation and which of our predecessors have contributed such a thing as it concerns the topic at hand. We treat Freud and Jung and Eriksson and Maslow as lawgivers who have unraveled the mysteries of the universe, and yet they have knitted these back into incomprehensible messes of their own, and I for one think that a smug little pyramid of needs, or a trifecta of id, ego, and superego, are useless if they cannot be interrogated to the full satisfaction of the facts which they seek to explain.
I do not envy the elegance and simplicity of the prism and the rainbow, or that distance = rate x time, so much as I envy the Krebs' cycle, or the process of ontogenesis, for example. Yes, the explanation may be complicated, with lots of different parts each of which may take a long while to explain, and there may be parts of it which are wrong (or, as it is said in science, “subject to revision”), but we must raise the bar for what it is that we consider an explanation at all, if only for our own self respect.
The four answers that we have for any given analysis, apart from four answers to one problem being absurd, barely make one answer between them, and this is representative of the void that exists at the heart of our study-- the lack of a single, unifying means of understanding the mechanics of human thought and experience, and to me this omission is nothing short of glaring.
The state of the pubic understanding is even worse. One can scarcely read an article or turn on the radio without being invited to entertain the most pedantic, ham-fisted, pseudopsychological nonsense, confidently propped up as enlightened and educated perspectives, which basically consist of “getting inside [someone's] head”, finding shadows of something vaguely nasty and creepy, or vaguely tortured, or perhaps even vaguely warm and fuzzy depending on the program, and then calling it a day.
Now, of course, I might never have a moment's peace if I used a survey of the national media as the barometer of human knowledge and understanding, after all there are some publications which will never stop printing horoscopes, but the simple fact is that even at the highest levels of our endeavor there is no clear alternative to these ideas.
It saddens me to think that even if there was undertaken the most wonderful campaign for the public understanding of psychological science this public would be no better off at the end of it, unless some friends were invited along to speak from the human biology department.
Many of my psychology classes have threatened, and not emptily, to go the entire semester without even mentioning the brain or how it arose, except of course for the token nods it demands when development comes up or for the attribution some complex function to a particular region, and so on.
This magnificent organ, far from being seen as the fabric of and basis for our entire lives and experience, is employed only as the deus ex machina which fills the gaps left in psychological theory. In fact, with one small and nearly dispensed with exception, every single thing that I have laid out as the foundation for the theory I have put forward in this book is material that was covered in exactly none of my psychology classes.
Psychology contends itself instead with philosophical life events and with their patently assumed consequences. These are loosely and vaguely defined, they are informed by the sociocultural milieu of the day, and they bring with them a scientifically unpardonable amount of bias, confusion, platitude, and truism.
It often seems that the goal of most psychological discussion is to reduce a situation of infinite complexity to a handful of tired clichés, or to use some opportunistic experimental data to prop up some inadequate existing concept, or at least to confirm the folk wisdom and biases with which everyone already views the situation.
This, put simply, is not the way that science works. The problems in our ideas that this way of thinking has bred could fill a book on their own, and before I decided that that on its own wasn't good enough, that was the book I was originally going to write.
There are so many things which people tacitly acknowledge as true without evidence, so many holes in the plot that so few seem to notice, so many nods to social convention and inherited ideas, and there are far too many easy answers.
Even if I'm ultimately wrong about what I have put forward here, that even if this work won't be seen in a hundred years' time as a major step forward in the history of psychology, then I hope at the very least to have gotten people looking in the right direction.
Thank you.