Tag Archives: Psychology

Why we should not integrate therapies.

21 Friday Oct 2022

Posted by in Biblical Counseling

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The manner in which Biblical Counseling as a discipline should interact with the discipline of “psychology”  is a matter of great interest to me. I use quotation marks because the word refers to a bewildering number of concepts and theories, all of which more-or-less concern what a human being is, how a human being knows, how human beings change, and what end they should change toward. Psychology is a science at times, a religion at times, a moral theory in other places.

In a series of articles being published in the Journal of Biblical Soul Care, I have been offering my thoughts on how we Biblical Counseling should interact with psychology. (The series begins here.) I do not think it best to either appropriate whatever “works”, nor to simply ignore it. In fact, I do not think it possible to ignore it altogether. Therefore, we have to learn how to handle this most pressing understanding of our day. In general, I think we should examine psychology with all the care one would use to pick up a porcupine.

That project will take years to complete. In the interim, I would like to offer this caution: it is one thing to read a study which reports on the stress effects of long-distance driving on truckers. It is another thing to import a therapy because it “work”. I would like to offer some cautions on why we should not simply use a therapeutic technique in BC.

Point One: It exceeds our job description. Biblical counseling is direction in Christian discipleship. We help people put Christian theology into practice. There are any number of things, good and bad, which lie beyond the scope of our work. If you are an accountant and you are acting as a counselor, be a counselor. Even the good work of offering tax advice is something other than biblical counseling. Stick to your job description. The box boy might help me to my car, but it’s not his job to rotate the tires.

Point Two: You need a license to conduct therapy. Psychotherapists constitute a licensed profession in the United States. They are governed by very specific standards and must pass certain requirements in each state. If you engage in therapy and you do not have a license, you are violating the law. The laws may be ill-informed and not in the public good, but they are the laws. A Biblical counselor does not need to be licensed, because we do not engage in therapy. We train in the Christian religion.

Point Three: Not all help is help. A common argument is that we are called to “help hurting people.”  Some therapy is said to help people. Therefore, we should use that therapy. The trouble here is with the word “help.” Therapy is an amoral procedure whose primary end is for the client/patient to feel better. If one feels happy, calm, well suited to one’s situation, everything is fine.

We do believe that as a general matter, living in accord with Biblical principles will result in a better, more satisfying life. But as we look through the text of Scripture, we see instances where living as God calls us will result in our happiness. Does the unremitting pain of the psalmist in Psalm 88 need therapy? Jesus’ agony in the Garden and then the escalating pain and sorrow of the Cross show that God may call his most highly esteemed servants to suffer tremendous sorrow.

Sometimes sorrow and pain is good because it leads us to repentance. Psalm 32 describes the pain felt by one who is living with unrepentant sin. The pain of the unrepentance was meant to drive David to repent. Should David have merely learned some breathing techniques and used valium?

This is not an exhaustive example of when sorrow or pain are not be avoided.  But it is sufficient to prove that not all pain is something which should simply stop, and it is not always “help” to help someone avoid sorrow or pain.

Point Four: a therapy is the rite of a foreign religion. All forms of beliefs and actions will have effect of changing people.  Even ineffective therapy will change a person, however slight the change. When you use a therapy, you instructing in hope (this will help you feel better). You giving instruction in what a human being really is, what is the point of a human being, and who how human beings change.

A therapy is not some neutral procedure which has the moral content of a hydrogen bond in a chemistry experiment. A therapy comes out of a complex understanding of a human being and seeks to change a human being in the direction of and consistent with that understanding. When you import a therapy, you are importing rituals of a different religion.

This last point may be the most difficult to understand, and it could bear more explanation. Perhaps in another place I will draw that assertion out in greater detail. 

Ketamine and Depression

07 Friday Oct 2022

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If I understand the argument of this study correctly (1) a depressed condition entails (at least in part) a system of how one processes information; (2) “updating beliefs” is a/the key to moving out of a depressed condition; (3) ingestion of ketamine facilitated the fact of one updating their beliefs:

“In the suite of the study, TRD patients received three administrations of ketamine at a subanesthetic dose (0.5 mg/kg over 40 minutes) in one week. Only four hours after the first administration, patients’ ability to update their beliefs after receiving a positive information was increased. They became less sensitive to negative information and recovered an ability to update their knowledge com parable to that of control subjects.

“Moreover, improvement in depressive symptoms after ketamine treatment was associated with these changes in belief updating, suggesting a link between clinical improvement and changes in this cognitive mechanism. “In other words, the more patients’ belief updating ability was increased, the greater the improvement in symptoms was”.”

The question would then the relationship between the drug the updated beliefs. Does the drug perform a placebo function? Does the drug somehow alter brain chemistry [whatever that might mean or entail in this particular instance] such that beliefs can be updated? Is there something which is preventing the “updating” of beliefs [beyond the belief that I cannot do so]? Does the drug do something intermediate, such as relaxing the patient which makes them more willing to “update their beliefs” [which would then suggest that the failure to update beliefs was more akin to a refusal than an inability]?

Unintended Consequences 1

24 Saturday Sep 2022

Posted by in Psychology, unintended consequences

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Researchers found that exposure to the blue light from a smart device altered the hormone levels in female rats

We have found that blue light exposure, sufficient to alter melatonin levels, is also able to alter reproductive hormone levels and cause earlier puberty onset in our rat model. In addition, the longer the exposure, the earlier the onset,” saysendocrinologist and lead author Aylin Kilinç Uğurlu from Gazi University.

https://www.sciencealert.com/early-puberty-in-girls-surged-in-the-pandemic-and-we-may-finally-know-why

Now you may not care about the hormone level in rats. But this suggests that mammals like us are susceptible to significant hormonal effects from our phones

The researchers were seeking to find out why girls worldwide were reaching puberty worldwide at an earlier age. The rats exposed to the blue light seemed to mature faster than the other rats

This then raises questions such as does this apply to human beings? What other effects does the hormone change result in?

Some ways in which memory may ago astray

16 Saturday Jul 2022

Posted by in Memorization, Memory

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Here is a helpful summary of the problems which may arise with memory:

When memory serves as evidence, as it does in many civil and criminal legal proceedings, there are a number of important limitations to the veracity of that evidence. This is because memory does not provide a veridical representation of events as experienced. Rather, what gets encoded into memory is determined by what a person attends to, what they already have stored in memory, their expectations, needs and emotional state. This information is subsequently integrated (consolidated) with other information that has

already been stored in a person’s long-term, autobiographical memory.

What gets retrieved later from that memory is determined by that same multitude of factors that contributed to encoding as well as what drives the recollection of the event. Specifically, what gets retold about an experience depends on whom one is talking to and what the purpose is of remembering that particular event (e.g., telling a friend, relaying an experience to a therapist, telling the police about an event).

Moreover, what gets remembered is reconstructed from the remnants of what was originally stored; that is, what we remember is constructed from whatever remains in memory following any forgetting or interference from new experiences that may have occurred across the interval between storing and retrieving a particular experience.

Because the contents of our memories for experiences involve the active manipulation (during encoding), integration with pre-existing information (during consolidation), and reconstruction (during retrieval) of that information, memory is, by definition, fallible at best and unreliable at worst.

Mark L. Howe and Lauren M. Knott , “The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: Lessons from the past and their modern consequences” Memory, 2015, Vol. 23, No. 5, 633–656, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2015.1010709

First, let’s note the particulars of what is said:

“This is because memory does not provide a veridical representation of events as experienced.” Memory is not an objective recordation of a historical event. We know that even a photograph can be deceptive. We only see what is before the camera, not all of the things which remain outside of the photograph.  Look up the Beijing Olympics sky jump location: On television it appears to be a located on a snow covered mountain. But it was really an artificial structure in an industrial park next to what looks to be a nuclear reactor.

This example considers only one dimension of the problem: what can be seen. When it comes to reality involving human actors, the number of potential variables in play, sights, sounds, emotions, thoughts, et cetera, make a comprehensive “recording” of the event impossible. No one human being could possibly know everything was is present at any one time. Hence, our memory is not a complete recordation of the past.

So, the first limitation is attention: “Rather, what gets encoded into memory is determined by what a person attends to.”

Next, to be efficient, it will not be necessary for our memory to record everything taking place. Existing memories and expectations of what should occur can fill out what is actually recorded. The old Spiderman cartoons from the 1960’s repeatedly used certain elements as fillers (for instance, Spiderman swinging through some location). The stock segments were interspersed into the new episode. And so, memory depends upon “what they already have stored in memory, their expectations.”

The way in which the memory is taken down also depends upon our emotional state: this may effect the information we attend to as well as the way in which it is stored. For example, a particularly fearful event will be kept differently than an insignificant occasion. You can remember that time you almost died, but you have no idea what you saw on your way to work three years ago on a Tuesday in March.

Moreover, the information is then kept alongside of what you already known and have remembered: There is an integration of that information with your existing life:  “This information is subsequently integrated (consolidated) with other information that has

already been stored in a person’s long-term, autobiographical memory.” This can result in the information being smoothed out, accommodated into a consistent whole.

But memory only becomes functional (for purposes of testimony) when it is retrieved. There are a host of problems which can arise when it comes to “finding” the memory. And then, once it is found, not necessarily everything is retrieved: “What gets retrieved later from that memory is determined by that same multitude of factors that contributed to encoding as well as what drives the recollection of the event. Specifically, what gets retold about an experience depends on whom one is talking to and what the purpose is of remembering that particular event (e.g., telling a friend, relaying an experience to a therapist, telling the police about an event).”

The memory is recalled is not an exact reproduction of what was originally recorded. Due to the way in which memory is stored and encoded, the memory must “reconstructed”. This too can result in changes from the original event:

“Moreover, what gets remembered is reconstructed from the remnants of what was originally stored; that is, what we remember is constructed from whatever remains in memory following any forgetting or interference from new experiences that may have occurred across the interval between storing and retrieving a particular experience.”

Indeed, the process of reconstruction and then returning the memory can result in changes to the memory. The plasticity of memory itself a matter of research. This has been studied not merely to determine the extent to which memory is fallible or can be manipulated, but also as a means of therapy to help people who have suffered from traumatic memories and maybe suffering from the effects of such memory (for instance, what is often referred to as “PTSD”; this work focuses on something called memory “reconsolidation”).

Building a Resurrection

22 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by in Politics

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I have been wondering  what is the substrate which is holding so much of what goes by “progressivism” together.  In what way does an extremist view on abortion, transgenderism, sexualizing children, expressive individualism coupled to collectivism which brooks no compromise. And I keep coming around to the same sort of conclusion.

I was pushed a bit further along this line while reading “The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI).”  The article details the Pritzker family’s bankrolling much of the “research” and advocacy in this area. Within that article, there is a cross-reference to this organization: https://terasemcentral.org/about.html

Under “science” we find a link to an article in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness (which I had not previously read): https://terasemcentral.org/docs/Terasem_Mind_Uploading_Experiment_IJMC.pdf

The article contends that it will become possible to replicate one’s consciousness in a computerized system. Effectively, there would be a resurrection of the person’s consciousness:

“Specifically, is it possible that software written a few decades from now, and paired with a database of video interviews of and associated information about a predecessor person, will be able to faithfully mimic the workings of this predecessor’s mind? An empirical answer can be obtained by tasking psychologists to determine whether they believe the new software-based mind appears to have a consciousness that is equivalent to that of its predecessor brain-based person. I have set up an experiment to see whether or not this is so. If it is, I believe the software-based mind is a techno-immortalized continuation of the predecessor’s identity. While the software- based mind will realize it is not the original brain-based mind, just as each human adult realizes they are not their teenage mind, or even the precise mind of the previous day, this fact of personal consciousness °ux does not undermine the continuity of unique identity.”

It would one’s life divorced from one’s body. It is interesting that it is not precisely the continuance of one’s disembodied soul, but rather a rejection of the body and a replicated (resurrected) consciousness without the substrate of a brain.  (“Throughout history there has never been a mind without a brain. It is the brain that has billions of neurons and trillions of synapses to provide the patterns of electro- chemical connectivity that, writ with extraordinary complexity, give rise to environmental representations, analyses and choices that are the hallmarks of a mind. The brain is to the mind as objects that are counted are to numbers. Some physical substrates, such as brains and abacus beads, necessarily entail non-physical phenomena, such as minds and math.”)

The “transgender” sexual identity, the belief that there is a consciousness which is somehow non-conforming to my body (that my body is not me): “In many regards it is not a very different quest from trying to discover the true state of a purported consciousness revived from a mind file. In both cases one must judge if the consciousness being presented is a fake or is authentic. Does the consciousness being presented represent an authentic analog (albeit with different gender or substrate), or does it represent discontinuity (such as a different personality that has taken root in a new gender or substrate)?”

Anyway, back to the original question.

There is something profoundly important about the human body. To remedy the fault of sin in the creation, it was necessary that God become incarnate in an actual human body. Indeed, one of the earliest heresies was the argument that Jesus only “seemed” to have a body. The true physicality of Jesus, in life, death, and resurrection is bedrock Christian faith.

The physical resurrection of the human body is key to the great hope of the Christian life.

The various strands of this “progressive” ideology seems to be ultimately a distain for the human body.  The body is a constraint and limitation which must be avoided.

The distain for the body easily translates into a willingness to engage in any sort of action to or with the body (as the early Gnostics who would either be profligate or ascetic). The death or enslavement of other bodies (provided they are sufficient far away) is permissible.

There is also a sort of disembodiment in the collective, as I become part of something bigger.

It is not necessarily a coherent set of ideals, but it does seem to gather around a certain core.

I am still thinking the matter through, but evasion of the body as a means of redemption and immortality seems to lie at the core.

Descartes Dreams

10 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Psychology

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(This is a final addition to the draft essay on empiricism which I posted yesterday. Again, very rough)

Descartes raised the question about being fundamentally deceived by our senses, well-before the computer simulation theory.  In his First Meditation raised the possibility that all our understanding is no different than dreaming:

Though this be true, I must nevertheless here consider that I am a man, and that, consequently, I am in the habit of sleeping, and representing to myself in dreams those same things, or even sometimes others less probable, which the insane think are presented to them in their waking moments. How often have I dreamt that I was in these familiar circumstances, that I was dressed, and occupied this place by the fire, when I was lying undressed in bed? At the present moment, however, I certainly look upon this paper with eyes wide awake; the head which I now move is not asleep; I extend this hand consciously and with express purpose, and I perceive it; the occurrences in sleep are not so distinct as all this. But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.

Descartes then questions the argument as follows:

6. Let us suppose, then, that we are dreaming, and that all these particulars–namely, the opening of the eyes, the motion of the head, the forth-putting of the hands–are merely illusions; and even that we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see. Nevertheless, it must be admitted at least that the objects which appear to us in sleep are, as it were, painted representations which could not have been formed unless in the likeness of realities; and, therefore, that those general objects, at all events, namely, eyes, a head, hands, and an entire body, are not simply imaginary, but really existent.

But I would like to press the argument in a different direction, based upon we know about our sensory perception being a matter of construction.  Descartes questions the dreaming argument by pointing to its relationship to our waking perceptions[1].  Yet, in light of what we have come to know about perception, we cannot so neatly distinguish between dreams and waking perception.

Our consciousness has access to the imagery, the perception manufactured by our brain. Our consciousness does not have unmitigated access to the world without the initial processing of senses and brain. In what way does the conscious access of imagery built while sleeping differ from access to imagery built while waking. We could say, that waking imagery at least has a genesis in senses while dreams are independent of current sensation. But that is not exactly true, for at least on some occasions sounds from the “outside” become incorporated into our dreams[2].

There are some psychologists and physicists who argue in a strong sense that dreams and waking are the same sort of constructive reality:

As we go about our lives, we take for granted the way our minds put everything together because the process is effortless, and its underlying mechanisms are baked-in, hidden, and automatic. But you might not have suspected that this same process of fashioning a seemingly external 3-D reality is the one underlying dreams. Since the realms of dreams and wakeful perception are usually classified separately—with only one of them regarded as “real”—they’re rarely part of the same discussion. But there are interesting commonalities that give us clues as to how our consciousness operates. Whether awake or dreaming, we are experiencing the same process even if it produces qualitatively different realities. During both dreams and waking hours, our minds collapse probability waves to generate a physical reality that comes complete with a functioning body. The result of this magnificent orchestration is our never-ending ability to experience sensations in a four-dimensional world.[3]

I am not contending that we take Dr. Lanza’s “biocentrism” in full. Dr. Lanza is arguing that our perception of reality in a very real sense is just a passive internal construction of reality, but that reality itself (at least what we could possibly know of it) is constructed by our perception of it. I know this sounds outlandish, but I want you to consider the particle/wave experiment in physics.

It is a well-known experimental result that light will “behave” like a particle or a wave, depending upon whether you give light the option of proceeding through one opening or two. If you give it one opening, it goes through as a particle, a photon. If you offer it two openings, it goes through both and behaves as a wave.[4]

And finally a quotation from the famous Dr. Feynman:

The question now is, how does it really work? What machinery is actually producing this thing? Nobody knows any machinery. Nobody can give you a deeper explanation of this phenomenon that I have given: that is, a de- scription of it. They can give you a wider explanation, in the sense that they can do more examples to show how it is impossible to tell which hole the electron goes through and not at the same time destroy the interference pattern. They can give a wider class of experiments than just the two slit interference experiment. But that is just repeating the same thing to drive it in. It is not any deeper; it is only wider. The mathematics can be made more precise; you can mention that they are complex numbers instead of real numbers, and a couple of other minor points which have nothing to do with the main idea. But the deep mystery is what I have described, and no one can go any deeper today.[5]

The weirdness of physics when it approaches the very small and the very large, the very slow and the very fast, will detain us further.  All you need to know is that we cannot simply dismiss the contention that our perception of reality has no effect upon the reality, itself.

To return to the question of dreams, I need merely assert the lesser contention a sharp distinction between waking and sleeping consciousness is not as easy as one may have thought. How do you contend, on the basis of what we know of sensory perception, that dreams are a wholly different from waking consciousness?

Another way to get at this same problem comes the position of Bishop Berkeley:

The starting point of Berkeley’s attack on the materialism of his contemporaries is a very short argument presented in Principles 4:

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?

Berkeley presents here the following argument (see Winkler 1989, 138):

(1) We perceive ordinary objects (houses, mountains, etc.).

(2) We perceive only ideas.

Therefore,

(3) Ordinary objects are ideas.[6]

Berkeley turns the empiricist’s argument on its head and works outward from ideas and tries to find some “real world” of tangible objects.  When look back to Descartes dismissal of we are always dreaming, he points to our perception objects while awake as a proof that dreams are not reality. To this, Berkeley has a response:

Berkeley is aware that the materialist has one important card left to play: Don’t we need material objects in order to explain our ideas? And indeed, this seems intuitively gripping: Surely the best explanation of the fact that I have a chair idea every time I enter my office and that my colleague has a chair idea when she enters my office is that a single enduring material object causes all these various ideas. Again, however, Berkeley replies by effectively exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents’ theories:

…though we give the materialists their external bodies, they by their own confession are never the nearer knowing how our ideas are produced: since they own themselves unable to comprehend in what manner body can act upon spirit, or how it is possible it should imprint any idea in the mind. Hence it is evident the production of ideas or sensations in our minds, can be no reason why we should suppose matter or corporeal substances, since that is acknowledged to remain equally inexplicable with, or without this supposition. (PHK 19)

Firstly, Berkeley contends, a representationalist must admit that we could have our ideas without there being any external objects causing them (PHK 18). (This is one way in which Berkeley sees materialism as leading to skepticism.) More devastatingly, however, he must admit that the existence of matter does not help to explain the occurrence of our ideas.

The project of naïvely assuming a real world to which we have direct, self-authenticating access is not as easy it may seem.  While Berkeley’s argument when made in the 18th century may have sounded like a philosopher having fun with words and ideas, we see a greater cogency in the force of his argument when we realize how much of sensory perception actually is construction.

In short, the relationship between what we consciously perceive and the thing we are perceiving raises some exceptionally difficult questions.

[1] For a thorough analysis of the dreaming argument see, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sberker/files/phil159-2018-lec2-descartes.pdf

[2] http://eddiejackson.net/web_documents/Descartes’%20Meditations%20on%20First%20Philosophy.pdf

[3]
Robert Lanza M.D.

Biocentrism

Dreams Are More Real Than Anyone Thought

Waking reality and dreams are different versions of the same thing.

Posted August 11, 2021

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/biocentrism/202108/dreams-are-more-real-anyone-thought

[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-home-light-wave-particle/

Double-Slit Science: How Light Can Be Both a Particle and a Wave

Learn how light can be two things at once with this illuminating experiment

By Education.com, Mack Levine on December 12, 2013

[5] (R.P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, p. 145). Quoted at Lecture 17: Wave-Particle Duality & the Two-Slit Experiment 1 Wave-Particle Duality & the Two-Slit Experiment: Analysis https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys419/fa2017/Lecture17_WaveParticleDualityAndTwoSlitExperiment_Analysis.pdf

[6] George Berkeley

First published Fri Sep 10, 2004; substantive revision Wed Jan 19, 2011

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/#2.1.1

What is a human being, if you extirpate love?

04 Friday Jun 2021

Posted by in Love, Psychology, Uncategorized

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In The Criminal Psychopath, Jurimetrics. 2011 Summer; 51: 355–397, Kiehl and Hoffman provide a thorough summary of the history, diagnosis, and treatment of the psychopath, particularly with a view to amount of crime committed by this relatively small proportion of the population.

It raises the interesting issue of the degree to which the condition is the result of a brain disorder and the interaction with this brain in its environment. There is apparently some evidence that the condition has a genetic component, and perhaps it is a peculiarly vulnerable brain in connection with the “right” environment which leads to the exhibition of utter moral inability. Plainly performing standard experiments by tormenting and mistreating children in rigorously similar manners to see whether the condition can be induced regularly would be evil. Therefore, one needs to consider proxies, such as the condition shows some responsiveness to treatment if the treatment early enough in life.

That there is correspondence between the condition and certain brain function is interesting: But note that the information cited shows the functioning of the brain: their brains function differently. When faced with moral situations the parts of their brain which were involved differed from “you and me.” But what does that exactly prove? The argument that the brain is causing this condition actually contains a hidden premise: that all thought must begin from the brain, not pass through the brain.

For a moment take a different body part: the psychopath and the mother with her child both use their hands, but the use is strikingly different. No one believes that the mother hand causes her sweet caress.

Reddit Turned an MIT AI Into a Psychopath. What Is It Doing to Your Brain? | Inc.com

Now a mother with broken hands could not caress in the same manner. The status of her hand both limits and permits certain behavior, but it does not cause her behavior.

But when it comes to the brain, it is easy to believe that the brain is causative. This is because the functioning of rest of the body relies heavily upon the functioning of the brain. In particular, the use of the brain in thought could imply that the brain is directing the thought.

But need that be so? If one adds as an element of the human being a mind, it is no difficulty to concluded that the minds of two different men would use their brains in a different manner: just as the psychopath murders and the doctor heals with the hand.

If we posit that information flows from the body toward the mind and the mind toward the body, effects can move in both directions. (The precise nature of mind and body is not the issue. Although at present I am very intrigued by Dembski’s Being as Communion (information is the ultimate base, not matter) and Thomas’ hylomorphism which seems to resolve Descartes’ hard cleavage interaction problem.) Thus certain types of brains would have effects without being the univocal cause.

Another element in the article which intrigued me was “His very disconnectedness is his mask. We cannot see him because we assume all humans have the connections that bind us, and because the psychopath’s very lack of those connections allows him to mimic them.” The psychopath, to use the Ancient Greek term, is a-storge: he lacks human connections. The fact of storge among other humans creates the framework which the psychopath exploits: “One explanation is that being exposed to the frailties of normal people in group therapeutic settings gives psychopaths a stock of information that makes them better at manipulating those normal people. As one psychopath put it, ‘These programs are like a finishing school. They teach you how to put the squeeze on people.'”

They bear a resemblance to Nietzsche’s Nobility who know themselves better than all others and are willing to command and exploit. They also exhibit the final end of depravity in Romans 1.

What should think of them. The authors were hopeful there were ways to get the psychopaths to slow down a bit on their crime spree of life. But there really wasn’t any element of hope.

“As one psychotherapist wrote, his psychopaths in treatment ‘have no desire to change, … have no concept of the future, resent all authorities (including therapists), view the patient role as … being in a position of inferiority, and deem therapy a joke and therapists as objects to be conned, threatened, seduced, or used.'”

That reference to the “future” stuck out. It is not merely that they have no concept of future punishment, they have no mechanism for hope. Perhaps they can move by hungers, I want this-then-that, but would be based upon a present hunger. I might plan to fulfill my hunger, but not be different.

Authorities obviously are merely impediments to be beaten or seduced. That is easy enough. But without the future, without hope. That again is a state described in Paul as the depth of lostness, “having no hope without God in the world.”

Now we come to this character: no authority, no hope, no future. Such a man is ultimately depraved.

It is the cognitive capacity of a man without love: because love is built around the future. Love does not exult in oneself, but puts another first. Love becomes a sort of authority for the other’s good becomes paramount.

Freud on the “Freudian Slip”

23 Tuesday Feb 2021

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The previous look at The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is found here.

            The “Freudian slip” is the most famous of all concepts from Freud. It occurs when someone reveals a hidden motivation by substituting the “wrong” word. As he begins this essay, Freud reviews the work done by Meringer and Mayor, and then the observations of Wundt. 

Freud underscores an element from Wundt – an element which Freud will enforce at the end of this essay: These slips of the tongue take place when there is a “suspension of the attention that it would inhibit it, the uninhibited flow of associations is activated and may be said, even more definitely, to do so through that suspension.” (60) As he says toward the end of the essay, “I do not think anyone would make a slip of the tongue [examples given], in short in all those cases where, as one may say, the mind is really concentrated on the matter in hand.” (96)

Freud rejects the argument that slips of the tongue are merely the result of confusing or substituting sounds of words. He does not deny that sounds of words can have an effect upon errors, and indeed may be the cause of some errors:

But they do not seem to me strong enough to impair correct speech by their own influence alone. In those cases that I have studied closely and of which I can claim some understanding, they merely represent an existing mechanism that can easily be used by a remote psychic motive without its binding itself to the sphere of influence of those connections. In a great many substitutions, a slip of the tongue occurs quite regardless of such laws of phonetics. (79)

Freud explains that he uses these slips to “resolve and track down neurotic symptoms.” (78) Patients “may try to conceal the subject, but cannot help revealing it unintentionally in many different ways.” 

He contends that his theory “will stand up to examination even in its minor details.” (95)

To support his contention, he notes dozens of instances where someone substitutes one word for another, and thereby discloses a secret they had hoped to conceal. 

I found most compelling the example he gave from the novel Egoist by George Meredith (I cannot agree with Freud that Meredith is the “greatest English novelist”). Without rehearsing the entire nature of the example, the proposition is that a woman in the novel, by a confusion of names reveals a secret hope and desire she tries to keep concealed – but cannot. Why I found this example compelling is that is an independent attestation by someone other than Freud (or a professional psychologist/psychiatrist) of the same idea.  Now, since Meredith was a rough contemporary of Freud, it is possible that such ideas “were in the air.” 

However, Freud provides an example from Shakespeare where Portia discloses herself by a slip.

Let’s take his concept seriously, that people sometimes say what they mean to conceal. I would think that best explained by the fact that a person is intently thinking about two things and is speaking with the hope of not saying something but the thoughts get the better of the tongue – we can’t concentrate on two things at once. For instance, Freud gives an example of where he is attempting to defend himself from a conflict with his wife and thus discloses something he did not wish to say.

But Freud has a rather different theory of what happens: He puts the emphasis on the unintended nature of the disclosure. In his theory, the concealed fact just finds a way out because sufficient control is not being brought to bear upon the speech so the unconscious makes a break for it. 

Yet, I think his examples could easily be re-read as not an unconscious escape but rather the conflict of multiple thoughts. 

For instance, he gives the example of where a soldier on trial for burglary used the word Diebstellung – position as thief – when he meant to use the word Dienstellung – military service.  The soldier made this blunder while testifying in Court. But it is in just such a circumstance that Freud said a slip would not occur, “in a speech made in defense of his name and honor before a sworn jury” (96). The soldier was trying to explain that he could not have committed the crime because he was still in the military: but he would at the same time be thinking of what he had been accused. 

If there are revealing substitutions, I don’t think he proves a subversive unconscious but rather a confusion of thoughts. 

Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic 4.2

14 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by in Freud, Psychology

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(In Defense of the Analytic Attitude)

In the remainder of the chapter, Rieff distinguishes Freud from what came after.  The distinction which Rieff draws is between Freudian “freedom” and a “cure.” Freud offers no solution, only a “technology” which will allow one to understand the working of their subconscious. The end game, as seemingly proposed by Rieff would be the freedom from the “residues of religious compulsion.” (79) This may be achievable with a combination of Freudian analysis and behavioral technique. (Ibid.)

Freudian analysis “is the aim of science – power; in this case a transformative technology of the inner life….This is ultimate technology.” (79)

The purpose of “faith” is to mitigate suffering: “all religions have a therapeutic function.” (76) Jung sought to scoop up all religions with his theory of archtypes. An interesting observation is how Rieff sees Jung and Freud as inversions of one another. Freud understood “erotic instinctual forces” sublimate themselves into the “highest ethical and religious interests of man.” While Jung saw the process going in the other direction. (77)

Freud’s aim of “freedom” comes at a cost:

“What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility.” (79)

This freedom is of course something which is at issue. It is taken by everyone that Freud’s theories of pscyho-social development and dream analysis and slips of the tongue – however interesting – are unquestionably not “scientific.” His technology is simply untrue. 

What is strange is that his basic proposition that your sensation of ethical constraint is a trick society has played upon, that restraint is what is holding you back, mixed with Rousseau and Hegel and whatnot and developed by his followers (some who – as we shall see – were criminally insane) has become a default argument over against the “illusion” of religion and God. It is a curious sort of position to occupy. 

But on the same ground, by what basis do Hegel’s thesis-antithesis, Rousseau’s sociology, Marx’s economic history still have currency? It seems that people pick bits and pieces of ideas without ever well-understanding either what they believe or why. They could never articulate their axioms much less their conclusions. 

We live too easily in cages built of the thought of others. Freud in his effort to bring a technology of freedom foisted insupportable conceits upon the world. When his conceits proved to be nonsense, the conceits remained.  

The Squirrel! Theory of Anxiety Management

20 Wednesday May 2020

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Distraction as a Means of Relief

A 2005 series of studies published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that perhaps people deal with threats by thinking about something else. This is essentially the Squirrel! Theory of stress management. That is perhaps too glib a summary and certainly not academic, I think it is fair.

The article, itself, is remarkably dense and considers a number of seemingly disparate concepts. The idea initially under consideration is the fact that people – particularly under some threat – exaggerate the extent to which others hold their personal views on any number of subjects.

They first note three major theories for this observed condition: (1) It might generate social support; you get others to like you. (2) Cognitive closure: there’s nothing to think about here, everyone has the same opinion. (3) Since threats undermine confidence in myself, exaggerating social consensus makes me feel better about myself.

They then went about threatening college students to see whether the third theory proved itself. They focused upon “defensively proud individuals”. While there are variants in the way in which this is expressed, “The common theme is that they all involve an explicit focus on an ostensible self-strength, which appears to mask vulnerability. Thus we see the three forms as manifestation of a latent defensive pride construct and, in the present research, expect them to be related to arrogant self-righteousness in the face of threats.” Ian McGregor et al., “Defensive Pride and Consensus: Strength in Imaginary Numbers,” Journal of Psychology and Social Psychology 89, no. 6 (2005): 978-96.
In the first study they gave two groups of psychology students a section to read on statistics. One paper was impenetrable; the other a simple explain of the importance of statistics. They were both told that the paper was something everyone knew (a “popular tool”). For those with the difficult page, the effect would be “you’re stupid.” They then asked them questions on moral issues such as abortion and capital punishment. Those who were humiliated by the researchers over estimated the number of people who held their particular views on the various issues.
A second study asked two groups of students to either vividly describe themselves in a frightening circumstance or a comfortable and securable place. They were then asked the moral questions. The frightened students again over-estimated the number of people who held their personal views on moral issues.
A third study threatened all of the students; but following the threat some students received praise. The students were then given two articles supposed written by a student who visited the United States from a foreign country. One version praised the US; one version complained and condemned. Being praised after being threatened resulted in less negative evaluation of the condemning “foreigner.”
A fourth study was conducted to determine whether the exaggeration of consensus was from “reflected glory” of the group or mere consensus with a group.
In the end, the researchers were left with the observation that under stress people can alleviate that stress by being affirmed personally or by imagining the whole world is on their side.
They then compared their findings to a number of other studies, and in particular to the results of terror management theory. But whereas terror management theory suggests that the defensive nature of such consensus under threat was ultimately as a means of protecting one against the fear of death, the various findings of terror management – and other studies – is we can only think about one thing at a time.

We propose that all of these findings can be economically explained from a thought-control perspective According to Wegner (1992), thought suppression begins with the search for distracting thoughts. The “distractor search brings a series of thoughts to mind until one is selected that absorbs attention,” at which point, “attention is drawn from the controlled distractor search to the absorbing distractor itself.” (991)

Since thoughts about oneself are easily available, they can act as useful “distractors” when faced with fearful conditions. The researchers suggest various neurological bases for this conclusion. But in the end, it means that one way to deal with anxiety is to distract yourself.
From a persuasion perspective, it might seem that fear will be an effective means of persuasion with coupled with consensus: First you introduce a disturbing matter then you offer up your product or service wrapped up in a consensus: Everyone loves X!
But the research is a bit more-tricky: If the affirmative is on a ground too closely related to the threat, it “fails to quell the threat because they [the affirmations] remind the participants of the threat.”
In their research, the authors of these studies argued that affirmations and consensus functioned the same way by distracting the one under anxiety. Thus, what applies to consensus would apply to affirmations.
But there is another possibility here: A product or service which resolves the threat (rather than merely distract from thinking about the threat) might be sufficient even if the threat and the consensus-approved product concern exactly the same thing.
In conflict, distraction is well known as a means of deflating a threat.
A final element of the article struck a theological note which the authors may not have considered:

PWe propose that threatened people may have turned to consensus in the present research for the same reason [diminish ruminations about threats]. Imagining widespread agreement with one’s own convictions may be self-soothing because self-righteousness is an appealing fantasy that can capture attention, make threats seem more remote, and allow them to fade from salience. (987)

Although the quoted language contains the clause “capture the attention”, the argument is not in distraction but in diffusion. The threat against me is not real, but I am righteous. But how could my righteousness have anything to do with the reality of a threat? The connection here is not apparent in the article.

In Romans 1, Paul makes a sustained argument from verse 18-31. It begins with the proposition that human beings know ourselves to be under judgment, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness.” In turn, human beings act to suppress subjective knowledge of that threat. The act of suppression then leads to a number of perversions and distortions of the human being in a whole catalogue of insanity and sin. The argument concludes with the observation that human beings not only do these unrighteous things, “they give hearty approval” to those who practice the same things.

Under the most profound existential threat, human beings respond with a forced consensus. However, the argument made in the quotation above, and by Paul, is not that the consensus acts to distract us; rather it acts to deny the fact of the threat. The more people who believe a thing, the more “objective” it in fact is. If all of us deny or believe some X then it is true. The threat is thus believed into non-existence.