rwl@uvacs.UUCP (Ray Lubinsky) (03/22/86)
Mathew Weiner (brahms!weemba) last posted: > >> >Clinical and Applied Psychology. > >> > >> I wish this were more of a "taboo" than it is. Studies show that as many > >> people are hurt as are helped by therapy. > > > >I don't what study you're talking about, but I have heard that most (70% or > >more) of people who have attended therapy/councilling found it beneficial. : > To be fair, I agree that clinical psychology in general does more good than > harm like medicine in general, but psychology suffers from having one all too > convenient and sometimes dangerous diagnosis: it's the patient's own fault, etc. > > But to be counter fair, I think the original complaint is against Freudianism, > Jungianism, etc, which are really big time pseudoscience, charging $50/hour > for so much "expert" happy talk. Aren't you contradicting yourself here in saying that therapy does more good than harm? Or just refering to a different study? Look, I realize that most people's impression (let alone their extent of awareness) about psychology is limited to the stereotype of the bearded Freudian with a German accent. That's not what it's all about. They are a minority in the field and even then they have their place. But then, I wasn't talking about major mental disorders. I'm talking about people like you and me who are troubled or dissatisfied with their lives. The ``convenient'' diagnosis is not that the patient's problems are his fault; the correct starting point is that they are his responsibility. No one else can take on the burden of your problems -- they are yours and you have choices about how to deal with them. This is a scary point in therapy and it's a point that some people never come to on their own. Maybe this is the ``dangerous'' part to which you refer. The very idea that you can't hang the blame on somebody or some- thing else is very uncomfortable. Many people waste lots of energy trying to prove that it isn't so. Therapy is not ``happy talk''. It's hard work. But it's well worth it. I'll grant you that theoretical psychology has a long way to go to reach the rigorousness of the hard sciences, but it's come a long way in a hun- dred years. I used to study physics and am now a computer systems en- gineer; I know how easy it is to poo-poo psychology. ``Pseudoscience'' is an understandable tag to attach to it, especially from a mathematician. But wasn't non-Euclidian geometry just so much nonsense at one point? Or special relativity? These fields became well-established not because they necessarily appealed to the intuition, but because their usefulness as paradigms became unavoid- able. Of course, reality didn't change -- just the way we looked at it. Probably these paradigms can be improved upon, but they'll do for now. Psychology is like that too. -- Ray Lubinsky University of Virginia, Dept. of Computer Science UUCP: ...!cbosgd!uvacs!rwl or ...!decvax!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!rwl