WRONG TRINITY

Why psychology has got it wrong: Psychoanalysis was one of the "backbone" sciences of the 20th century, yet depression and behavioural problems are rife today. In the first of two articles, our correspondent explains why psychology has failed (Peter Watson, 5/14/03, Times of London)

THE 20TH CENTURY BEGAN with an incredible coincidence. In 1900 three ideas were born almost simultaneously. First, the unconscious was revealed by Freud in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. Then came the gene, when scientists rediscovered and amplified the work on plant breeding by the Benedictine monk Gregor Mendel. Thirdly, there was Max Planck?s theory of the quantum: that energy exists in tiny packets called quanta. These three ideas ? psychoanalysis, genetics and quantum physics ? can reasonably be called the scientific backbone of the 20th century.

Their growth and development, however,could not have been more different. Scientific breakthroughs in genetics and physics have occurred regularly over the past 100 years, often demonstrating surprising links between the two. Psychology, by contrast, is sinking in a morass of jargon, flawed research and scientific disagreements ? and is clearly failing the people that it is supposed to help.

Just this week, scientists at Bristol University overturned another accepted psychological ?fact?. After studying 14,000 families, they found that children whose mothers go out to work suffer no psychological damage.

Yet it is also true that British children are suffering from an unprecedented epidemic of behavioural problems. Between 1997 and 2001 the number of prescriptions for Ritalin, given to children to help them calm down and concentrate on schoolwork, soared from 921,000 to 2,085,000. In 2001 the number of children expelled from school for bad behaviour was more than 9,000, an increase of 11 per cent on the previous year. Among adults, the average 25-year-old is up to five times more likely to be depressed as 50 years ago. Adults are 28 times more likely to have been victims of violent crime as in 1953.

What is going on? On the psychological side, life seems to be going from bad to worse, when it ought to be getting better. For the past 100 years, we are supposed to have been living in ?the psychological century?. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists did not exist before Freud, yet by the 1970s there were 200 therapies on offer, ranging from Synanon to Insight to Rolfing. At certain points in the 20th century there were more psychology graduates than any other kind. The psychological jargon that has entered the language stretches from paranoia to penis envy, and from id to identity crisis to inferiority complex. So why, amid all this new professional apparatus, are behavioural problems more widespread, depression more common and psychotherapeutic drugs taken in unprecedented quantities? Could it be that psychology is failing? I think so. In fact, I think it has failed big-time. Furthermore, it has failed not just in the sense that more people are ill or unhappy, it has failed technologically, philosophically and is already in an advanced stage of decomposition.

Freud has taken a bashing recently, especially over the efficacy (or otherwise) of his method of treatment, so I?m not going to harp on about that (although I think the criticisms are fair). Instead, an historical approach is more original and more revealing.

The problem with Mr. Watson's comparison is that Freudianism resembles not genetics and quantum physics, which are sciences, but Darwinism and Marxism, which are likewise religions, which is why the latter comparison has stood the test of time. The similarities of the latter trio include: revelation; a single prophet to whom the "truth" was revealed (note that all three (like any cult of personality) are named for their prophets, whereas genetics is not Mendelism nor quantum physics Planckism); a lack of the fundamental features that define a science--susceptibility to experimentation and falsifiability and the like; descent into bitter sectarian infighting representing a competition for the mantle of the prophet; etc.; continuing on into a failure when applied in the real world, as opposed to the closed world of the theory.

MORE:
Here's an interesting and somewhat related story about how the university was turned into a secular seminary:
Who Paid for Secularization?: The agenda?and money?behind a social shift. (Christian Smith, May/June 2003, Books & Culture)

"The central claim of this book," writes Christian Smith in the preface to The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Life, just published by the University of California Press, "is that the historical secularization of the institutions of American public life was not a natural, inevitable, and abstract by-product of modernization; rather it was the outcome of a struggle between contending groups with conflicting interests seeking to control social knowledge and institutions." Edited by Smith, with essays by a number of scholars, the book offers a bracingly revisionist account of secularization that is sure to generate debate. To whet your appetite, here is an excerpt from Smith's introduction.:

Revolutions and social movements are not simply the result of interested and aggrieved activists capitalizing on new political opportunities. To mobilize and prevail, activists also need access to material resources sufficient to sustain their cause. In some cases, the difference between successful and failed revolutions and movements can be traced largely to increasing and decreasing supplies of resources. The secular revolution succeeded in part because new sources of material resources outside of the control of Protestant authorities became available for secular activists to deploy in the cause of secularization. This story is long and complex, and varies in different spheres of public life. Given space limitations, I focus here on the core economic transformation that shaped activists' secularizing of American higher education and science: the boom and incorporation of industrial capitalism. [...]

Perhaps the most obvious and crucial influence that expanding corporate capitalism exerted on American higher education was its financial patronage of secular research universities, which effectively marginalized religion. Most of America's Christian colleges depended financially on the support of local towns, affiliated denominations, and student tuition. The education they managed to produce with these limited funds was impressive, all in all. But corporate capitalism's centralization of the production and ownership of wealth at the end of the 19th century created vast new pools of financial assets, some of which many industrial philanthropists chose to devote to the cause of reforming higher education.

As it turns out, the most important American research universities that self-consciously pioneered functionally secular education and scholarship were either created ex nihilo or were significantly endowed by affluent capitalist benefactors: Johns Hopkins University by Johns Hopkins, Cornell University by Ezra Cornell, the University of Chicago by John D. Rockefeller, Stanford University by Leland Stanford, Clark University by Jonas Gilman Clark, and so on. Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, James Duke, and many other wealthy industrialists also had a hand in endowing what became major research universities. Industrial money also flowed into secular universities through Rockefeller's General Education Board, founded in 1902 with assets of $46 million; through the Carnegie Corporation with assets of $151 million in 1911; and through the Commonwealth Fund established by Mrs. Stephen V. Harkness in 1918 through a $43 million endowment.

This massive supply of new financial resources for universities came with few mandates seeking to preserve substantial religious interests in higher education. Rather, the concern of these capitalist patrons was to rationalize American higher education through uniform national standards and to promote advanced scientific research modeled on the German university system. This they viewed as serving the interests of the nation and its economy. In effect, the hundreds of millions of dollars that capitalist moguls pumped into their new research universities created the financial basis for autonomy from religious bodies. They also decisively institutionalized a new model of specialized, secular scholarship and learning, which quickly became the national ideal standard for higher education and scholarship.

In some cases, big corporate money actually came with explicitly anti-religious mandates. In 1905, for example, Andrew Carnegie gave $10 million to establish a professors' pension fund. Carnegie put Henry Smith Pritchett in charge of the project, the secularized son of a Methodist preacher, of whom it was said that "[h]is 'faith' was science." Pritchett's rules governing access to funds stated that all denominational colleges and universities were categorically excluded from the plan; only schools with no formal ties to religious denominations could participate. Pritchett argued that denominational influences on colleges made for unsound education, encouraged the existence of too many small schools, were institutionally inefficient, and compromised the public good. In response, 15 colleges immediately severed their ties with their religious denominations in order to get a share of the Carnegie money?including Wesleyan, Dickinson, Swarthmore, Brown, Bowdoin, Rutgers, Rochester, and Occidental.

All of this reflected in part the fact that corporate capitalist interests required a different kind of graduate than those earlier Christian colleges had been educating. In the previous economic era, American colleges specialized in training and graduating gentlemen broadly educated in the classics and intellectually socialized into a coherent Protestant moral universe. They would go into the traditional professions to become leaders and sustainers of the prevailing social order. But corporate capitalism did not need classically educated gentlemen. It needed technically and professionally trained employees in management, finance, law, advertising, engineering, and other material sciences.

Similarly, corporate capitalism needed scholars in higher education whose research agendas differed from those dominating earlier Christian colleges. Traditional faculty scholarship in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin languages, moral philosophy, theology, literature, science as inductive Baconian specimen-gathering, and the like contributed little to the industrial corporation's production of material wealth and accumulation of capital. Rather, corporate capitalist interests were better served by technical knowledge generated by basic and applied scientific research producing scholarship useful for boosting material production and economic growth. Not geology focused on harmonizing with the Genesis creation account, but geology intent on
locating and excavating minerals and petroleum was what corporate capitalism, by systemic logic, was interested in?regardless of the particular religious beliefs of any individual capitalist magnate. Capitalism thus undercut the justification for the scholarly task of a college system that privileged religious knowledge in its education, bolstering instead a rationale for a kind of technical, instrumental scholarship that was at the very least indifferent to religious concerns and interests. The moral order of Christian higher education simply did not much aid the interests of an expanding corporate capitalist system, and the material rewards for academic achievement shifted to a different version of success in higher education.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 20, 2003 8:25 AM