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Life, Death, & Psychology
Group therapy in psychology.
In conversation with a psychology major at public university, I found out that students study numbers not narratives. Here’s what I mean. When I asked the student what their major focus of study in psychology was, she said, “We study data, polling, and how people feel.” I was a bit perplexed. I asked if they ever discussed the great questions of life that everyone asks, such as, “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “What is my purpose in life?” “What is the source of my knowledge?!” “What is the standard for ‘right’ and ‘wrong’?” She said she had not heard those questions in her psychology major. My eyes went wide in disbelief. These questions, along with others, are some of the most primary concerns for every human person. I asked one last question. “You said that in your classes your focus is on numbers, on data, on the assessment of quantitative analysis.” She shook her head up and down. “So, in psychology – the science of how humans think and behave – you don’t investigate qualitative, conversational research, or read the stories of human behavior, or consider the narratives of people’s lives, or ponder answers to basic concerns that everyone faces?” The look on the young student’s face said it all. She realized that what it meant to be human was being left out of her studies. She was considering scientific numbers without social narratives.
A Christian view of psychology begins with essential questions of reality, God, humanity, purpose, knowledge, and ethics. And it is my considered belief that the ultimate question, “What happens when I die?” drives the answers to all the other questions. The writer of Hebrews said it best. “It is appointed for a person to die once and after that comes judgment.” A Christian view of psychology begins with, “Where did I come from?” and ends with, “How should I prepare for death?”
For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, personally seeking truth in psychology or wherever it’s found. [First published at MarkEckel.com]
Published in Education
What struck me was different: that she was apparently unable to formulate an intelligent response to your question, and was confident that she had.
That sounds like philosophy, not psychology.
Commonly known as “nodding.”
Apart from discerning the means to manipulate the mind, for better or worse, I always thought psychology was about knowing what the mind is and how it works. With all due respect to Jordan Peterson, polling and testing people and categorizing and quantifying people’s conscious thinking seems like tying to treat the symptoms of a medical condition without knowing what the cause of the symptoms it is.
Martin Seligman does better. Jordan Peterson too.
Do you mean these two do something differently, or do what everyone else does, but better?
They talk about the meaning of life.
We have to be careful not to confuse pure science and applied science. Discovering practical means of manipulation is outside of the ends of psychology the science (in the sense of pure science), and is an end of the applied sciences like clinical psychology, psychiatry, and psychological warfare.
Science seeks the answers only to well-formed questions: those for which there is a well-formed proposition that can be recognized logically as the answer to the question, and which can at least in theory be known to be true (or probably or approximately true) through the scientific method. “What is the mind?” is not a well-formed question, so it cannot be one that psychology seeks to answer.
Academies don’t trust narratives while they unthinkingly peddle them.
They are drowning in data.
Well, so did Victor Frankel. But I wouldn’t recommend his so-called third school of Viennese psychotherapy.
I know nothing–almost.
I only know that some psychologists talk about the meaning of life. It’s not all about numbers.
I don’t know much about Peterson. And he’s . . . either epically subtle or rather slippery. Hard to figure out for a simple guy like me.
Seligman I understand to some extent. He’s a newfangled Aristotle, and I dig it.
William James is another psychology guy who talks about the meaning of life.
I wasn’t speaking with your interrogatory predilections. If you had asked me, I would have suggested the first question is: Is there such a thing as the human mind? But you seem to have ignored that step. And I think you are in error in implying that psychology even has an aspect of hard or empirical science in the first place; and also that it doesn’t exclusively hinge on the human mind (though “veterinary psychology” might not), and the first area of endeavor should be to determine if there is such a thing as the human mind, and then localize and define it, if there turns out to be such a thing.
Psychology assumes the answer to this.
I barely know Peterson. But everything he says is backed up by what (he says) the statistics show. Percentages of psychological attributes, categorized statistically. His “always tell the truth because it will eventually prove to result in the best possible outcome” and “every time you lie, it leads to some sort of disaster of some sort or another” is pure speculation, that he MAY say is based on a lifetime of anecdotal clinical interviews and counselling.
Though, he’s right, but never from a statistical vantage.
But anyway, psychologically speaking, the definition of mental ill-health (disease or disorder) is purely functional. It is defined by having a problem that severely affects you life and ability to properly function. If you don’t have a problem with something, then you don’t have a psychological problem.
Well, it is right, and there is abundant empirical evidence. Are we not in agreement on that?
Yes, it’s functional.
You need a better concept of proper function. Socrates and Seligman are on the job. This is also the whole point of Plato’s Republic. The soul itself has a function. Function is more than just something we do in our lives.
I think that we are not in agreement on what psychology is de facto. We don’t agree that psychology is rightly a statistical analysis of human behavior, and that the fundamental questions of psychology investigate what the human mind is, or approach the meaning of life.
I think psychology, at its highest, seeks to understand the human mind so that others can assist people to have better functioning thinking (including emotional thinking). But I doubt that this can ever be arrived at by questionnaires and statistical analysis OR by esoteric theory.
In other words, I suppose, statistical modelling of the human mind does not reveal the human mind.
I don’t think it’s inherently statistical. I think those fundamental questions sound ok to me. Isn’t that what Jordan Peterson and Martin Seligman and William James talk about?
(Maybe not James in his Principles of Psychology. It’s been too long. I forget!)
Sounds ok to me. What are we disagreeing on exactly?
I don’t know anymore. If I used emojis I’d show a delightedly surprised face. :)
But not when they are doing psychology.
It’s like saying that some capacitors have resistance. It’s true that all the objects that we label “capacitors” have resistance. But to the extent that they do, we err by calling them “capacitors.” We call a component on a circuit board a capacitor, and not, more accurately, a “capacitor/resistor/inductor/antenna”, because the opportunity cost of using the less accurate term is lower than that of using the more accurate one. “It’s Economics 101”, as they say.
Similarly, we call someone a “psychologist” instead of, more accurately, a “psychologist/philosopher of meaning/Eagles fan/uncle/car driver” because the opportunity cost of using the less accurate term is lower than that using the more accurate one. Economics 101.
I don’t follow.
Is Martin Seligman not doing psychology? What is he doing exactly?
Seems that the student had more to teach her interlocutor about psychology than vice versa. It’s no wonder that some young folk have so little regard for Boomers.
Psychology is terrified of not being taken seriously as a science. Numbers, biological factors, or maybe even a behaviorism stripped of the question of motive or ideation all seem sciency so it leans in that direction. I recall a friend many years ago who dropped his psychology major because his first class in The Psychology of Perception was a semester on the anatomy and physiology of the pigeon eyeball.
The big questions about human nature or the phenomenon of thought cannot be cleanly detached from icky, unacceptable elements of philosophy, literature, myth or even theology so they are excluded.
I strongly suspect clinical psychology cannot be reduced to method. The personality, character, and intuitive skills of the practitioner matter. I recall reading about the unusually brilliant work of Milton Erikson and think it unlikely that much of that could be replicated or reduced to method even by an institute with his name on it.
Worse, given the state of our universities, clinical psychologists may see themselves as the front line of a woke ideological apostolate rather than reverent healers of human beings.
From this discussion, and more specifically from the responses to your comments, one might conclude that there are many people running around who haven’t the faintest idea of what science is — assuming, provisionally, that psychology is a science. On the other hand, maybe the takeaway here is that it is not a science but rather a scientistic lesser cousin of philosophy.
Theology.
If these Seligman and other psychologists like him are not doing psychology, just what is psychology?
They’re philosophizing.
I actually looked that up this morning. Per wikipedia:
Psychology is the study of mind and behavior.[1] Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
Philosophy is not specifically included.
Not by name, but it’s included. All of that is stuff in philosophy.
This is a Venn diagram situation.
I didn’t say that Seligman is not sometimes doing psychology.
I said that when he talks about the meaning of life, he is not doing psychology. When he talks about the science of mental phenomena like sensations, emotions, thought processes, and behavior, he is doing psychology.
So psychology is a small part of what this particular psychologist does, but the biggest part is actually theology and not psychology?
Why is that?
Why can’t psychology overlap somewhat with philosophy and/or theology?
Why not define psychology as the sort of thing psychologists do, which in this case includes talking about the meaning of life?
Philosophers don’t have exclusive say over every other theoretical discipline. And I think the Venn overlap is rather small.
By the way, I took out this bit at the end. I left out the ancillary documentation on botano-psychology such as knowing “the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.”
It’s psychology, philosophy, and humor. Where does this fall on the Venn?
No, but we did invent most of them.
(We didn’t invent math, religion, geography, or history, I guess. I think we invented all the others.)
In the middle.
Did anybody bring props?