[MD] Modern Psychology: Good, Bad, or Indifferent to MoQ

[david buchanan]

Carl said:

...There seems to be TWO branches of psychology operating at this time.  There is Counseling Psychology, which is what I'm learning, and Research Psychology, which is what someone would be getting with an M.S. (I'm getting an M. ed.)  The one I'm in studies different theories of counseling, the  other is watching rats in a maze. (To put it crudely.)  ..The other problem, in my opinion, is that the insurance companies and big pharma are driving the research.    ...As for psychiatry, I had the opportunity to talk with a recent graduate from medical school.  She was a psychiatrist.  I asked her how much training she had received in therapeutic techniques.  She replied, "None." She had been trained in psychopharmacology and symptom management.  To me, that's just sad.

I wonder what William James would have said about that.  Keep in mind that he made his living as a psychologist, and did philosophy on the side.



dmb says:
There are many branches of psychology. I couldn't say how many branches, but the number is certainly more than two. The discipline has never been unified. James worked with Wundt, hit it off big with Jung and met Freud too but James didn't much care for him. These are four of the most famous names in psychology, from the period when modern psychology was being born, and deep divisions were already apparent. Behaviorists and Jungians are from different planets, you know, and there is a whole range of options between them. James joked that the first psychology lecture he ever gave was also the first psychology lecture he'd ever heard. If James failed to get a proper degree in philosophy, it's only because professional philosophy hadn't quite been invented yet. He had a medical degree from Harvard, but never practiced medicine. This is what led him to psychology, which in turn raised many philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of consciousness.

He hated the kind of bio-chemical reductionism you're complaining about. He called it "medical materialism" and saw it as a means of dismissing everything that's difficult and interesting about psychology. James was plagued with problems like anxiety and depression and so was his father. James was definitely thinking about this stuff from a first-person point of view and as a scientist. Like Pirsig, James's interest in philosophy grew out of practical problems that he encountered in the course of doing non-philosophical work. Philosophy wasn't a hobby on the side for James. It was the culmination of a lifetime of learning, much of which was produced in an explosion of creativity during the last five years of his life (1905-1910).