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Tuesday, August 10, 2004
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A DECENT RESPECT FOR EMPIRICISM…
…would certainly be the beginning of any university education, yes? In fact, UD, with help from Timothy Burke’s [see Easily Distracted on UD's links] well-designed ideas about a new college, would argue that a real university or college needs to educate students toward two broad accomplishments: 1. A knowledge of the major documents and events of Western culture. 2. A decent respect for empiricism. To know your world, and to know how to evaluate truth claims, would be an excellent foundation for any education that calls itself “higher,” for any institution that calls itself a college or a university. Yet how do we work our way back to these essentials from the quackery of the contemporary college curriculum? Burke’s ideas are great, but he doesn’t discuss how he’d go about tossing established trash -- he sidesteps the problem by imagining a brand new college. UD, for her part, thinks we should pound the crap out of what’s already there and make it go away. She proposes we begin, not with Creative Writing (see UD, 12/30/03), but with the far fouler Psychology. Lately, a few sensible psychologists and psychoanalysts have tentatively suggested restricting therapy, and psychology curricula, to empirically tested theories and treatments. The head of the American Psychological Association -- whose degree is in education, whose 35-page cv appears on his Oprah-style website, who has a faculty appointment at an undistinguished university, and who looks forward to the day when we will all have to make “appointments for annual psychological checkups“ -- has called this idea “insane.” The idea is certainly insane from the point of view of business (this man’s other degree is an MBA). But from the point of view of (as the article in today’s New York Times Science Times section puts it) “credibility,” of “re-establishing the field’s respectability and repairing its image among insurers as a money-sink,” a drop of respect for empirical method might be a mark of lucidity among psychologists, rather than a sign of dementia. Tens of millions of people in this country are in therapy, and we know that “therapy” means jackshit. Therapy is anything. All things. As the piece in the NYT makes clear, therapists are people who receive payment for being, in a wild variety of ways, compassionate and intuitive and long-suffering with you, just like the friend or relative or religious advisor who does this stuff for free and who you’re supposed to have in your life but for some reason don’t. Or maybe you do have such people in your life, but you don’t listen to them because they don’t hold certain degrees and you think holding those degrees means something. Or you think you have to pay money to get anywhere with yourself. Or you enjoy having someone pay a lot of attention to you on a regular basis. “Psychology,” as talking treatment, as practice and subject matter, has made little effort to make itself anything other than a welter of empathetic activities. Indeed it tends to be proudly anti-empirical. Psychologists don’t mind admitting that, as one of them says in the Times piece, “we have very little knowledge.“ Most psychologists don’t give a shit about reproducibility or results or anything like that. Yet we have given them, for fifty years or so, the run of the place. It’s only recently that insurance companies and scientists and others have said You are empirically ungrounded and you are costing us a lot of money. If people want to keep hanging out with you, they can do it on their own dime. If universities want to teach psychology, they can come up with an actual recognizable field of study. At the APA’s last convention, when a more diplomatic version of the above was offered, the collective therapists became “raucous.” “The split in the field is bigger than it ever has been,” comments an observer. “The intensity of the acrimony, the distaste, has never been so high.” One of the intuitivists puts their position this way: “The move to worship at the altar of these scientific treatments has been destructive to patients…” Empirical method is religious fanaticism. Psychologists have begun defending their turf against empiricists and insurance companies with a fanaticism of their own. Here’s the last paragraph of a recent communication to the troops from the head of the APA [UD‘s responses to this remarkable paragraph are in parentheses]: "Less than 5% of the population have doctoral degrees. Hence, we are the educated elite of our time. [This is the sort of self-puffery you come out with when your profession is shrinking.] Our chosen field, psychology, is applicable to every aspect of human life. [Since psychology is everything, in other words, the business opportunities for the psychologist are vast.] As former APA President Patrick DeLeon has said, if we take care of society’s most pressing needs, society will take care of us. [Venal enough for you?]" Self-respecting universities who would like to get serious should, UD thinks, start with their psychology curriculum. |