APA has issued its first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys. They draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage[.]More and more I think that psychology/psychiatry is chiefly just bad philosophy -- but dressed up as medicine, so people act as if it were a technologically secure basis for decision-making. Freud did more damage to our society perhaps even than Marx, though we rarely talk about how badly he's damaged us by convincing us that people are largely unconscious machines in need of programming and shaping rather than convincing and persuading. That convinced our governing elites that the people were a dangerous mob in need of systems of control, and our fellow citizens that the half who disagreed with them were monsters persuaded only by the Id.
You can't unring a bell, and bad philosophy can poison a culture as thoroughly as Romans salting the earth of Carthage.
19 comments:
I know common wisdom is never read the comments, make an exception!
In the logger vernacular, "they got ripped a new asshole!"
Too funny!
Like sociology and economics, psychology is NOT a "science." Whatever thesis one develops can be disproven; or it cannot be falsified. NOT science.
Psychiatry is the practice of magic incantations, rather than discussion of sin (original and actual.) Man's desperate efforts to run away from one's own conscience, monetized!!
One of the original ideas of second wave feminism - at least as I understood it - was that traditional sex roles for both women and men were constricting; both sexes would be better off if they had a wider range of options with regard to emotions, interests, careers, family roles. It's beyond sad to see that an organization like the APA is back to enforcing sex roles, just not the ones that were in vogue 60 years ago.
I did get a good laugh, though, from this:
researchers ... found that the more men conformed to masculine norms, the more likely they were to consider as normal risky health behaviors such as heavy drinking, using tobacco and avoiding vegetables, and to engage in these risky behaviors themselves
Avoiding vegetables! Oh, the horror!
I guess I avoid risk; I eat my vegetables. I just wait until food has eaten the vegetables first.
Eric Hines
...both sexes would be better off if they had a wider range of options with regard to emotions, interests, careers, family roles.
I'm curious how you feel about that at this point, at which 'both sexes should have a wider range of options' has come to mean 'including the right to be treated as if they were the other sex, and to punish at law anyone who dissents.'
Wide ranges of options we certainly have these days! Although it appears that the 'traditional' one is being foreclosed, at least in that part of polite society in which having a therapist is considered de rigueur.
(A woman I grew up with is now in the yoga business full time, except when she is fronting spiritualist practices such as being a medium so you can talk to the dead; she frames all of this, from the exercise to the spiritualism, in terms of 'healing.' Everyone needs 'healing' from 'trauma.' Most of her clients seem to go from the yoga studio to the pedicure lounge, but they're all traumatized and in need of a constant process of healing.)
I'm curious how you feel about that at this point, at which 'both sexes should have a wider range of options' has come to mean 'including the right to be treated as if they were the other sex, and to punish at law anyone who dissents.'
I think there are only 2 sexes and you are what you are - genetically and in terms of primary and secondary sex characteristics. I don't think people have the right to be treated as if they were the other sex. I don't think people who believe they are the sex other than the one they are biologically should be able to punish people who think that biology rules.
That said, I think that if someone who is an adult truly believes he or she is in the wrong sex body then that someone should be able to take hormones and have surgery to obtain a body of the other sex. I have a fair number of caveats with regard to that statement and am happy to provide them but that's a little off-topic right now.
To me, a wider range of options simply means that people are treated as individuals; if a man wants to be a manicurist or a woman wants to be a roughneck then, provided each of them is competent, more power to them. A wider range of options means description such as "most men are more ambitious than most women" or "most women are more nurturing than most men" doesn't become prescription: men should work, women should raise kids.
it appears that the 'traditional' one is being foreclosed
Yes, that's part of what I was getting at when I said the APA was back to enforcing sex roles. They know how men (and women) should be which is no different from the "men should be manly, women should be womanly" approach: the "should" changes but the tut-tutting remains.
(I'm not sure I'm getting your connection between this topic and your yoga medium. I can think of some connections but those would be mine, not yours.)
The yoga thing was an aside, which is why I enclosed it in parenthesis. It was a sort of enlarging on what kind of people I'm thinking of when I speak of the class for whom having a therapist is part of the expected social etiquette.
We agree on the disagreeableness of the 'tut-tutting.' I am not sure if we agree on the trans* issue, about which I've written occasionally; but I am sure that no one can have a right to tell me what I'm allowed to think or to say. Anyone who insists on such a 'right' is making an enemy of me, which maybe they didn't need to do. In any case they might have avoided adding me to the list of people they had to fight.
As for the traditional roles, I'm more inclined to accept that 'traditional femininity' was unreasonably restrictive than that 'traditional masculinity' was. Maybe that's not fair; maybe they were equally so. I see the virtues of the tradition, though, when it comes to the kind of men it made. I don't think we're benefiting as a society from having shifted our role models from the sort of characters John Wayne played to the sort that Johnny Depp does. (Mutatis mutandis for most other actors working today, with honorable exceptions for Jason Momoa, who has had a couple of decent roles including Conan; and without regard to what the actors are like in reality.)
Psychiatry is something quite different from psychology at this point. Psychiatrists are MD's and mostly prescribe medicine, give referrals for specific short-term therapies such as behavior programs, anxiety management, DBT, and CBT for depression or conflict, or trying to convince you to go to substance rehab. Not a lot of philosophy in the mix at this point. Practicing psychologists who see seriously ill people are going down that same road.
There are some psychiatrists who are still influenced by psychoanalytic theory and its descendants and do this crap, and even more psychologists. But it's hard to get reimbursement for that unless you can attach yourself to academia these days.
The national organisations of many fields, not just the social sciences, are staffed by people who decided that advocacy was going to be much more fun and pay much better than doing the work they were trained for.
AVI:
I assume there must be some part of the field that is doing something you felt was worthwhile, because you don't seem the kind of person to devote your professional life to something you didn't think to be. That said, I encounter what you might be more comfortable calling 'the old psychiatry' chiefly in its lingering effect on our assumptions about human beings. If humans are mostly unconscious, more like programmed robots than like rational actors, then it is more important to program them than to talk with them.
We saw that mode explicitly in the "Nudge" movement that the Obama administration endorsed, but it's really at the back of major political programs these days. There's a kind of repetitive conditioning in the resort to 'racism/sexism/transphobia/Islamophobia/homophobia' charges: rather than engage the argument, just describe it as "Yuck!" and hope people become averse to encountering it. Use shame to convince people to avoid conclusions (or even questions), as if you were trying to train a dog or a baby about where not to defecate.
Perhaps the medicines help; at least perhaps they ameliorate. It's possible to get some kind of data on that. The theories, though, they're a sort of philosophy: philosophy of mind, coupled with a kind of phenomenology. Pragmatically these are philosophies whose effects are demonstrably bad compared to earlier theories; and thus, at least from the point of view of pragmatism, those psychological-philosophical theories are false.
It was a sort of enlarging on what kind of people I'm thinking of when I speak of the class for whom having a therapist is part of the expected social etiquette.
Ah, gotcha. My thinking tied it to the change in traditional roles and the possible unanchored sensation that can produce.
As for the traditional roles, I'm more inclined to accept that 'traditional femininity' was unreasonably restrictive than that 'traditional masculinity' was.
That is my perception as well; much of second wave feminism was about opening opportunities for women outside of hearth and home. That doesn't mean traditional masculinity wasn't restrictive just that it wasn't as restrictive as traditional femininity. Or perhaps the key is the word "unreasonably".
I don't think there was/is anything wrong with the kind of men the "virtues of the tradition" made. Certainly I'd rather be married to a John Wayne character than to a Johnny Depp one. This is an area I don't really have sorted out. Society needs to provide role models so how do we provide them without insisting everyone fit into the same mold? There seems to be a tendency to insist on behaviors rather than holding them up as exemplars but allowing for variance. Perhaps it's not possible to be truly flexible and still hold society together. I don't know.
I don't recall your writing on the trans issue. I'll see if I can find it.
I am sure that no one can have a right to tell me what I'm allowed to think or to say.
Yup. No one gets to tell me that I have to use they/them/their when referring to an individual. Which sounds flippant but really isn't.
Okay, so in a comment to this post:
http://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2018/11/legally-barred.html
you said:
As I've written before, I find transgender claims philosophically interesting because they stand as a challenge to physicalism.
I can't find the "written before" post but it sounds interesting. Any idea where it is?
One of the articles was here:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2014/10/sense-and-nonsense.html
Also:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2017/05/transiting-sex-and-race.html
More tangentially, but still quite relevant:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-philosophical-structure-of-new.html
Also tangential, but relevant:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2018/01/blaming-invisible-men.html
Thanks, Grim. I'll take a look as soon as I figure out door sizes and casing widths.
I eat my vegetables. I just wait until food has eaten the vegetables first.
That's reportedly the Al Michaels approach as well. Since he's 74 and still going strong, it seems to work.
Grim, that couple of sentences on Freud are great.
I ribbed my son that he must be a really manly man, as he eats no green vegetables at all. I think it's to so with his tastebuds and chloraphyll, or something.
Personally I love vegetables, but I'd never claim they're "healthier" than other kinds of food such as grains or meat. I pretty much tune out any claims about food category healthiness these days. I have no idea what people imagine they're talking about.
Re Elise's comments on second-wave feminism: My mild request is that a true statement like "more men than women are in the 1% statistical tail for extraordinary STEM ability" does not morph into "no woman should do STEM work even if she happens to be good at it." It's not only an unreasonably restrictive approach but an annoyingly dumb one. It's easy to find out who's good at most things. There's rarely any need to check the plumbing first. By the same token, I think the hoopla over gender dysphoria is mostly if not entirely balderdash: your plumbing is what it is. On the other hand, if people want to have surgery done on themselves, I don't consider it my business unless I'm asked to pay for it. There are a lot of things people conclude they must do in order to be happy, most of which I don't consider myself to be involved in at all. I decline to pick up the bill, and I need neither approve nor disapprove.
Since he's 74 and still going strong, it seems to work.
There's another side to that, too, that's not easily measurable, but it's a risk I'm willing to run (and apparently, so is Michaels). It's akin to the health claim about paleo diets--healthy because that's what our pre-civilization ancestors ate. Did our ancestors actually find that diet healthy, or did they survive despite it? Do Michaels and I?
And regarding "74 and still going strong:" that's only middle-aged for me, so the test is far from complete (I don't know Michaels' ancestry). My parents died at 96 and 103. And, channeling Lamarck (or some such), my wife's father died at 103, also. Her mother is the one who died early--at 86.
Eric Hines
I figure anything more than my three score and ten is gravy. A scarier thought these days than it was earlier in my life.
I read through your trans posts, Grim. Interesting - thanks.
More and more I think that psychology/psychiatry is chiefly just bad philosophy -- but dressed up as medicine, so people act as if it were a technologically secure basis for decision-making.
Not so easy to apply that standard to the rest of scientific orthodoxy such as moon landing and heliocentric theories.
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