Psychology is a peculiar science in that the function of cognition is there identical with the object of cognition, for the object of cognition is the psyche, and cognition is a part of the psyche. So one uses the same system to recognize the system.1
The revaluation of psychology is currently
taking place at the rough edges of its 100th anniversary as a 'science.'
I place the word 'science' in quotes because there is some debate as to
whether to classify psychology (the study of the psyche or mind and soul)
as a science or as an art.
This classification depends mostly upon its usage and application which,
interestingly, can be in both areas and thus allows psychology the privilege
of a bridging role. That psychology connects science(body) with art(mind)
is also strikingly a main factor in its current evolution, for this is
by no means a new idea and was known from the beginning. Although
its different branches are argued by different psychologists on more philosophical
rather than scientific grounds, psychology can nonetheless be considered
both a science and an art, for "art is really an extension of science,
not its opposite; science tries to store and correlate dead facts; art...(tries)
to store and correlate living facts."2
As the data of the latter part of this century
reveals the Occidental-minded, Cartesian split of mind and body as pitifully
confounding, psychology is gaining a new and sturdier foothold. This
is very much needed for its survival, because at the midpoint of its 20th
century incarnation it had lost its way and has been spiraling downward
since. The doom-path of psychology was caused by an attempt to force
it into a paradoxical situation with the mind/body split: it was
initially created to explain and resolve the prevalent idea of mind and
body separation but was then quickly divided into mind and
body roles established by empirical evidence of little pragmatical
value. There it festered and grew problems and illnesses that have
diseased our society. The best example of these is on the 'mind-only
side' and called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), which illustrates
perfectly the fractured mess that can occur when psychology losses contact
with its objective half. MPD is an outrageous belief that the psyche
can break up, via trauma, into several or many different and separate personalities
which can then take over the person's psyche at any time and assume control
of that person's actions. It is like taking the Cartesian split-half
of mind and splitting it again! This type of diagnosis stems from
trying to assign mental illness to a purely subjective realm that negates
objective reality. In other words, thought is separated from behavior
and the individual's responsibility for their own illness is denied.
Psychoanalysis is the sickness which its therapy purports to be the cure.3Tremendously compounding this terrible path that psychology has tread is the socioeconomic creation of an empirical psychological industry based on quick, symptomatic treatment of these newly-found problems and illnesses. When personal responsibility is denied, then the emphasis in treatment shifts dramatically to technique and "that technique in itself changes people, that anyone can change if only he finds the right method."4 The MPD and many other counterfeit psychological disorders grew directly out of this technique focus which, in turn, has been rich fodder for an industrial growth of 'treatments.' The resultant psych-industry juggernaut consciously perpetuates the idea that understanding can only follow technique--techniques are what it sells, and the more it sells the better off it is. Plus, in its greed to create even more techniques this industry has perfected its own skewed science of psychologizing, pathologizing, and generalizing modern life "for the purpose of victim-making, patient-making--user making."5 The normal problems of life are now seen as abnormal; people are 'victims'; and treatment is necessary.
Mainly within the existential realization that
one lives life and is not lived by it, psychology is coming back full-circle
to grips with the fact that subjective and objective realities are inseparable:
mind and body are one, or as Erich Fromm eloquently put it, "man
is both the artist and the object of his art; he is the sculptor and
the marble; the physician and the patient."7 The suffering
of the patient cannot be separated from his or her being.
Even though this simple sounding conclusion
was known since the life and times of Buddha (563-483 B.C.E.), it has certainly
been known from the beginning of psychology. The young science became
misguided and had to re-learn it. It was misguided by many demons,
including the 20th Century's age of anxiety, Cartesian momentum, rebellion
against Victorianism, poor religion (continual literal translation
of metaphorical ideas), the age of industry, and more. It re-learned
wholeness from an explosive consilience8 of knowledge within
and without its boundaries that includes huge contributions from humanistic/existential
psychology and the ever-increasing scopes of
neuroscience and biology. This current comparative knowledge
couldn't have been possible until now because, of course, the amount of
knowledge to compare in the means of psychology was previously inadequate.
However, we now have a phenomenal collection of ideas: such as the
thoughts of Otto Rank and most humanistic psychologists that the sick person
has a will to health and creativity is the answer, of Abraham Maslow and
Victor Frankl that the ideal cure for neurosis is to increase its meaning
and then search beyond the ego, of Quantum Physics and the thoughts of
Marie Louise von Franz on Synchronicity that not only are the mind and
body not separate but neither is the function of the universe, of Joseph
Campbell and Carl Jung that the increase of mythological/metaphorical meaning
decreases the need for psychotherapy and that psychology is the modern
translation of myth (which is the translation of our function in the universe),
of William Glasser and the Reality Therapy movement that personal responsibility
and sense of identity work hand-in-hand in the here-and-now, of the Gaia
Theory and of Gregory Bateson that the parts of a whole exist by means
of each other and that the mind is not a thing but a process, of the Santiago
theory of Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana that the process of the
mind is the same as the process of life (which has been specifically applied
in bio- and neurochemistry that the nervous and immune systems communicate
via peptides which are biochemical manifestations of emotions, e.g.. thinking
with one's gut is little different than with one's brain), and of many
more on the horizon.
Precisely in the beginning, it was William
James who created radical empiricism and stated in his preface to The
Meaning of Truth, "The generalized conclusion is that therefore the
parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are
themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe
needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but
possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure."
Relationships between things are as important as the things themselves;
in other words, the whole being cannot be cured with a quick fix.
The wonderful period of any vital thing is
that of its change. Psychology's current revaluation is an exciting
period brimming with a multifarious array of people and ideas too large
to go into full detail here. This essay is concerned with the fact
that psychology's childhood and adolescence have ended and that we must
demand a mature, comparative discipline of its behavior from now on.
To do this the whole of psychology must recognize that "to remove the symptom
without helping the person get at his underlying conflict is to rob him
of his best direction..."9 and that "...the causes of suffering
are the means of its release..."10 For example, psychotropic
medications work wonders for some acutely psychotic people and those with
moods wildly out of control who are in danger of harming themselves or
others, but beyond this they recklessly treat symptoms and not their
cause. Or, also, a misguided psychoanalyst can waste years of a client's
life in therapy treating superficial manifestations of a larger
reality. These two examples deal with the fine line between symptoms
and causes, and this is exactly where revaluated psychological science
must focus and work at the whole truth of the being: mind, body,
and all. The art of the science must be mastered.
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.
--Carl Jung
1. Carl G. Jung, Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra (New Jersey: Princeton University
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