Quote of the Day

“How Did Obama Get Elected? You know these people who call 911 when McDonald’s runs out of chicken McNuggets? Well, there are a lot of them.” — Rush Limbaugh

Psychology vs. Nouthetic Counseling: A Tale of Two Classes

After recently listening to to an Intro to Psych Class from MIT I then decided to cross the aisle and check out a class in Pastoral Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary. Here’s a brief comparative analysis of the two classes.

First, a brief description of the classes:

From MIT: This course surveys questions about human behavior and mental life ranging from how you see to why you fall in love. The great controversies: nature and nurture, free will, consciousness, human differences, self and society. Students are exposed to the range of theoretical perspectives including biological, evolutionary, cognitive, and psychoanalytic.

From RTS:An overview of current trends in counseling theory and practice and the role of counseling in public, private and church settings. Basic counseling skills taught in this course include interview, assessment, and listening. Application is made to premarital, family crisis, grief, and substance abuse counseling, with emphasis on developing strategies and applying scriptural principles.

The teachers:
The MIT Professor is Dr. Jeremy Wolfe. He is Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. In addition, he is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT where he teaches Introduction to Psychology, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University. He received his AB in 1977 from Princeton and his Ph.D. in Psychology from MIT in 1981

The RTS Professor is Dr. Andrew J. Peterson, a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania where he worked for six years as a mental health practitioner, he also served as a professor of psychology for counseling and teacher training courses for Grove City College, and professor of pastoral counseling at a seminary in Escondido, California. He is currently the campus president of the Charlotte campus of Reformed Theological Seminary.

Out of the gate, the striking contrast between the two classes is that while both have as their goal the exploration of the various fields of psychological study, the MIT professor (hereafter “Dr. Wolfe”) merely presents the data on each with only a tinge of his own personal feelings about them. The RTS professor (hereafter “Dr. Peterson”) opens up with a very pointed statement that psychology as a study is antithetical to “biblical counseling” and that the only point in studying these disciplines is to be aware of what’s out there in the world and to see the “glimmers of truth” that some might hold. Regardless of Dr. Peterson’s constant attestations that he is giving a “fair” presentation of psychology, he makes no secret of the fact that he finds it in opposition to a “biblical” approach.

The MIT class begins with the science behind psychology including the basic study of the brain and its parts, how we perceive things, memory functions, visual stimulation, etc. There is no real contrast in any of the material given at RTS, since the anatomy and the function of the brain is never discussed at all. In-depth information about conditioning, reinforcement schedules, Pavlov, et. al. receive the same deafening silence from Dr. Peterson.

The next striking contrast in the two classes is the source material used. The MIT class consists of many, many peer reviewed studies and reams of outside material from recent scientific journals showing various psychological studies done — often by people that the professor knows personally. The RTS class generally sticks with one or two textbooks supplemented by anecdotal evidence from the Dr. Peterson’s own experience and the occasional news article that references a study done but very little technical information about the study itself. In the scholarship wars, the MIT class wins hands down.

Dr. Peterson repeats in just about every session that psychology is based on four tenets: “evolution, nihilism, relativism, and atheism.” At least the first one is evidenced in the MIT class as evolutionary psychology plays a large roll in interpreting the “why” of experiment results. For example it is suggested that we throw up when we see others throw up because our primitive ancestors learned that if another animal threw up after eating the wildebeest I’d better throw up too to save myself from being poisoned. Although Dr. Wolfe does say at one point that this could be explained by either “evolution or the hand of God whichever you prefer.”

Dr. Peterson makes much of discrediting Freud even spending some time sharing the fact that he kept “statues of Egyptian gods on his desk” although not exactly sharing the relevance of this fact to Freud’s theories. It would seem that he could have saved his time for Dr. Wolfe declares about Freud that there are only “two things you need to know about him. 1. He’s dead 2. He’s wrong.” It would seem that the nouthetic obsession with combating Freudian thought is a battle that has already been won to a large extent. The playing field has shifted whilst nobody was looking.

As I listened to the entirety of the lectures the major contention between two points of view would seem to boil down to the following points

- Answering the “why” questions. Why does a man enter a school and shoot children? Why does date-rape occur? Why does someone beat their spouse? In Dr. Peterson’s view this is simply sin that occurs because the heart is desperately wicked. He sees no reason to delve further into the “why” of the matter than that.

The psychologist on the other hand is not satisfied with this answer. There must be a reason why some people react to a situation one way and some react in another. Even if we assume that all people are wicked, there must be some different stimulus (be it genetic, environmental, or whatever) that causes people to act out in different ways.

- Approaches to ‘talk therapy.’ Dr. Peterson made the statement that no counseling should exceed five or six sessions. In his view more meetings than this will create a dependence on the counselor instead of a dependence on the Holy Spirit and Scripture. Since there is no need to determine the “why” in a case, the only problem then is labeling the “what” (i.e. the sin) and proscribing a Biblical remedy such as Scripture memorization, substituting one activity for another,etc.

In contrast Dr. Wolfe describes a scenario where sessions may be required for extended periods of time, perhaps even years. This allows the counselor to dig deeper into the person’s past uncovering layers of experiences and motivations that may have been suppressed or purposely avoided by the counselee.

- Mental Illness as a disease. While Dr. Peterson initially concedes that there may be a medical basis for behavioral problems, he puts forward the opinion that once “you’ve had a brain scan and a good night’s sleep” you no longer have room to make excuses. The idea that there would be a gene that makes a person more prone to addiction he dismisses by saying that researches have been looking for it for years and never found it. Apparently, Dr. Peterson is unaware of exactly how many genes there are in the human body. He also dismisses the idea of “chemical imbalances” as being an industry term that doesn’t really mean anything.

Dr. Wolfe also conceeds that there are issues with putting a diagnosis on a mental problem. Often times things will be diagnosed solely for the purpose of receiving money from an insurance company without a complete ability to fully diagnose the specific problem. However, he also points out that there are a wide spectrum of mental conditions that can be replicated by psycially damaging portions of the brain. Simply because the brain is very complex and hard to define at times does not mean that mental conditions may not very well have a physiological aspect.

- Medication as a treatment.Dr. Peterson says that medication has a place. However, what exactly that place is remains unclear. He dedicated the majority of his time on the topic to the subject of SSRI drugs (paxil, prozac, zoloft, etc.) which he are not much more helpful than a placeebo and have terrible, awful side effects. Although he never explicitly says that these drugs shouldn’t be taken, no student could possibly leave the class with any other impression than that these drugs are both a waste of time and possibly even related to ’sorcery’ (yes, Dr. Peterson does reference pharmekia to support this point)

Dr. Wolfe also references SSRI drugs and admits that we don’t always know why the drugs work. However, he points out that in any medical science there is a long-term process of refining these drugs and new treatments and breakthroughs are happening all the time.

- The problem of responsibility. The main point that Dr. Peterson continues to return to is that ‘psychology’ is a method of displacing the responsibility from the patient and blaming the problem on either environmental or biological factors. His response to this is that the counselor needs to identify the sin problem, assign ‘homework’ to the counselee, and help them to acknowledge Biblical truth about their situation. Nothing else is needed in order to restore this patient to a right mind. In his words if we didn’t have one shred of psychology but had the Bible, we’d be just fine. The great fear seems to be that if we accept that there are biological or environmental influences that we leave the door open to a person not being responsible for their own actions.

Dr. Wolfe points out that just because we can show a reason for a behavior does not make it into an excuse. Just because a violent person was abused as a child does not give them justification for their violence. It can, however, provide a starting point to helping a patient to deal with the underlying cause.

National Infantry Museum

This weekend we took a trip down to Fort Benning and visited the National Infantry Museum. As the museum guide explained “the last 100 yards of every battle belong to the infantry troops. Always has. Always will.”

The entrance to the exhibits is a long rising corridor with statues and equipment depicting U.S. infantry troops in every major conflict from the Revolutionary War to the current war in Iraq. All of the mannequins are cast from actual soldiers who are currently serving at Fort Benning. One of the highlights is a glider from the D-Day invasion — one of only a handful left intact. It’s an inspiring walk. If you can get through it without a sense of pride in our country and its military, you are beyond hope.

Exiting the corridor, are exhibits showing the history and mission of Fort Benning. There’s even a simulator where you can try to qualify at an electronic range with military weapons.

Down stairs from that is a large hall with rooms dedicated to major periods of time (Civil War, Cold War, etc. etc.). It would take hours to do justice to each one and it was naptime for Darlene so we visited the wall with information about the liberation of Grenada in 1983 and promised ourselves that we’d come back.

There’s also a WWII village located in back of the museum with buildings of that era that have been relocated from the main post of Fort Benning. It’s a scheduled guided tour that may be best visited sometime when the weather is not over 90 degrees in the shade.

Best of all, the museum itself is free. But never fear, the iMAX theater, restaurant, and gift shop are there to help you unload yourself of any excess dough.

A little more Postman

To go along with the book review below, here’s a video of Neil Postman discussing the Internet.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

I’ve (finally!) finished Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Published in 1985, Amusing Ourselves to death attempts to make quantify the effect of television across the forty-odd years since it became the main source of communication and entertainment in American homes. The twin questions of “How have we changed?” and “Is that a good thing?” are what Postman sets out to answer through this volume.

At the outset, Postman attempts to show the difference in Epistemology and Comprehension between the “typographic world” that had existed since the invention of the printing press and the “image world” that came into vogue through print advertising, photography, and ultimately through television. It is his contention that our largely image-based perception has weakened the ability of the public to process complex information and to make rational arguments.

After all, it is difficult to argue with a picture. It does not make propositional statements, it simply gives an impression to the viewer. It does not appeal to a person’s intellect but rather to their emotional frame. Television is the ultimate expression of such irrational information gathering with quickly passing images on the screen making detailed and rational discussion almost impossible.

He then points out that television disconnects objects and events from reality, placing them out of context in embedded in a slough of advertising that renders even the “good” television programming all but useless. One moment a murder occupies the screen. The next an advertisement for air travel. Then on to a story about a child with a kitten. Next, an underarm deodorant. With this splintered and fragmented way of viewing the world around us, it is difficult to come up with any sort of meta-narrative or framework to connect all these pieces into a whole.

In the second part of the book, Postman visits the topics of religion, politics, and education, showing how that each in turn must devolve into mere entertainment if it hopes to stay on the television airwaves. Religion becomes showmanship. Politics becomes a world of soundbites and actors rather than well-thought policies and men of character. Education becomes nearly impossible on television because the media simply does not lend itself to the forming of complex ideas. In short, things are shortened, dumbed down, and presented at the lowest common denominator in the population.

Throughout the book, there is the contrast of Huxley’s view of the world (as presented in A Brave New World with Orwell’s view (as seen in 1984). Postman’s opinion is that American society will continue to resemble more of Huxley’s view — with rampant sensory stimulation and a complete lack of thought — than the opposing view of Orwell’s totalitarian state. It is not a strict control of information by the government that we have to fear but rather such a deluge of inane entertainment that people simple lose the will and the capacity to think for themselves at all.

Postman concludes by acknowledging that it is unlikely that we can at this point remove television from society. He suggests rather that there be a change in how we watch television. We must abandon the delusion that watching TV news coverage and so-called educational television is doing anything to build our minds. Television, says Postman, is at its best when it is doling out mindless entertainment instead of masquerading as a serious and informative medium.

Is television an ultimate evil in itself? Postman doesn’t seem to think so. We cannot blame television for what it is nor can we really claim conspiracy on the part of television producers for feeding the populace what it wishes to see. The question is one of appetite and awareness. Do we know what we wish to get from television and are we actually getting whatever that is or are we buying into a pretty delusion that we are getting smarter when, in fact, we are merely collecting more emotional impressions?

Postman’s points would seem even more relevant to day in the age of the iPhone, YouTube, and the “always on” electronic culture in which we live. One must wonder what Postman would think now of the rise of the Internet that has become a playground for everyman to try his hand at image-based presentation. I think he would say that it is inevitable and give the same warnings to approach these things carefully and purposefully.

Michael Jackson

Jonah Goldberg from National Review Online nicely sums up my feelings on Michael Jackon’s passing.

Calling Michael Jackson an icon doesn’t let him off the hook for anything. But to listen to the news anchors you’d think it absolves him of everything.

I say: Who cares who his famous friends were? Who cares what a “fascinating” person he was? If you want to talk about his death as an end of an era, have at it. But that’s not what the Barbara Walters set is doing.

I know that Michael Jackson wasn’t convicted of the despicable crimes he was accused of. And that’s why he never went to jail. Three cheers for the majesty of the American legal system. But in my own personal view he wasn’t exonerated either. Nor was he absolved of his crimes because he could sing, moonwalk or sell 10 million records. (Though many of us suspect the money and fame he made from those things is precisely what kept him out of jail).

And, while I merely think he was a pedophile, I know he was not someone responsible parents should applaud, healthy children emulate nor society celebrate.

And while we’re at it, his relatively early death wasn’t “tragic.” He was one of the richest people in the world. He spent his money on perpetual childhood and he was perpetually with children not his own.

Meanwhile, in the last ten days, we’ve seen or heard of remarkable people who’ve given their lives for freedom in Iran. We’ve heard of innocents killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the last decade, America has lost thousands of heroes in noble causes and thousands of innocent bystanders who were denied the simple joys of life through no fault of their own. Those deaths are tragic, and we’re hard pressed to think of more than a handful of names to put with the long line of the dead.

If anything, Michael Jackson’s life, not his death, was tragic.

Every year at the Oscars they show a montage of people who died over the previous year. Invariably, the audience only applauds for the really famous people. This has always offended me. Not necessarily because the famous people don’t deserve praise but because it’s so clear that the audience is clapping for the fame. Michael Jackson had many accomplishments. But the press is sanctifying him because he was famous, deservedly so to be sure, but not because he was good. So much of the coverage seems to miss this fundamental point, as if being famous made him good.

I feel sympathy for Jackson’s family and friends who understandably mourn him. But I can’t bring myself to mourn him any more than I mourn the random dead I read about in the paper everyday. Indeed, I confess to mourning him less.

Every channel says this is a sad day for America. I agree. But not for the same reasons.

As I have said many times, the cult of celebrity is a sickness. Shame on Christians who partake of its vanity.

Public Opinion

I’m in the midst of reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman when this particular passage smote me in the eye.

In America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information –misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information– information that creates the illusion of knowing something but in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying that we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

That’s a mouthful. He then follows with this quote:

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means to detect lies.” — Walter Lippmann

A Little Bill Shakespeare

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Disapproval

“God of Earth and Outer Space”

It’s not often you find astronauts as the theme of a hymn!

God of earth and outer space,
God of love and God of grace,
Bless the astronauts who fly.
As they soar beyond the sky.
God who flung the stars in space,
God who set the sun ablaze,
Fling the spacecraft thro the air,
Let man know your presence there.

God of atmosphere and air,
God of life and planets bare,
Use man’s courage and his skill
As he seeks your holy will.
God of depth and God of height,
God of darkness, God of light,
As man walks in outer space,
Teach him how to walk in grace.

God of man’s exploring mind,
God of wisdom, God of time,
Launch us from complacency
To a world in need of thee.
God of power, God of might,
God of rockets firing bright.
Hearts ignite and thrust within,
Love for Christ to share with men.

God of earth and outer space,
God who guides the human race,
Guide the lives of seeking youth
In their search for heavnly truth.
God who reigns below, above,
God of universal love,
Love that gave Nativity,
Love that gave us Calvary.

Listen to the MIDI

h/t Just Wallpaper.