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...by writing about my dream last night. I do this with some trepidation, since even for the most die-hard Jungian, other people's dreams can be extremely dull.
I have never been able to remember my dreams, so for the last six months I have kept a notebook next to my bed to record them. I've only written in it a handful of times, and most of the nocturnal entries are illegible. There is no record of nocturnal emissions.
So, last night's dream:
I was bicycling along a road on the Isle of Wight, which I have visited twice or maybe three times in my life. It was a balmy afternoon in late summer. The low hills were bathed in warm apricot light and the air was full of those tiny bouncing bugs that come out shortly before sunset. I was on my way back to my bed and breakfast. I had come to the island for the summer to write.
I reached the top of a gentle incline and was about to freewheel down the other side when I noticed a small farm lane to my right which parted from the main road. It was a road made of slabs of pebbled concrete. However, the lane cannot have seen much use since the tufts of grass grew thickly in the middle of the cracks where the slabs met. I followed the lane with my eyes and saw that it lead to a small village higher up the hill. From where I was standing, it looked as if this was the highest village on the whole island. It suddenly seemed important to visit that village, so I turned off the main road and began to cycle up the lane.
On my way towards the village, I met the son of the couple who owned and ran my bed and breakfast. He was a boy of about ten who had a yellow BMX bicycle very similar to the one which I myself had had at that age. I felt a close connection with this boy. When I think about it now, he may have been my childhood self.
We rode our bicycles along the lane which passed through the village and then continued to climb up the hill. When the lane reached its highest point, we stopped and admired the view of the island spread out beneath us. There was a steep embankment to our right, so we leant our bikes against the verge and scrambled up the embankment.
The views from the top of the embankment were even more impressive. However, we were still not on the highest point of the island - there was another crest in front of us which the embankment had hidden from our view. Although the sun was about to set, we had come too far to turn back now. The long grass rippled in the wind as we climbed up this last slope.
When we reached the top of the slope we were amazed to see the ruin of an enormous arch caught by the last rays of the sun. This arch had been entirely hidden from below by the angle of elevation. We walked through the arch. The shadowy far side was decorated with beautifully preserved Inca or Mayan motifs. In the shadow of the arch lay the ruins of what must once have been the keep of a castle. The walls and staircases were still standing, but there was no roof and the grass grew thick in the central courtyard.
'This is scary,' said the boy.
I notice that there is a knee high fence surrounding the ruins. The fence appears to be new and well-maintained. We step over the fence and enter the colonnade of the ruins. The colonnades remind me of the entrance hall of the palace of the King of Mustang, in Lo Manthang. However, instead of Tibetan mastiffs, these ruinous corridors are guarded by enormous black birds. The light is fading fast but this is a unique opportunity to explore and I try to give the boy courage. However, I am a little unnerved myself by the way that the enormous birds swoop down from the sky and fly through the colonnades before landing in the nests which hang at irregular intervals along the walls. All we can hear is the sound of huge wings beating the air.
We explore the ruins. My face is covered by cobwebs which are thick and sticky and hard to get off. It sounds frightening but I don't remember being afraid. When we have explored to our satisfaction, we return to the arch with the Inca or Mayan artwork. However, darkness has fallen very quickly. There was no gloming - it is now pitch black. I take the boy's hand and we walk in the general direction of the hill and our bicycles, though I know we will never find them in this darkness. I realise that we are going to have to wait here until daybreak and I feel a little foolish, that is all.
In retrospect, the feel of this dream reminds me a little of Alain-Fournier's descriptions of the Lost Domain in Le Grand Meaulnes.
If anyone would care to offer an interpretation, please don't hold back.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
25. Cronbach's alpha
I feel the time may have come to give an honest appraisal of my current state. When I first started this blog, I intended to write in an anonymous way, in the hope of appealing to readers who don’t know me personally as well as to those that do. For much of last year, that strategy was not totally unsuccessful. I frequently received emails from blogspot.com, informing me that someone had commented on one of my posts. Most of the comments were friendly endorsements. Only rarely did a reader demand my immediate decapitation. However, the only comments I receive these days are from websites offering me STD creams, breast enhancements, or the unique opportunity to invest in the mining of a fabulously precious new metal somewhere in Russia. And that’s why I am breaking with my initial intentions, casting objectivity to the winds, and writing about me.
I am now almost two years into a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology and I must confess that I am underwhelmed. Not just by the subject matter, but also by the profession and, above all, by the practitioners.
The first surprise came fairly near the beginning. I would sit in the library, surrounded by books whose titles captivated me: ‘Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis’, ‘Altered States of Consciousness’, ‘Jung and the Collective Unconscious’. But do these books constitute any part of my degree? Hell, no. I spend my time in that airless library trawling through research papers which use statistics to prove correlations between various diagnoses and the variables associated with them. Not once, whilst reading such a research paper, have I had anything like an epiphany or moment of insight. In general, when I have deciphered the clumsy prose, I am left with a tentative endorsement of a proposition which is already evident to anyone with any common sense, and the ubiquitous coda, ‘more research needs to be done in this area’.
When I lament the absence of epiphanies, I am not asking for a Damascene moment or spiritual break through. Oh no, nothing so grand. All I was hoping for was that moment of reflection that a really good author can provide . Just a few sentences which resonate, an original thought or a new insight, something I am moved to write down in a notebook and mull over in a quiet moment. Something like this:
The moment a man starts to tell you about sex, he’s telling you something about the two of you. Ninety percent of the time it doesn’t happen, and probably it’s as well it doesn’t, though if you can’t get a level of candor on sex and you choose to behave as if this isn’t ever on your mind, the male friendship is incomplete. Most men never find such a friend. It’s not common. But when it does happen, when two men find themselves in agreement about this essential aspect of being a man, unafraid of being judged, shamed, envied, or outdone, confident of not having the confidence betrayed, their human connection can be very strong and an unexpected intimacy results.
From The Human Stain, by Philip Roth.
or this:
Happiness is absorption. – Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is nothing that resonates with me in psychology research papers. However, I cannot complain that I am not being taught the maths. Or ‘math’, as I am endlessly being ‘corrected’. Statistics are the bane of my life. In my nightmares I am assailed by Cronbach’s alpha, by the Nagelkerke R-squared. Who are you, Mr. Cronbach? What does your alpha do? Herr Nagelkerke, do you like it that these barbarians rhyme your name with turkey? Whereas initially my statistics class was just boring, it has now become boring and difficult. I am nostalgic for the days of boredom, pure and unsullied. And I am tyrannized by monthly stats exams. Does any of this help me to understand people any better? I don’t think it does.
And I suppose this really throws up a number of fundamental differences between myself and the psychological establishment (other than the fact that I am male and credit myself with a sense of humour). So, there is the DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, the clinician’s bible. A six hundred page volume, of what, exactly? Constellations of symptoms which constitute diagnoses. Well, that’s all well and good if we wish to make sure that we are communicating effectively with other clinicians; it helps us to speak the same language. But what are these symptoms really symptoms of? Mental illness, yes, but what is that? Is it a disease? Can we point to it somewhere in the brain? Very, very rarely is that the case. Most often you are fobbed off with some evasive answer about serotonin and dopamine, but no one really seems to know. Does lack of serotonin cause depression? Does depression cause lack of serotonin? What is the difference between psychosis and communication with a spirit world? When the DSM is amended and new diagnoses are added, have new illnesses been discovered? Or has society changed its mores and deemed that certain behaviors now fall inside or outside accepted parameters, just as homosexuality was once diagnosed as a mental illness? There are so many questions here that I am unable to treat the DSM with the hallowed reverence with which it appears to be treated by most psychologists.
My doubts about the field of academic psychology have, if anything, been confirmed by a course I am taking in intellectual assessment. This teaches me how to administer and score IQ tests, and a host of other cognitive screening measures. Once again, it’s really not that difficult. A few mathS problems, a few comprehension tests, that sort of thing. And a whole raft of statistics to back it all up. And I can see that it all has a certain utility – is this child doing badly in school because he lacks the cognitive infrastructure to process information, or is he just easily distracted? But what I don’t like is the underlying belief that someone’s ability can be summed up by these tests. At the end of the day, they are very conformist. There is no room for thinking outside the box, for drawing new connections, for originality of thought. I suspect that most artists and more than a few innovators would perform very poorly on these tests. People whose strengths are slightly different will fall between the cracks. To give an example, there is one question in the child IQ test which asks, ‘What should you do if you find a wallet in a store?’ If a child replied, ‘Take it home, invest the money for a year, return the original sum to the owner and give the rest to charity,’ he would receive no points. The ‘correct’ answer is, ‘Give the wallet to the store keeper’. We might not want to encourage that child’s unusual approach, but I don’t think it is right to conclude that the child is less intelligent. This socially conformist thinking informs much of the verbal portion of the test.
You really don’t have to be very clever to administer, score or interpret an IQ test, despite what psychologists will have you believe. You plug in a few set phrases and look out for any anomalies in the results. You make things sound a bit more complicated than they need to be. For instance, instead of saying ‘Johnny’s vocabulary is poor,’ you will interpret: ‘Johnny’s long term memory and wealth of knowledge of words is in the below average range.’ Duh.
At least with the IQ tests, you can see that quite a lot of work has gone into designing them and crunching all the statistics behind them. That is not always the case. There is a screen called ‘trails’, in which you get an individual to join up dots and you time them. There is another called the COWAT, the Controlled Oral Word Association Test. Sounds grand but don’t be fooled. You give someone one minute to think of as many words as they can starting with a particular letter, and you count how many they come up with. That’s it. Then you compare it to the average in the population. Not very complicated. In fact, it’s rather like a mindless drinking game, without the drinking. However, I don’t mean to say that any of this is useless. It’s just not very inspiring.
I think my complaint is that there are so many different things about humans that are important. I am thinking of qualities like humour, kindness, originality, creativity and, for most cultures at most times in history, a spiritual dimension. The course I am studying occasionally pays lip service to some of these qualities, but no more than that.
So, disenchanted with Cronbach’s alpha and IQ testing, I was happy that this year I would be taking the year long ethics course. I enjoyed the ethics component of my undergraduate philosophy degree. I found it challenging but ultimately rewarding; it deepened my appreciation of the complexity of human life. The ethics course here has very little to do with ethics in the true sense. It ought really to be renamed the ‘how not to get sued’ course. It’s about learning the trite pronouncements of the American Psychological Association’s Ethics Code. We are examined twice a term by multiple choice. Multiple choice, in ethics? It is enough to make you weep. The first question on the first exam was: What should the ethical psychologist do? The answer: Do good. I mean, really. That, surely, is the very starting point of intelligent debate on ethics – what do we mean by good? In no way is ‘Do good’ an answer to anything. At least, not outside of kindergarten.
It doesn’t help that the ethics course is taught by a woman I find extremely irritating. I think she hates men, particularly white ones. She considers herself a feminist, which she defines as any form of human interaction which is sensitive and not exploitative, i.e. just the sort of interaction which white men are incapable of. I don’t particularly mind her sexist views (of course, in her eyes, only men can be sexist). I daresay that she has seen enough damaged clients, or has had some very bad experiences of her own, to make her profoundly distrustful of men. And that would be reasonable, up to a point. What I find much more irritating is her smugness about the role of psychologists. She likes to refer to the way that ‘we’ psychologists think and behave, as if psychologists were a class apart from the rest of the world. But they’re not. If anything they are more screwed up because they often don’t have the humility to recognize it.
It particularly irks me that this teacher of ethics prides herself so highly on the fact that people have a propensity to break down and cry in her presence, as she keeps telling us. If they do, it’s not because of her remarkable insight, but rather because she is so sad and chubby that she makes everyone else feel sad. When sitting opposite her, you certainly wouldn’t worry about lowering her mood; that’s not a possibility. When she sits at the end of the table in the classroom, her fat arms merge into her shapeless shoulders which morph into her sad round face. She is constructed of circles and ovals, rather like a hulking Picasso nude. From his blue period.
The other thing that annoys me about this woman is her use of language. Over the last six months, I have come to think that the field of psychology is defined not so much by its content but rather by the language it uses. But the thing is, I don’t feel that the language is expressing thoughts or ideas which couldn’t be communicated more simply and more intelligibly in normal everyday language. I mustn’t be too black and white about this; a certain amount of technical terminology is necessary. Concepts like defences and resistances are permissible (but have pretty much entered the mainstream anyway). But the way this lady uses language, I feel she is doing it to create a field which is inaccessible to the layman, rather than in order to clarify reality. And I also see some of my fellow students attempting to emulate that. For example, do we really need to say ‘positive reinforcement’ when we mean ‘reward’? Or ‘acting out and failing to observe boundaries’ when we mean ‘misbehaving’?
Fellow students: you will recognize them by their shiny metal water bottles (de rigeur), their zip-lock baggies of peeled carrots, and their propensity to complain about grad school at any given opportunity. Oh, and their infantile concern about grades.
I also have a number of my own clients who come to see me for therapy. They are all ex-convicts, currently on parole, and all diagnosed with at least one mental illness in addition to some form of drug or alcohol addiction. This is a tricky population. I actually rather enjoy seeing them, and I don’t find it hard to build relationships with them. That’s partly because I think to myself that, had I been born under different circumstances and had some different life experiences, then it could be me sitting where they are sitting. There but for the grace of God, go I. And, frankly, I’m quite curious about the rising cost of blowjobs in the Tenderloin, or how best to make freebase from cocaine. And this is, in part, the stuff they like to talk about. Once the relationship is a bit more solid, I do try to address more emotional subject matter, but often they can be quite resistant. On a number of occasions we have never got that far because they have already been re-arrested before they trusted me enough, or were bored enough, to get into the meaty stuff. And even when my clients seem happy to see me, and grateful to have a sympathetic ear, I still find myself spending a lot of the time wondering what on earth I should be doing. Hunting for Cronbach’s elusive alpha?
In fact, I really don’t know what to make of ‘therapy’ at all. At my work site I sat through a 3 day training on Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, or DBT, which is currently all the rage. DBT seems to me to be a combination of basic parenting (e.g. teaching clients that it is best to ‘think before you act’), and a reductionistic nod towards Zen Buddhism (learning to sit back and simply observe). Those are all admirable goals, but they were taught to us in so simplistic a manner that I think a lot of us found it quite embarrassing. I had a brief moment during which I mentally compared my own life and current situation with that of my talented and successful school friends – something I try to avoid doing at the best of times. I imagined them calmly guiding their hedge funds through yet another crisis, or effortlessly winding a High Court judge around their little finger, or, in one case, receiving a prize for a new epidemiological matrix which predicts the spread of disease (without recourse to Cronbach’s fetid alpha). And, I am proud to say, I was able to smile rather than weep.
And what of all the other so-called therapies? Art therapy? Music therapy? Bibliotherapy? What is therapy, really? Isn’t it just something that makes you feel better? So why don’t we have swimming therapy? Masturbating therapy? Shooting the breeze in the pub with your mates therapy? Is it just because no psychologist has yet dignified these activities with the seal of APA approval? I would really like to know how bibliotherapy differs from the good old-fashioned occupation of reading a fine book. I suspect it is just another instance of the field of psychology appropriating an activity and renaming it to make it sound more impressive. And less accessible to the layman. Well fuck you psychologists, I am proud to be a layman.
Isn’t that the joy of truly great books, that they make you feel less alone? Are we not companions in arms with our fictional heroes, marching hand in hand through the dark existential night? For me there is more therapy in literature than in all the psychotherapies combined.
Which brings me on to my own therapy… But maybe I will save that for my next post.
I am now almost two years into a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology and I must confess that I am underwhelmed. Not just by the subject matter, but also by the profession and, above all, by the practitioners.
The first surprise came fairly near the beginning. I would sit in the library, surrounded by books whose titles captivated me: ‘Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis’, ‘Altered States of Consciousness’, ‘Jung and the Collective Unconscious’. But do these books constitute any part of my degree? Hell, no. I spend my time in that airless library trawling through research papers which use statistics to prove correlations between various diagnoses and the variables associated with them. Not once, whilst reading such a research paper, have I had anything like an epiphany or moment of insight. In general, when I have deciphered the clumsy prose, I am left with a tentative endorsement of a proposition which is already evident to anyone with any common sense, and the ubiquitous coda, ‘more research needs to be done in this area’.
When I lament the absence of epiphanies, I am not asking for a Damascene moment or spiritual break through. Oh no, nothing so grand. All I was hoping for was that moment of reflection that a really good author can provide . Just a few sentences which resonate, an original thought or a new insight, something I am moved to write down in a notebook and mull over in a quiet moment. Something like this:
The moment a man starts to tell you about sex, he’s telling you something about the two of you. Ninety percent of the time it doesn’t happen, and probably it’s as well it doesn’t, though if you can’t get a level of candor on sex and you choose to behave as if this isn’t ever on your mind, the male friendship is incomplete. Most men never find such a friend. It’s not common. But when it does happen, when two men find themselves in agreement about this essential aspect of being a man, unafraid of being judged, shamed, envied, or outdone, confident of not having the confidence betrayed, their human connection can be very strong and an unexpected intimacy results.
From The Human Stain, by Philip Roth.
or this:
Happiness is absorption. – Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is nothing that resonates with me in psychology research papers. However, I cannot complain that I am not being taught the maths. Or ‘math’, as I am endlessly being ‘corrected’. Statistics are the bane of my life. In my nightmares I am assailed by Cronbach’s alpha, by the Nagelkerke R-squared. Who are you, Mr. Cronbach? What does your alpha do? Herr Nagelkerke, do you like it that these barbarians rhyme your name with turkey? Whereas initially my statistics class was just boring, it has now become boring and difficult. I am nostalgic for the days of boredom, pure and unsullied. And I am tyrannized by monthly stats exams. Does any of this help me to understand people any better? I don’t think it does.
And I suppose this really throws up a number of fundamental differences between myself and the psychological establishment (other than the fact that I am male and credit myself with a sense of humour). So, there is the DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, the clinician’s bible. A six hundred page volume, of what, exactly? Constellations of symptoms which constitute diagnoses. Well, that’s all well and good if we wish to make sure that we are communicating effectively with other clinicians; it helps us to speak the same language. But what are these symptoms really symptoms of? Mental illness, yes, but what is that? Is it a disease? Can we point to it somewhere in the brain? Very, very rarely is that the case. Most often you are fobbed off with some evasive answer about serotonin and dopamine, but no one really seems to know. Does lack of serotonin cause depression? Does depression cause lack of serotonin? What is the difference between psychosis and communication with a spirit world? When the DSM is amended and new diagnoses are added, have new illnesses been discovered? Or has society changed its mores and deemed that certain behaviors now fall inside or outside accepted parameters, just as homosexuality was once diagnosed as a mental illness? There are so many questions here that I am unable to treat the DSM with the hallowed reverence with which it appears to be treated by most psychologists.
My doubts about the field of academic psychology have, if anything, been confirmed by a course I am taking in intellectual assessment. This teaches me how to administer and score IQ tests, and a host of other cognitive screening measures. Once again, it’s really not that difficult. A few mathS problems, a few comprehension tests, that sort of thing. And a whole raft of statistics to back it all up. And I can see that it all has a certain utility – is this child doing badly in school because he lacks the cognitive infrastructure to process information, or is he just easily distracted? But what I don’t like is the underlying belief that someone’s ability can be summed up by these tests. At the end of the day, they are very conformist. There is no room for thinking outside the box, for drawing new connections, for originality of thought. I suspect that most artists and more than a few innovators would perform very poorly on these tests. People whose strengths are slightly different will fall between the cracks. To give an example, there is one question in the child IQ test which asks, ‘What should you do if you find a wallet in a store?’ If a child replied, ‘Take it home, invest the money for a year, return the original sum to the owner and give the rest to charity,’ he would receive no points. The ‘correct’ answer is, ‘Give the wallet to the store keeper’. We might not want to encourage that child’s unusual approach, but I don’t think it is right to conclude that the child is less intelligent. This socially conformist thinking informs much of the verbal portion of the test.
You really don’t have to be very clever to administer, score or interpret an IQ test, despite what psychologists will have you believe. You plug in a few set phrases and look out for any anomalies in the results. You make things sound a bit more complicated than they need to be. For instance, instead of saying ‘Johnny’s vocabulary is poor,’ you will interpret: ‘Johnny’s long term memory and wealth of knowledge of words is in the below average range.’ Duh.
At least with the IQ tests, you can see that quite a lot of work has gone into designing them and crunching all the statistics behind them. That is not always the case. There is a screen called ‘trails’, in which you get an individual to join up dots and you time them. There is another called the COWAT, the Controlled Oral Word Association Test. Sounds grand but don’t be fooled. You give someone one minute to think of as many words as they can starting with a particular letter, and you count how many they come up with. That’s it. Then you compare it to the average in the population. Not very complicated. In fact, it’s rather like a mindless drinking game, without the drinking. However, I don’t mean to say that any of this is useless. It’s just not very inspiring.
I think my complaint is that there are so many different things about humans that are important. I am thinking of qualities like humour, kindness, originality, creativity and, for most cultures at most times in history, a spiritual dimension. The course I am studying occasionally pays lip service to some of these qualities, but no more than that.
So, disenchanted with Cronbach’s alpha and IQ testing, I was happy that this year I would be taking the year long ethics course. I enjoyed the ethics component of my undergraduate philosophy degree. I found it challenging but ultimately rewarding; it deepened my appreciation of the complexity of human life. The ethics course here has very little to do with ethics in the true sense. It ought really to be renamed the ‘how not to get sued’ course. It’s about learning the trite pronouncements of the American Psychological Association’s Ethics Code. We are examined twice a term by multiple choice. Multiple choice, in ethics? It is enough to make you weep. The first question on the first exam was: What should the ethical psychologist do? The answer: Do good. I mean, really. That, surely, is the very starting point of intelligent debate on ethics – what do we mean by good? In no way is ‘Do good’ an answer to anything. At least, not outside of kindergarten.
It doesn’t help that the ethics course is taught by a woman I find extremely irritating. I think she hates men, particularly white ones. She considers herself a feminist, which she defines as any form of human interaction which is sensitive and not exploitative, i.e. just the sort of interaction which white men are incapable of. I don’t particularly mind her sexist views (of course, in her eyes, only men can be sexist). I daresay that she has seen enough damaged clients, or has had some very bad experiences of her own, to make her profoundly distrustful of men. And that would be reasonable, up to a point. What I find much more irritating is her smugness about the role of psychologists. She likes to refer to the way that ‘we’ psychologists think and behave, as if psychologists were a class apart from the rest of the world. But they’re not. If anything they are more screwed up because they often don’t have the humility to recognize it.
It particularly irks me that this teacher of ethics prides herself so highly on the fact that people have a propensity to break down and cry in her presence, as she keeps telling us. If they do, it’s not because of her remarkable insight, but rather because she is so sad and chubby that she makes everyone else feel sad. When sitting opposite her, you certainly wouldn’t worry about lowering her mood; that’s not a possibility. When she sits at the end of the table in the classroom, her fat arms merge into her shapeless shoulders which morph into her sad round face. She is constructed of circles and ovals, rather like a hulking Picasso nude. From his blue period.
The other thing that annoys me about this woman is her use of language. Over the last six months, I have come to think that the field of psychology is defined not so much by its content but rather by the language it uses. But the thing is, I don’t feel that the language is expressing thoughts or ideas which couldn’t be communicated more simply and more intelligibly in normal everyday language. I mustn’t be too black and white about this; a certain amount of technical terminology is necessary. Concepts like defences and resistances are permissible (but have pretty much entered the mainstream anyway). But the way this lady uses language, I feel she is doing it to create a field which is inaccessible to the layman, rather than in order to clarify reality. And I also see some of my fellow students attempting to emulate that. For example, do we really need to say ‘positive reinforcement’ when we mean ‘reward’? Or ‘acting out and failing to observe boundaries’ when we mean ‘misbehaving’?
Fellow students: you will recognize them by their shiny metal water bottles (de rigeur), their zip-lock baggies of peeled carrots, and their propensity to complain about grad school at any given opportunity. Oh, and their infantile concern about grades.
I also have a number of my own clients who come to see me for therapy. They are all ex-convicts, currently on parole, and all diagnosed with at least one mental illness in addition to some form of drug or alcohol addiction. This is a tricky population. I actually rather enjoy seeing them, and I don’t find it hard to build relationships with them. That’s partly because I think to myself that, had I been born under different circumstances and had some different life experiences, then it could be me sitting where they are sitting. There but for the grace of God, go I. And, frankly, I’m quite curious about the rising cost of blowjobs in the Tenderloin, or how best to make freebase from cocaine. And this is, in part, the stuff they like to talk about. Once the relationship is a bit more solid, I do try to address more emotional subject matter, but often they can be quite resistant. On a number of occasions we have never got that far because they have already been re-arrested before they trusted me enough, or were bored enough, to get into the meaty stuff. And even when my clients seem happy to see me, and grateful to have a sympathetic ear, I still find myself spending a lot of the time wondering what on earth I should be doing. Hunting for Cronbach’s elusive alpha?
In fact, I really don’t know what to make of ‘therapy’ at all. At my work site I sat through a 3 day training on Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, or DBT, which is currently all the rage. DBT seems to me to be a combination of basic parenting (e.g. teaching clients that it is best to ‘think before you act’), and a reductionistic nod towards Zen Buddhism (learning to sit back and simply observe). Those are all admirable goals, but they were taught to us in so simplistic a manner that I think a lot of us found it quite embarrassing. I had a brief moment during which I mentally compared my own life and current situation with that of my talented and successful school friends – something I try to avoid doing at the best of times. I imagined them calmly guiding their hedge funds through yet another crisis, or effortlessly winding a High Court judge around their little finger, or, in one case, receiving a prize for a new epidemiological matrix which predicts the spread of disease (without recourse to Cronbach’s fetid alpha). And, I am proud to say, I was able to smile rather than weep.
And what of all the other so-called therapies? Art therapy? Music therapy? Bibliotherapy? What is therapy, really? Isn’t it just something that makes you feel better? So why don’t we have swimming therapy? Masturbating therapy? Shooting the breeze in the pub with your mates therapy? Is it just because no psychologist has yet dignified these activities with the seal of APA approval? I would really like to know how bibliotherapy differs from the good old-fashioned occupation of reading a fine book. I suspect it is just another instance of the field of psychology appropriating an activity and renaming it to make it sound more impressive. And less accessible to the layman. Well fuck you psychologists, I am proud to be a layman.
Isn’t that the joy of truly great books, that they make you feel less alone? Are we not companions in arms with our fictional heroes, marching hand in hand through the dark existential night? For me there is more therapy in literature than in all the psychotherapies combined.
Which brings me on to my own therapy… But maybe I will save that for my next post.
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