"Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame Re: Radio Doug

[Miles Jackson]

On Sat, 29 Mar 2003, RE wrote:

> Psychoanalysis doesn't hinge on any factor in your list.  Those theories
> have been offered to explain the contents of what psychoanalysis does hinge
> on, simply put, unconscious psychological processes.  It's true that it
> hasn't been of much help politically, at least in a direct way of the sort
> Reich or others envisaged.  But it's really the only game in town if you
> want to try to adequately talk about psychological life.  The dominant
> alternative, cognitive-behavioral psychology, is really a form of
> decisionism.

This is a pretty serious misconstrual of academic/"scientific"
psychological theories.  Psychodynamic theory or psychoanalysis is
far from "the only game in town" to make sense of psychological
processes.  Here are the major theories:

1.  Psychodynamic theory, focusing on the unconscious as a cause of
behavior;
2.  Humanist theory, emphasizing the innate human capacity to grow,
change, and become "self-actualized";
3.  Cognitive theory, emphasizing the thinking processes that
underlie and make possible behavior;
4.  Behaviorism, focusing on the environmental factors that influence
behavior (e.g., reward and punishment; note that this approach denies
the importance of mental processes, and thus is completely
incompatible with cognitive theory);
5.  Physiological/biological approaches, emphasizing genetics or more
specific biological factors (e.g., neurotransmitter metabolism,
hormone levels).

Also emerging as mainstream academic approaches are cultural theory
and evolutionary psychology (more or less sociobiology warmed over).

Despite the popularity of Freud in the broader academic and
popular culture, many actual psychologists who do research and
develop theories pretty much ignore his work, for two simple
reasons: (1) many psychodynamic ideas cannot be adequately tested
and (2) when people have systematically tested psychodynamic
ideas, they are often inconsistent with data (e.g., the idea
of catharsis).

I think there are significant strengths and weaknesses in all
these approaches, including psychodynamic theory.  However, I
want to stress that psychodynamic theory is only one of the
interesting and useful theories that psychologists have
developed.

Miles