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

[RE]

It's the only game in town because the other theories tend to ignore
psychological conflict and assume very simplistic, abstract models of
psychological existence.  Within psychology pure behaviorism is completely
marginalized, its eradication of subjectivity was simply impossible to
maintain.  It was superseded by cognitive-behavioral psychology, which began
to entertain mental processes in the form of memory and cognitive
processing.  But c-b theory has very little comprehension of psychological
development, as is evident in its essentially existentialist orientation to
therapy.  Humanist theory evades what psychoanalysis tries to grapple with.
Check out Russell Jacoby's book Social Amnesia for an amusing tour.
Physiological and biological approaches are just that.
Randy


:
:
: 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
:
:
: