Hiding in the Backwaters Just one more blog on the net.

What is it we really know?

I've been reading Rewriting the Soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. It was recommended to me by one of my professors. I picked it up more for the "sciences of memory" part than the "multiple personality" part. I confess I am a skeptic of multiple personalities (officially Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID now). It's been a very interesting read. His commentary on how we acquire knowledge in the social sciences was particularly intriguing.

[Binet's] measures of "intelligence" had to agree, generally, with preexisting judgments and then be adapted at the margins. Had he declared that many children who could not cope with French elementary education were intelligent, he would have been mocked. Had he said that the better students at the lycées where stupid, he would have been reviled. ... Binet's great innovation, the testing of intelligence, made sense only against a background of shared judgments about intelligence, and it had to agree with them by and large, and also to explain when it disagreed. Who shared the judgments? Those who matter, namely the educators, other civil servants, and Binet's peers in the middle classes of society.

...One result of calibration is that prior judgments became both sharpened and objectified. What were once discrimination made by suitably educated or trained individuals were turned into impartial, distant, nonsubjective measures of intelligence. Intelligence became and object, independent of any human opinions (my emphasis).

Now, I was aware that IQ tests are under fire for being culturally (white, middle class) biased, but it wasn't until I read those words that I understood the why and wherefore.

Many sociologists of science, and a few philosophers, have recently welcomed the idea that scientific knowledge is a social construction. They contend that science does not discover facts, but constructs them (Hacking, 1995).

Makes you stop and think doesn't it?

The Golden Compass

Yes, I'm reading The Golden Compass. I needed to some light reading in part to fill the times on an airplane I can't use my laptop and in part to break up all the high-falootin' reading I've been doing lately. One can only read so much scholarly literature before one's brain goes to mush.

In an approach pioneered by Cleary, Humphreys, Kendrick, and Wesman (1975), a regression model is applied in which a test or indicator variable serves as the predictor variable, and the score on some important “gold standard” serves as the variable to be predicted. In this model, an indicator can be considered fair or unbiased for both groups only if the regression lines are the same for the groups in question. Regression lines can differ in both the slope of the line and its intercept value. Different slopes suggest that the indicator is differentially useful across levels of the indicator for the groups, whereas different intercepts suggest that the indicator is systematically over- or underpredicting the gold standard for some group.

Snooze-o-rama.

I picked this up not so much because of the impending movie release as a blurb in this month's issue of Out. It mentions the existence of two gay angel characters in the second book. Naturally my interest was piqued. I'm curious as to how that is presented in the book. I'll let you know when I get there.

Second book? Yes, it's a trilogy, a fact missing from all the marketing hype. Is the movie only the first book or all three? I don't know. I sure hope it's only the first. You try and munge a whole series into one movie and you are asking for a flop. Just ask Disney (The Black Cauldron) and 20th Century Fox (The Seeker: The Dark is Rising).

If the movie powers that be have a brain between them (which is often open to debate) they have produced the first book and are waiting to see how much money the first movie makes before committing to the other two. If the movie is as entertaining as the book, they should do well.

Ouch.

According to my informal observations, most people who are attracted to being psychotherapists like closeness, dislike separation, fear rejection, and suffer guilt readily. They tend to be self-critical, to be overly responsible, and to put other people's needs before their own. They feel more unentitled than deserving. They try to avoid feeling greed, anger and other "selfish" states of mind and become disturbed when they notice evidence of their own competitiveness or hostility. They favor defense of reversal, attempting to nourish the child in themselves vicariously by taking care of the child in their client. They identify with victims rather than with oppressors, with children rather than with parents.

Serendipity?

Notwithstanding that some qualities are unique to a pyschoanalytically oriented approach, much of its healing potential is shared by therapists of all sorts. Although my attitude about this derives from personal experience, it is compatible with some very stringently conducted research. Analyzing the work of of Luborsky et al.(2000), Messer and Wampold (2002) observe that the current emphasis on "empirically supported treatments" is based on a discredited medical model an has contributed to an empirically unwarranted devaluation of the experiential, psychodynamic, and family therapies. They further conclude that specific, symptom-targeted strategies are effective "only insofar as they are a component of a larger healing context," and that (as we have known for a long time) more variance in outcome arises from differences among therapists than from differences among treatment approaches.

...It makes little sense to teach students how to deal effective with the easiest clients, leaving them to learn by the school of hard knocks how to work with more challenging ones—all the while suffering from vaguely defined guilt that they are breaking textbook rules.

...there are some things students need to know that are even more basic and fundamental to psychoanalytic practice than how to interpret transferences and resistances or how to understand the working-through process or when to consider ending treatment. They need to know how to maintain their own self-esteem, how to behave in a way that is both professional and natural, and how to protect their own boundaries from the incursions that their more desperate clients insist on attempting. ...I also know that beginners need specifics and are not helped by vague statements to the effect of "It all depends."

...applicants to most social work programs know better than to tell their prospective teachers that they want to be therapists instead of administrators or social activists. Large segments of the public believe that therapy is about blaming one's parents, avoiding personal responsibility, and rationalizing selfishness. Therapists are neither well organized nor temperamentally disposed to battling their disparagers. So I am trying to give moral and conceptual support to trainees who, despite all these circumstances, know that psychotherapy is the project to which they want to commit the rest of their working lives.

...Perhaps it is more accurate to to say that my vision of science encompasses clinical lore as a legitimate source of knowledge in addition to what can be learned from controlled studies. I deeply believe we need to be just as respectful toward more poetic, metaphorically expressed, experience-based clinical theory as we are toward more highly controlled research.

...Because of the American affinity for the new and revolutionary, psychoanalysis in its youth was too often uncritically embraced here; now in its maturity it is too often uncritically dismissed.

...Despite my strong feeling that we need to do lots more research on psychotherapy and to pay attention to what researches have already established, I have learned much more from passionate practitioners than from dispassionate researchers.

(my emphasis)

Oh...I like her.