Tag: quotations

Why (British?) experimental psychologists hate psychoanalysis(?)

From Whittle (1999, p. 240; I’m remaining silent on my opinion here—I just found the paragraph made me grin.)

The British are notoriously distrustful of theory. Newton was even, famously, distrustful of “hypotheses.” Theory is continental. We think of it as Germanic, and heavy. We think of Hegel and Heidegger. Brits who get entangled in it, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge or R. D. Laing, become incoherent substance abusers with marital problems. Psychoanalysis is full of theory. It has to be, because it is so distrustful of the surface. It could still choose to use the minimum necessary, but it does the opposite. It effervesces with theory, so infectiously that books of theory now bombard us from Paris, New Haven, Indiana, it sometimes seems from everywhere where there is a feminist modern-language academic. This weight of theory is a major reason why experimental psychologists, who are the most deeply British-Empiricist culture that there is, cannot get on with psychoanalysis. How could they possibly? How could people whose habit of mind is to ask of every statement that might have empirical content whether (1) it is statistically significant, and (2), more interestingly, whether there might not be another simpler explanation, possibly stomach these outpourings of prose, of sentence upon sentence of uncertain epistemological status?

Reference

Whittle, P. (1999). Experimental Psychology and Psychoanalysis: What We Can Learn from a Century of Misunderstanding. Neuropsychoanalysis, 1, 233-245.

Clinical experience vs. systematic observation

“Psychoanalytic practice has limitations as a form of research. A physician practising internal medicine learns from clinical observations but is not under the illusion of being engaged in research. The physician’s work, we hope (if we are the patient, that is), is however influenced by the results of research, and his or her reasoning will have been disciplined by scientific training. The problem of using clinical experience as research is well known to be one of induction. Mostly, we tend to confirm our theory-based expectations from our patient’s material. Our memory for material is biased, even our perception is impure. We cannot be pre-Kantian objective observers. Our own discovery of the pervasiveness of countertransference denies us this possibility, even in principle.

[…]

“In a paper that I wrote, longer ago than I care to remember (Fonagy, 1982), I put forward the argument that research studies could not and should not be used to test psychoanalytic ideas. If a clinical observation cannot be replicated in the laboratory, there are a host of good reasons why this might be so. Rather, systematic observations could be used to inform us about the psychological processes underpinning clinical phenomena…”

—Peter Fonagy, Grasping the Nettle: or Why Psychoanalytic Research is such an Irritant. Paper presented at the Annual Research Lecture of The British Psychoanalytical Society on 1st March, 2000.

Thinking in words

“… the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person.”

—George Orwell (1946), Politics and the English Language

The rational agent

“… the rational agent is not simply the one who follows the normative canons of logic and probability theory, and neither is she the one who follows adapted heuristics for action choice or ‘somatic markers’. Rather the rational agent is the critically self-aware agent; the one who is aware why she acts, and who modifies her own behaviour according to her self-knowledge. As Karl Popper (1990) wrote, ‘A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right’…”

Lambie, J. A. (2008). On the irrationality of emotion and the rationality of awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 946-971

How about this for a definition of emotion?

From Power, M. (2010, pp. 18-19) [Emotion-Focused Cognitive Therapy, Wiley-Blackwell]:

“Emotions are mental and bodily states that typically comprise a constellation of physiological, behavioural and psychological processes that follow the appraisal or evaluation of a situation or event as relevant to the individual’s goals. These goals range from basic drive-based survival goals to higher-order interpersonal and aesthetic goals. There are a limited set of such emotion states that include fear, sadness, anger, disgust and happiness, all of which have come to signal in a multitask multilevel system shifts in the priority of goal-based functioning and from which an infinite range of more complex emotions are derivable. These emotion states are normally short-lived in nature and need only last a matter of seconds or minutes; when they become more chronic, they are normally referred to as “moods” for which the instigating situation or event may have been forgotten. The conscious aspect of an emotion is referred to as its “affect” or “feeling”, though under many circumstances emotions can be unconscious and have no reportable affect state.”

On the inseparability of intellect and emotion (from 1933)

“[…] Imagine that we are engaged in a friendly serious discussion with some one, and that we decide to enquire into the meanings of words. For this special experiment, it is not necessary to be very exacting, as this would enormously and unnecessarily complicate the experiment. It is useful to have a piece of paper and a pencil to keep a record of the progress.

“We begin by asking the ‘meaning’ of every word uttered, being satisfied for this purpose with the roughest definitions; then we ask the ‘meaning’ of the words used in the definitions, and this process is continued usually for no more than ten to fifteen minutes, until the victim begins to speak in circles—as, for instance, defining ‘space’ by ‘length’ and ‘length’ by ‘space’. When this stage is reached, we have come usually to the undefined terms of a given individual. If we still press, no matter how gently, for definitions, a most interesting fact occurs. Sooner or later, signs of affective disturbances appear. Often the face reddens; there is bodily restlessness; sweat appears—symptoms quite similar to those seen in a schoolboy who has forgotton his lesson, which he ‘knows but cannot tell’. […] Here we have reached the bottom and the foundation of all non-elementalistic meanings—the meanings of undefined terms, which we ‘know’ somehow, but cannot tell. In fact, we have reached the un-speakable level. This ‘knowledge’ is supplied by the lower nerve centres; it represents affective first order effects, and is interwoven and interlocked with other affective states, such as those called ‘wishes’, ‘intentions’, ‘intuitions’, ‘evalution’, and many others. […]

“The above explanation, as well as the neurological attitude towards ‘meaning’, as expressed by Head, is non-elementalistic. We have not illegitimately split organismal processes into ‘intellect’ and ’emotions’.”

Reference

Korzybski, A. (1933).  Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics Institute of General Semantics.

Solomon Kullback: Oral History Interview

Read about Kullback on Wikipedia.

The oral history is on the NSA website over here.

Loads of cryptanalysis anecdotes therein (if you’re into that kinda thing), e.g., (p. 119):

There used to be coke machines, the Army version of the coke machines, I guess. You put in a nickel and a cup would come and you would get a coke. Well, it wasn’t long before the people discovered that the machine, when you dropped a coin in, would turn on. But if you pull the plug out, the mechanism which turned it off failed to operate. So people would go in there and put in their nickel and get a cup, pull the plug out and everybody in the wing would go get their cup of coke. So after a while, the vendor who filled these machines sort of looked at it and began to complain to General Corderman about the fact that here is a machine at the end of a day, all of the cokes and so on were used up and gone but he only finds a couple of nickels in it. “What gives?” I guess eventually Corderman checked and found out about the fact that people had found out that if you pull the plug once the machine got started then the mechanism which shut it off would fail. So he sent out a very cute notice to everybody in the Arlington Hall Station. It said, “Now that we have solved the machine and have enjoyed some of the fruits of that solution, I think we ought to provide the vendor with a nickel for each cup of coca cola.”

 

Authority

“… In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

“I bow before the authority of special [people] because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. […] there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subbordination.”

—Mikhail Bakunin, What is Authority?

Direct action

“Proceeding with the belief that in every situation, every individual and group has the possibility of some direct action on some level of generality, we may discover much that has been unrecognised, and the importance of much that has been underrated. So politicalised is our thinking, so focused to the motions of governmental institutions, that the effects of direct efforts to modify one’s environment are unexplored. The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being a free [person], prepared to live responsibly in a free society.”

David Wieck (1962), The Habit of Direct Action (quoted by Colin Ward, 1973)