Two Opposite Trends in Psychology

I find it interesting that there are currently two very opposite trends in psychology--both of which are critically important.  I have already commented on the different levels which human psychology can be viewed.  The two extreme polar opposites are neuropsychology and human potential awareness.  The latter term is not a current term; it is from the '60s.  But I use it to make my point.  The current term is actually "positive psychology" or "the psychology of happiness."  The main difference between the two is that there is much more of an empirical (experimental) base to positive psychology.  (Human potential psychology was often referred to disparagingly as "armchair psychological theorizing").

But both of these trends are absolutely useful and important.  They describe the human experience at different levels, using different metaphors.  And they are both true, if by "true", we mean that there is experimental evidence collected to verify their theories. 

The studies on happiness have immediate relevance to all of us.  But the the neuroscience studies have relevance too, in a different way.  The happiness studies let us know that certain behaviors, such as altruism, can bring positive effects in our lives.  They are not just something taught by religious texts.  The neuroscience studies lead to new medications, but they also suggest new psychotherapy techniques.  And perhaps most importantly for the layman, they give us that humility that I have spoken of in other postings--the humility of understanding the complexity of motivation and that there are often fundamental physiological reasons that we and those we know act in certain ways.

Unfortunately, at times in the past each of these perspectives tried to invade and take over the doman rightfully occupied by the other.  For example, it used to be taught that autism was caused by cold, rejecting mothers.  And it was also taught by some that altruism did not really exist; it was just a conditioned behavior, or the result purely of our evolutionary past and survival mechanisms.  The micro and deterministic trues to subsume the macro and holistic and vice versa.  But they are both important, separate ways of viewing the world which are both important.


It's a wonderful age that we live in that it is scientifically acceptable to converse and conceptualize human behavior in so many different ways and at so many different levels.  It is intellectually freeing, and it frees each of us to explore our own psychology in ways that our ancestors never could.

A Very Sophisticated Book

One of the most sophisticated books I have read in a long time is The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain. Psychotherapy books in the 1970's (a long time ago when I was in graduate school) were often criticized as being "pop psychology." This is anything but. It is not easy reading for the layman. But for the sophisticated reader, it can't be beat as a way of understanding how psychotherapy relates to brain functioning. The book tackles the problem of integrating two very different paradigms, or heuristics--psychotherapy metaphors and neuroscience concepts. Both are important.

There is at least one more paradigm which has to be integrated with these two, which is the spiritual paradigm.

I once had a patient, a computer programmer, tell me that he had been reading about how computers can be described as operating at seven different levels. I'm no computer wizard, but I can imagine what he means: the atomic level, the circuit board level, the basic machine language level, the macro language level such as A++, the final interface level with the human operator, etc. The same is true of humans. Their functioning can be described at many different levels, and it is hard to integrate all of these together. It will be a long time before we can integrate all of them. But in the meantime, Louis Cozolino has made a really great start in this book.