Dorothy Rowe

At this time of year you might be struggling with your faith, or perhaps your lack of it. It can be difficult to reconcile what you see as the true meaning of Christmas for example, with the way that others view the celebration. Clinical psychologist Dorothy Rowe has thought long and hard about the place of religion in the modern world, and how religious belief is sometimes used to mask our feelings. She argues it's the reason some in society feel compelled to force their own ideas or faith onto others.

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The BBC World Service programme which boldly crosses boundaries: scientific, creative and geographic, presented by Bridget Kendall. Dorothy appeared with the American economist Marshall Goldman who assesses Russia's new status as an energy super power in his latest book Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia. Sociologist Frank Furedi argues we are too quick to blame global problems on humankind and should confront this new misanthropy'.

'The Forum sounded like eavesdropping on a very interesting dinner table in a restaurant, and it gave you all a chance to develop your thoughts and relate them to what other people were saying.' Sheila Christie.

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Dorothy talks to Philip Adams

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IS PSYCHOLOGY a science? This was the big theme in the fourth year of my undergraduate psychology degree at the University of Sydney, Australia, in the late 1940s. Our professor, Bill O'Neill, devoted many lectures to this question.

The subject matter of research in psychology might not fit easily into experimental designs, he argued, but that should not prevent us from holding fast to scientific principles to define our terms and refine our hypotheses. The purpose of science, he said, was not to discover facts but to ask better questions.

Today, psychologists - and the public - take it for granted that psychology is a science. I base my work on the developmental psychologists who study infants, and neuropsychologists who study how we make sense of our experiences. I know developmental and neuropsychologists follow O'Neill's principles.

However, many psychologists prefer to try to show that the world is what they want it to be, while others fear venturing into any area where they might have to confront the questions of how our brain creates meaning, and how, out of this meaning, comes what the neuropsychologist Chris Frith calls the "illusion" of being a person.

The subjects of research in the physical sciences adamantly remain themselves, refusing to disclose their nature until researchers ask them the right questions. In psychological research, things are different. Research subject and researcher can assess each other. Astute researchers can choose their subjects carefully, then frame their questions to guide subjects' answers and, by playing on the subjects' desire to please, produce the results the researcher wants.

This process has important consequences when it comes to "belief". Researchers who are advocates for religion are more likely to find that people with religious beliefs are happier than those with none, even though depressed people often report that their religious beliefs, rather than supporting them, actually create intense fear and guilt.

Our religious or philosophical beliefs about the nature of and the purpose of life are central to how we live and, as such, are appropriate subjects of psychological study - provided researchers can set aside their own fantasies about life and death.

Undeterred by such a notion, one branch of the field known as "transpersonal psychology" is based on the assumption of the existence of spirituality. On the website of the British Psychological Society, the transpersonal psychology section states that it "might loosely be called the psychology of spirituality and of those areas of the human mind which search for higher meanings in life, and which move beyond the limited boundaries of the ego to access an enhanced capacity for wisdom, creativity, unconditional love and compassion". I don't think my old professor would regard this as an operational definition.

But consider, too, what happens at the other end of the "belief" spectrum. Here, instead of trying to understand how we use religious or spiritual beliefs to overcome our greatest fear - that of ceasing to be a person - or trying to understand why we do what we do, some psychologists rely on an equally unscientific model of humans as puppets driven by genes, or by bits of the brain, as if our brain is separate from who we are. Such psychologists are always surprised to discover that we know more than we are consciously aware of, when to be conscious of everything we know would be to be overwhelmed by information.

Alongside all this, a vast amount of psychological research is into the trivial and the obvious (just look at the papers every day). This can occasionally be interesting or even useful but, like the psychologists who believe that we are all spiritual or all puppets, those who engage in such research are running away from what human beings really do. Consciously or unconsciously, we are all engaged in creating meaning: that is, interpreting what is happening around us.

Our interpretations determine what we do. Some of them we reveal to other people, but we do not pass on information, ideas or memes in a kind of "pass the parcel". Someone speaks to us and we create a personal version of what was said.

These interpretations can come from only one place: past experience. Since everyone's past experience is different, no two people can ever interpret anything in exactly the same way. There will be as many interpretations of this Comment and Analysis as there are readers of it

There will be as many interpretations of this article as there are readers of it.

The wealth and complexity of the scientific study of meaning, via the discipline of psychology, is immense. It should be relished, not run from. As yet we do not know how brain activity becomes meaning, how the firings of neurons translate into subjective experience. So the only fantasies we need right now are the kind that turn into testable hypotheses.

Dorothy Rowe is a psychologist and author of What Should I Believe? (Routledge)

Not mad or bad, just scared (June 07)

Suppose you're at home awaiting the arrival of the person on whom you feel your life depends. The person is very late and the minutes are flying by. You try to watch television but you can't concentrate. You move from chair to window and window to door. Acting on sudden impulses, you make phone calls, check diaries and traffic news. When a friend phones you for a chat you rudely order them to hang up. The line must be kept clear.

You're exhibiting hyperactivity, impulsiveness, distractibility and emotional lability (short temper). You have been stricken with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Or it may be that you are afraid. The symptoms of ADHD are the symptoms of fear.

ADHD is the mental disorder which millions of children in the developed world have succumbed to in recent years. At the same time the numbers of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder 'have risen astronomically' (NS 19/5/07). The symptoms of this disorder are hyperactivity, irritability (not getting your own way), psychosis (grandiosity/inflated self-esteem), elation (expansive mood), rapid speech, sleep (lack of).These symptoms are an exaggeration in a particular way of the symptoms of ADHD. The person is very, very afraid.

Each of us has our own individual way of dealing with fear, but generally our method follows one of two common patterns. Many of us become quiet when we're very frightened. We're engaged in trying to keep our emotions under control. We want to think clearly about what is happening and to develop some kind of plan for understanding and dealing with the source of our fear. Our theory mightn't be realistic or sensible, but it's our way of trying to keep things under control.

Other people see this quiet thought as being unnecessary. Their policy has always been to act, not waste time thinking. They use action as a way of dealing with their fear.

Adventure movies often feature a thinker and an action man - Spock and Captain Kirk - working effectively together. However, when the fear becomes exceeding great, the Mr Spocks retreat into their private world, while the Captain Kirks become increasingly and less sensibly active.

One of the outstanding differences between the Captain Kirks and the Spocks is their attitudes to what goes on inside them - their thoughts and feelings. The Spocks mightn't always approve of their thoughts and feelings but they're not afraid to go into their inner world, whereas the Captain Kirks might say that they value their emotions, but it is only their admirable emotions they're prepared to acknowledge. They deny their fears, hatreds, jealousies and resentments because they fear them. They try to run away from their feared inner world by being busier and busier, but of course their inner world stays with them. Stephen Fry says that manic-depressive people like himself are enjoying themselves when they're extremely active and energetic, but this wasn't the case with all manic people I've known in my long career as a clinical psychologist. They were always very, very frightened.

It's unlikely that the psychiatrists who've diagnosed these children with bipolar disorder have spent much time in long, detailed conversations with them as I did with my patients. Rather, they diagnosed the children on the basis of their behaviour as seen in the consulting room or described by the parents and teachers. They didn't see the behaviour as the outward signs of great fear. Why did they do this?

We don't simply become afraid. We are afraid of something. That thing can be outside us or inside us - a cancer, or a wicked thought. Children can become frightened of many things, but the one thing that all children fear is adults. Adults have the power to hurt the child, and many of them do. Loving parents and kind teachers know that they might inadvertently frighten a child, and, if so, it's their task to reassure the child. If a child goes on and on being frightened and becomes unable to function normally and be happy, then the people who are responsible for this child's welfare aren't doing their job properly. In saying this I have broken a very powerful rule. Parents, and those who stand in loco parentis, must not be criticised. If a child doesn't behave properly, it's the child who is at fault. If he can't be regarded as naughty and punished, he must be mad, and the madness treated with brain-altering drugs, the effect of which on the developing brain is unknown.

Blaming and punishing the child is a custom found in all societies throughout human history. In her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware the psychoanalyst Alice Miller showed that in the Bible there are many stories of children sacrificing themselves for their parents, but not one story of a parent sacrificing himself for his child. Diagnosing children with ADHD or bipolar disorder requires collusion between the parents and the doctor. They agree that the fault is located in the child. The parents fail to mention, or they underplay, the economic, social and personal difficulties with which they struggle, and the doctor doesn't inquire about these matters because he lacks the skills and resources needed to help the parents. Thus the parents can maintain their illusion that they are good parents trying to deal with an intrinsically flawed child, and the doctor his illusion that he is a good doctor. The child continues to be afraid.

Dorothy Rowe Beyond Fear third edition HarperCollins 2007.

 

5 February 2005:  Like a puppet on the couch

Psychologists and psychiatrists persist in treating us as if we were helpless victims of our biochemistry. This is a disastrous mistake, says Dorothy Rowe.

The Bible says you have free will and you can choose to do whatever you like, but if you make a choice God doesn't approve, He'll clobber you. Most scientists, on the other hand, argue that what you do is nothing but the end result of a long chain of causes over which you have no control worth talking about. Who is right? Are we agents capable of acting on the world anyway we choose or puppets dangling off biochemistry's strings?

Actually neither really fits our daily experience. In my work as a psychologist one of the big questions I ask people is: "How do you operate as a person?" I also listen to people talking to each other about how they operate. The vast majority describe themselves as engaged in making sense of a situation, deciding what to do and acting on those decisions. A few insist that they are being controlled by extraterrestrial powers or voices emanating from their television. Not surprisingly, these people don't manage their lives very well. Sometimes people who see themselves as agents will claim that some aspect of their behaviour is not under their control - "I inherited my bad temper from my father" - but these are merely agents ducking responsibility. The bottom line is that we all know we are agents making choices, but those choices are based on very limited knowledge.

Many psychiatrists and psychologists prefer not to see people as agents. They don't want to recognise that, while objects don't assess an experimenter, people do, and this assessment affects the outcome of the experiment. They prefer to think of themselves as experts who know more about the person as a puppet than the person can ever know about him or herself. So if, when you consult a psychiatrist about your intense sadness, you say: "I feel terribly guilty because I didn't look after my parents properly before they died," you are likely to be told: "That's your illness speaking." To the psychiatrist what you have said is not a statement about how you interpret your situation, but irrational guilt, a symptom of major depressive disorder.

Forty years ago there were only a handful of mental illnesses, and relatively few people were seen as being manipulated by a mental "illness" Now there are innumerable mental disorders, created by psychiatrists. In fact the most recent edition of the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), covers everyone. If every other diagnosis fails, you've always got "personality disorder not otherwise specified".

Psychologists use the DSM to label people, but they also like to pop people into boxes called traits - sociability, curiosity, extroversion and the like. Do you do what you do because you have x amount of sociability, y amount of curiosity and z amount of extroversion?
Unfortunately most popular magazines and national newspapers, New Scientist included, help perpetuate this puppet/agent mistake. So a story about technology presents humans as agents making decisions and acting on them, while one about mental health downgrades humans to puppets. People suffering from mental illness are described as manipulated by something acting in or on their bodies. And out in the world, depressed people are likely to be told by doctors that they have a chemical "imbalance" in the brain caused by a lack of serotonin, despite the fact that no abnormality in serotonin levels has ever been demonstrated to cause depression.

It is clearly all much more complex than they would have us believe. As the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus said: "It is not things in themselves which trouble us, but our opinions of things". In other words what determines our behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us. The human brain does not show us what is actually going on. What neuroscientists like V.S. Ramachandran and Richard Gregory have demonstrated is that our brain creates pictures of what is going on around us, and these pictures depend on what our body is equipped to learn and on what situations we find ourselves in. So if your eye lacks the receptors required to pick up certain wavelengths of light, you will live in a colourless world, and if you are a nomad child living in a yurt, you'll learn to see depth and distance differently from a child brought up in rectangular rooms.

Everything you learn goes into your mind/brain, this ever-changing, interconnected structure of meaning made up of ideas, images and memories. What you call I, me, myself is a complex system in which consciousness is a small, moving torchlight powered by the contents of your meaning structure. You interpret what goes on and make choices, usually without becoming fully conscious, just by putting your interpretation into action.

And the interpretations we choose are always aimed, at least in part, at holding ourselves/our meaning structure together. Of course, this complexity and the individuality of our choices make studying people very difficult. But surely from here on in, research (and treatment) not based on this understanding of ourselves as agent is a complete and utter waste of time.

Dorothy Rowe is a psychologist and writer
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Copyright New Scientist 2005^©
Reproduced with the permission of New Scientist

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