Making the past determine the present
Historically, psychoanalysis has made its bread and butter from telling people that events that occurred within the first three years of life pretty much determine how adults turn out. Dawes points out that there is no evidence for this, especially in determining child abuse. He says:
There is no evidence that childhood abuse and neglect will out, or that it will have some permanent effect on adulthood without it first having an effect on adolescence. (219)
Jerome Kagan, who has spent decades studying temperament in young children says: continuity does not imply inevitability. The human organism is highly resilient in the face of deleterious experiences and sufficiently malleable to bounce back, given constructive inputs. Only continual obstacles will prevent an initial bend in a twig from righting itself towards the sun. (218)
The problem is that feeling and believing that one is a victim of early traumatic experience is likely to induce a demoralized state in which the person stops trying to make things right in the present. Or they must wait for years until they develop insight with the therapist's help into what really happened so that these early events no longer haunt their lives. In the meantime, their lives can become worse. Dawes says the therapist should be blamed for putting unscientific ideas in people's heads and teaching them to hate their parents. Where is the evidence that simply learning to blame or hate somebody is therapeutic?
Doll interpretations are not scientific
In the courts, professional psychologists often turn to doll play for as a tool for finding out if a child has been abused. Dawes says there is no psychological evidence for that this works. Currently there is no standardized set of questions for conducting interviews using the dolls or standardized agreement as to how to interpret them.
This lack of validity does not prevent professionals from using the technique. The sad reality is that agencies not directly connected to psychology are using these unscientific techniques, including child protective agencies and the criminal justice system.
Rorschach tests aren't scientific
Whether in or out of court settings, Rorschach tests are very popular among clinicians. This is popularly known as the inkblot test. Vague images are presented that are either the result of actual inkblot patterns resulting from a folded paper with a blot of ink on it or standardly vague images are presented and then interpreted. For example, the clinician interprets whether the client attempts to integrate the entire blot into a single image or uses only part of it or only focuses on small detail. Use of the whole blot is interpreted as needing to form a big picture of grandiosity. Tiny details are interpreted as being an obsessive personality. The content of the imagery also matters. Many people see animals, but too high a proportion of animals indicates immaturity or a lack of imagination. Seeing figures that are part human and part nonhuman like satyrs, cartoon characters, or witches indicates alienation. It's not that these interpretations aren't interesting. But a therapist with a license that requires them to be scientific should not be making untested interpretations while making money off the public's dime.
These tests have been dismissed by scientific psychologists:
In 1959, many of the world's most eminent psychologist were lined up against the use of the Rorschach. Hans Eysenck quoted Lee Cronbach, one of the world's leading experts of psychometric testing said that "the test has repeatedly failed as a prediction of practical criteria". In 1978 Richard H. Davis concluded that "the general lack of predictive validity for the Rorschach raises serious questions about its continued use in clinical practice". (151-152)
After all this, why does it continue among licensed professionals. One reason is that it has intuitive and creative appeal. But another reason could be they are paid well for administering it.
Humanistic Psychology and the Obsession with Feelings and Self-Esteem
I feel, therefore I am
Late in his book, in Chapter 8, Dawes shifts gears from writing about the problems of clinical psychoanalytic therapies to what he unfortunately calls "New Age psychology". What he is describing (the preoccupation with feelings and the obsession with self-esteem) were happening long before the New Age, the beginnings of which I date around 1978. The school of psychology that fits the bill is humanistic psychology. So, I will continue to describe the results of his research,but I have renamed the school as it is an expression of "Humanistic", not New Age psychology.
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