Tom Cruise has made a lot of waves lately with his accusations that psychology is a “pseudo-science”. In it’s place, of course, he advocates the practice of Scientology. This stuff about pseudo-science is a poor way to phrase what might otherwise be a very strong argument. What I mean by that is that whatever truth there may be in that attack on psychology, Scientology could doubly be called a pseudo-science. After all, it was created by a science-fiction writer, and sci-fi relies heavily on the distortions of science for dramatic purposes.
And yet, for some reason, Cruise’s argument has never been cut off at the knees, no matter how many times he’s championed it on tv. Why is this? In my opinion, it seems like we all have at least a small nagging doubt about psychology. It’s not like other hard sciences, such as engineering. The psyche isn’t something any of us can really see or measure. We can only know it by it’s effects. And this is precisely where Scientology swoops in: it’s almost wholy focused on the effects, rather than the psyche itself. Whether right or wrong, it’s picture of the mind is extremely simple and barely even a topic of consideration.
Meanwhile, an army of psychologists, sociologists, behavioral and neuroscientists have been studying the mind-brain for over a century. And all we have to show for it is an increasingly complex and tangled mess of theories, models and possibilities. And these are all subject to change at a moment’s notice with the arrival of new research and theories.
So what are we as ordinary people to think? Of course psychology & psychiatry are suspect. Nevermind the increasing amount of mind-altering pharmaceuticals that are marketed to solve all the problems that psychology tells us we have. A lot of people suspect it’s a trap, but don’t know how to articulate the why or how. So when Tom Cruise gets on tv and talks about how “dangerous” psychology is and how he just wants to help people, we’re bound to have a reaction. He’s touching on a sore spot for a lot of us. But does that mean he’s right?
If you study the work of L. Ron Hubbard and it’s conceptual origins, you’re going to find without any doubt that his work is deeply rooted in psychology. Really, Dianetics in its most basic form is nothing more than a system of therapy. Hubbard basically tried to put something together that he could get results with, and then stuck with it. People generally talk about how he incorporated as a church to get tax relief, but I suspect perhaps it’s more than this. By turning his system of therapy into a religion, he took it out of the stream of psychology. In other words, if his work was just another aspect of psychological discourse, it would be subject to decades of research and revision. If you look at most psychology from the 1950’s and 60’s, you’ll find that a lot of it has been “discredited” according to modern views. Dianetics would have almost certainly gone the same way. But turning his system of therapy into the Church of Scientology allowed him to escape this cycle and maintain his system intact against outside influence.
But that doesn’t answer the question of the “value” of Scientology though, does it? The value I see in it is that it doesn’t get hung up on complicated shifting theories of the mind, and instead focuses on controlling outcomes. This of course is also it’s danger: a simplistic explanation which doesn’t allow for other possibilities or for growth. Any religion or ideology that doesn’t do that is functionally dead, in my opinion - no matter how effective it may be in the short term.
If I were Scientology’s marketing team trying to get the word out and really challenge psychology, here’s what I would do. I would simply admit to being a weird religion with crazy beliefs. And then I would go through psychology point for point and show how psychology itself is no different: a religion with crazy beliefs. We just happen to have culturally accepted psychology and given it’s practitioners power in our society. It’s almost totally arbitrary. It could just as easily have been Scientology in an alternate universe - and the Scientologists understand this all too well. If you really delve into psychology, you quickly find yourself on the shifting ground of unproveable mysticism and high weirdness. Are archetypes really any less “magical” than body thetans? Is saying that you’re a “clear” or an “operating thetan” substantially any different from saying that somebody is a manic-depressive? Both psychology and Scientology are merely models, interlocking systems of theories which allow us to make observations, predictions and modify behavior accordingly. As models, both are right and both are wrong. They simply use different terminology and methods to get people interested and hooked. If they were smart they would really play on this nagging anti-establishment distrust of psychology, and say: If both are religions, why not take responsibility for yourself and choose which one you’ll follow based on results?
Is this supposed to be a defense of Scientology? Is this supposed to be an attack on psychology? Neither are really accurate. I’m simply rephrasing the debate in what I see as clearer language than what’s been applied up till now.
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9 Comments
Bravo. This is well articulated. I feel like this is really does pin down what many of the issues in the debate are.
One other issue, here, though is the question of personal psychological autonomy and effective functioning. And on the surface, the establishment of psychiatry, in so much as it seems to label everything under the sun as some form of “disorder” that must be treated by a prescription drug and years of dependency on a shrink seems to thwart our ability to heal from, manage and overcome our psychological issues for ourselves. Sure, you can get over depression by taking Paxil or whatever the newest drug is, but you are dependent on the drug–you haven’t really overcome it, you’ve just been given a crutch to manage it with. Sure, you can walk around and it looks like you do it just as well as the person with out the crutch, but take it away and you’re back on your knees. Scientology promises to give you a technique that, once learned, allows you to deal with this shit on your own. And that’s mighty damn appealing, especially when many of us seem to suspect that there was a time when folks were more self-reliant psychologically and that people back then must have been doing something differently or known something that we don’t. Unfortunately, the church offering this technique wants you very much to be dependent on it far past the point where you’ve learned how to use self-hypnosis (auditing) in order to take the “charge” off past hurts and buoy your confidence and ability to handle whatever else might come up.
The various forms of cognitive therapy also give you a technique (analyzing the thoughts that lead you to get depressed, pissed off, etc., disputing them if they have no rational basis and then consciously chooosing to engage in different behavior and more rational thoughts) and in general it does equip people to handle their own shit without a pill bottle and decades of psychotherapy. But the impression that is fostered by our media is you’ve got to spend years with a shrink babbling away until you’ve talked out every awful thing that ever happened to you or you have to take a drug or both. And that ain’t necessarily true.
Yeah those are good points that I left out. Thanks. I want to come back to the whole disorder-drug cycle at some point too, but I’m trying to formulate some other thoughts on it before doing so. You’re definitely right though that Scientology at least *promises* effects you can manage on your own, while pharmaceuticals give you an external source of relief. The whole argument of “sustainability” is a good one here: which can you perpetuate on it’s own - the answer’s obvious.
I think you touched on an interesting point here about institutional reliance also. While pretending to offer you self-reliance, Scientology trains you to look to them for the next step, and correction. Psychiatry as well says you can’t do this on your own, you don’t have a degree or a medical doctorate. And that’s definitely one of the things I like about the Free Zoners - is that they are trying to take the Scientology techniques and give them freely so people can be truly self-sufficient on them (whether or not you think the techniques are any good). Certainly there are psychologists and psychiatrists though who do try to teach techniques freely as well.
I’m sympathetic to Scientology in that it attempts to be empirical. But, of course, you also have to buy into all that other coercive bullshit. I don’t know anything about the Free Zoners (other than what I’ve learned in Tim’s blog), but perhaps they have a promising approach?
Cruise’s diatribes against psychology usually incorporate statements that do not survive fact checking. Since fact checking is not popular in today’s media, it’s not surprising that he hasn’t been thoroughly demolished while in the spotlight.
I wouldn’t call it a mess; complex, yes, but the body of knowledge is navigable. With the development of functional MRI, we have been able to measure many aspects of brain function. You can do controlled studies on principles of psychology and psychiatry; there was a recent result that shows that “talk therapy” is just as good at curing depression as Prozac, and has longer-lasting effects.
If someone does a controlled study that compares Scientology to an equivalent belief-set with similar mechanisms (e.g. blaming your parents for your problems– one Scientology notion is “you have these problems because your parents thought about aborting you when you were in the womb”) with some different trappings than thetans and auditing, and there’s a significant difference in favor of Xemu et al, then I’ll take another look at Scientology. I doubt that the CoS would be willing to submit to an unbiased controlled study, though.
Then by all means, please navigate it….
I do; any time I’m curious about some aspect of it. Right now my interest is memetics; Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind is very accessible, and Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine is quite good. For a very thick and interesting tome on meditation and consciousness by a neurologist who’s studied Zen meditation, try Zen and the Brain, by James H Austin; the main problem with that book is that it’s too heavy to carry around as a casual read.
A subscription to Scientific American is an excellent way to keep up on new developments in all walks of science without having to become an expert just to translate the jargon.
That’s pretty much exactly my point about Scientology. Hubbard mapped out a particular path from all these different areas, and then turned it into a religion. Imagine Blackmore turned her work into a religion - it would allow her to never have to change, update or improve her ideas. There would be no more peer review, no more scientific journals - all just pronouncements and matters of faith.
i would challenge psychiatry in this simple way. show me one thing you do to aleviate the symptoms of say, a phobia or a compulsion. no medicating now, that`s cheating. there is no method of treatment in the dsm iv or any psychology text.
if you insist on watching an arguement between tom cruise and brooke shields as a way of forming an understanding of what works in the mind sciences then you deserve what you get.
Flooding, cognitve therapy, etc… all work without meds…
BUT Scientology IS (in many ways) cognitive therapy just insulated from critics by its religion status. Flooding catharsis etc…all of ‘em in there…
Tom Cruise is RIGHT… scientology did help him…a cognitive therapist wouldve done the same…scientology just got to him first