Comments on: Scientology vs. Psychology

By: aloxes

aloxes — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 15:36:00 +0000

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

By: alistair

alistair — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 18:43:35 +0000

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.

By: Occult Investigator

Occult Investigator — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 15:22:17 +0000

I do; any time Iâ€™m curious about some aspect of it.

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.

By: Max Kaehn

Max Kaehn — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 06:31:12 +0000

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.

By: Occult Investigator

Occult Investigator — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 04:52:59 +0000

I wouldnâ€™t call it a mess; complex, yes, but the body of knowledge is navigable.

Then by all means, please navigate it….

By: Max Kaehn

Max Kaehn — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 04:15:29 +0000

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.

“[A]n 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.”

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.

By: slomo

slomo — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:10:32 +0000

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?

By: Occult Investigator

Occult Investigator — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 22:52:15 +0000

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.

By: hebrides

hebrides — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 19:37:50 +0000

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.