These Mind Doctors Need Help!
● Your children fight with one another? They’re just showing they love you! “If you are a harried parent,” two educational psychologists say, “whose children seem to be fighting all the time, take heart. They probably are just showing their love for you.” They are vying for parental affection. “Children fight for a place in the sun. They want to be the favorite of the parents.” Their fighting, the psychologists say, is their way of asking parents this question: “Do you really love me?” Brawls as a means of communicating love? Hardly!
● Lonely? Take off your clothes. This folly is offered by some psychologists. “Sharing nudity is one way of getting rid of the terrible feeling that one is all alone in the world. . . . nude-encounter therapy is a novel new way of helping people feel comfortable with themselves and others.” One psychologist, for $75 per person, offers a general nudity session open to all; an advanced nudity session for “creative mating” for couples; a nudity session for singles who are “tired of playing the dating game and wish to meet under more transparent circumstances.” What’s really transparent is, he’s helping his pocketbook and harming his clients.
● “A nation-wide survey,” “Science News” magazine said, “has disclosed that more than one in twenty male, Ph.D. psychologists have had sexual intercourse with their patients.” With female psychologists the rate is much lower. This despite a formal American Psychological Association decree that “sexual intimacies are unethical” and psychologists must avoid exploiting their clients. One disapproving psychologist said that erotic contact with the client “reflects pathological needs on the part of the therapist.”
● Most persons deplore the rising tide of violence. One psychiatrist said it’s good for you. “Rioting is healthy. Society needs aggressive outlets.” He said that in Belfast during the riots there was a decrease in depressive illnesses among those who rioted, but neuroses increased in those who did not participate. When the government banned marches that precipitated outbreaks of violence, he said: “It was pure stupidity to ban all marches . . . The government was clearly in need of psychiatric help.” This psychiatrist is the one who needs help.
● You think that when a football player who has made a touchdown spikes or hurls the ball onto the ground, he is expressing his exuberance at scoring? That’s a superficial judgment, according to a research psychiatrist. The player loves the game because it gives him money and recognition; he hates it because it results in injury and humiliation. When he scores and prances in the end zone he is trampling on his opponents, and in spiking the ball he slams it down on the heads of his enemies. “To a psychiatrist these are manifestations of a love-hate relationship,” this therapist says. “In the act of spiking, the man is responding directly to the despair or contempt he has for the work on which he is most dependent.” This psychiatrist is “seeing things.” Common sense sees the obvious: the player is thrilled over scoring.
● Both psychologists and psychiatrists borrow respectability and prestige from the breathtaking achievements of such sciences as mathematics, chemistry, biology and physics, according to an article in “Maclean’s” magazine. Calling their professions “science” and associating their bedlam of contradictory speculations with natural sciences based on experimental evidence is hardly convincing. The column in “Maclean’s” concludes: “When a psychiatrist’s, sociologist’s, or psychologist’s advice is given the same weight as a physicist’s, dentist’s or engineer’s, we are deluding ourselves only a little less than those who consulted the entrails of a sheep or the Oracle of Delphi.”