Have we witnessed the death of psychology? Is today the moment when no new psychological insights can further explain human interactions?
Sure, we have the potential for neologisms, but aren’t such terms just reinventions of the psychological wheel? Words—just semantics—don’t guarantee any novelty of understanding though they change the familiar metaphors. We can easily argue that the DSM in all its variations is superior to Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut. Yes, that’s long title, and if you read through the work, you might be convinced, even with your present knowledge embedded with Freudian, Jungian, Structuralist, Functionalist, Behaviorist, Gestaltist, or sundry other psychologies, that Burton is onto something that makes sense. You might argue that, think about it, the DSM has clinical analysis and synthesis behind it. Behaviors once thought to be diseases of the mind or psyche are now the subject to rationally devised therapies or to plain dismissal as “normal” behavior.
The question stands: Is psychology dead?
What is the counterargument? That various psychological systems achieve demonstrable effects? But, given Burton’s work, could not demonstrable effects arise in interactions between some practitioner of Burton’s “cures” and the melancholic? Remember, at the time of Burton and both before and after, the populace believed melancholy was THE identifiable malady that motivated its associated behaviors. There was no such verbal entity or description, such as “manic-depressive,” in Burton’s time. For Burton, “…from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free…Melancholy…is a habit, a serious ailment….”
But then again, why dismiss the potential for a new psychology to someday engender new insights and a new way of understanding human interactions. Are there ways that explain our species that we have not yet imagined or discovered? Is there some parallel in how we understand the Standard Model of physics? After all, isn’t the DSM the psychological equivalent of a “Standard Model”?
If the physicists are willing to explore the subatomic world in search of a new particle that might overturn the Standard Model or at least revise it, shouldn’t we look for some human “particle” in our interactions that might overturn the DSM or any of the standardized psychological systems? Not a physical particle, of course, but some as yet undetected mechanism that drives us to think what we think and behave as we do.
Is humility necessary for any endeavor aimed at overturning current understanding? The physicists acknowledge that the Standard Model cannot explain Dark Matter or Dark Energy. Something’s amiss. So, they keep looking in their own clinic of experimentation, the Large Hadron Collider. Bottom quarks, aka Beauty Quarks, rammed in collisions in the LHC have produced in their breakdown more electrons than muons, a result not expected under the Standard Model.
The Ins and Outs of psychology: The new DSM, that is, DSM-5, excludes bereavement from depression. Okay, sure, why not? Bereavement is a, to borrow from Burton, a form of melancholy, a “malady” he includes because all melancholy stems from our mortality. In DSM-5, “gender disorder” is now “gender dysphoria” because the term is “less pejorative,” and it probably qualifies a person for insurance-paid treatment. The Standard Model of human psychology incorporates other changes, many of them reflective of the times.
So, that raises yet another question. Will DSM-6 reflect the next generation’s culture just as DSM-5 reflects the culture of the recent past and The Anatomy of Melancholy reflected the culture of the seventeenth century?
There’s a joke from the end of the twentieth century about the proliferation of lawyers. Essentially, it’s that if the proliferation continues, every other person on the planet will be a lawyer. Could we make a similar joke about the standard models of psychology? Could we surmise that DSM-20 will be as unrecognizable to today’s psychologists as Burton’s analysis of Melancholy? Or, if psychology isn’t really dead, will it metamorphose into a permanent model of humanity that ultimately elucidates what we are and why we act as we do? Is there an explanation awaiting the discovery of a bottom quirk that breaks down to become all the various quirks of human behavior?
Sure, we have the potential for neologisms, but aren’t such terms just reinventions of the psychological wheel? Words—just semantics—don’t guarantee any novelty of understanding though they change the familiar metaphors. We can easily argue that the DSM in all its variations is superior to Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut. Yes, that’s long title, and if you read through the work, you might be convinced, even with your present knowledge embedded with Freudian, Jungian, Structuralist, Functionalist, Behaviorist, Gestaltist, or sundry other psychologies, that Burton is onto something that makes sense. You might argue that, think about it, the DSM has clinical analysis and synthesis behind it. Behaviors once thought to be diseases of the mind or psyche are now the subject to rationally devised therapies or to plain dismissal as “normal” behavior.
The question stands: Is psychology dead?
What is the counterargument? That various psychological systems achieve demonstrable effects? But, given Burton’s work, could not demonstrable effects arise in interactions between some practitioner of Burton’s “cures” and the melancholic? Remember, at the time of Burton and both before and after, the populace believed melancholy was THE identifiable malady that motivated its associated behaviors. There was no such verbal entity or description, such as “manic-depressive,” in Burton’s time. For Burton, “…from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free…Melancholy…is a habit, a serious ailment….”
But then again, why dismiss the potential for a new psychology to someday engender new insights and a new way of understanding human interactions. Are there ways that explain our species that we have not yet imagined or discovered? Is there some parallel in how we understand the Standard Model of physics? After all, isn’t the DSM the psychological equivalent of a “Standard Model”?
If the physicists are willing to explore the subatomic world in search of a new particle that might overturn the Standard Model or at least revise it, shouldn’t we look for some human “particle” in our interactions that might overturn the DSM or any of the standardized psychological systems? Not a physical particle, of course, but some as yet undetected mechanism that drives us to think what we think and behave as we do.
Is humility necessary for any endeavor aimed at overturning current understanding? The physicists acknowledge that the Standard Model cannot explain Dark Matter or Dark Energy. Something’s amiss. So, they keep looking in their own clinic of experimentation, the Large Hadron Collider. Bottom quarks, aka Beauty Quarks, rammed in collisions in the LHC have produced in their breakdown more electrons than muons, a result not expected under the Standard Model.
The Ins and Outs of psychology: The new DSM, that is, DSM-5, excludes bereavement from depression. Okay, sure, why not? Bereavement is a, to borrow from Burton, a form of melancholy, a “malady” he includes because all melancholy stems from our mortality. In DSM-5, “gender disorder” is now “gender dysphoria” because the term is “less pejorative,” and it probably qualifies a person for insurance-paid treatment. The Standard Model of human psychology incorporates other changes, many of them reflective of the times.
So, that raises yet another question. Will DSM-6 reflect the next generation’s culture just as DSM-5 reflects the culture of the recent past and The Anatomy of Melancholy reflected the culture of the seventeenth century?
There’s a joke from the end of the twentieth century about the proliferation of lawyers. Essentially, it’s that if the proliferation continues, every other person on the planet will be a lawyer. Could we make a similar joke about the standard models of psychology? Could we surmise that DSM-20 will be as unrecognizable to today’s psychologists as Burton’s analysis of Melancholy? Or, if psychology isn’t really dead, will it metamorphose into a permanent model of humanity that ultimately elucidates what we are and why we act as we do? Is there an explanation awaiting the discovery of a bottom quirk that breaks down to become all the various quirks of human behavior?
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