PDF Download Myths of Childhood, by Joel Paris
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Myths of Childhood, by Joel Paris
PDF Download Myths of Childhood, by Joel Paris
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First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
- Sales Rank: #4305483 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Routledge
- Published on: 2000-05-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 6.00" w x .75" l, .99 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 246 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Favoring genetic factors and non-familial environmental factors over early experiences as influences on personality, this book discusses research indicating the importance of genetic predispositions in the causation of mental disorders and describes the need to place greater value on the quality of the relationship between patient and therapist than on the link between the past and the present as a curative factor."
-"Resources in Education
"Joel Paris has written--again--another lucid, synthetic, and provocative book that challenges fundamental assumptions that have dominated our field in the last century. I suspect the author's mission would be accomplised if he riles unswerving practitioners of dogma and stimulates students to quetion traditional concepts and shibboleths. This masterful book deserves to be read by both these groups and would serve as a marvelous catalyst for discussion and reflection.."
-"Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, February, 2003
About the Author
Joel Paris is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
An extremely valuable assessment of where psychiatry stands in the second decade of the 21st century. Make it more available!
By Graham H. Seibert
Psychotherapy emerged at the end of the 19th century, a period in which there was a vast amount of scientific progress being made in the physical sciences. It was the age of Maxwell, Einstein, Darwin and his successors, Durkheim, Boaz and others. It was the time in which Fisher and Spearman were inventing the science of statistics.
Unfortunately, the tools simply did not exist to do a rigorous scientific analysis of the subject at hand, the human animal. Evolutionary psychology, and most especially behavioral genetics were still a century away. Psychology was an empirical practice. Therapists did what they could, observed the results, and attempted to create general theories to explain the connections. It was a hit and miss process. Himself a therapist, Paris credits psychiatry with an overall record of helping its patients. However, he attributes the progress almost entirely to the personal relationship formed between doctor and patient, and the wise guidance that a therapist may give.
Paris concludes that most of the general theories of psychiatry are bunk. Nobody much talks any more of the id, the ego and the superego, or the other constructs created in the early days. The construct that gives Paris the title of this book, "the myth of childhood," is the primacy of childhood experience. This is the theory, dating from classical times, that experiences in early childhood have a lifelong impact. This was the rationale behind Freud and others' practice of delving into childhood experiences looking for explanations of problems that afflicted the adult patient. This was the rationale behind many researchers' segmenting childhood into a sequence of phases, and theorizing that the child had to successfully complete one phase before moving into the next.
The primacy of childhood theory led to a number of spectacular abuses, notably the "recovered memory" phenomenon by which both children and adults found, falsely, that they had been sexually abused in childhood. The theory was that the hurt was so painful, so deep, that it had to be repressed. Repression is another construct that Paris says simply cannot be proven to exist.
The theory went on to hypothesize that the patient could not recover until the past had been brought to light through hypnotherapy or other recovered memory techniques and dealt with. As Paris notes, therapists have the all-too-human tendency towards a confirmation bias. They wanted their hypotheses about individual people to be true. It was quite easy to suggest to patients, especially under hypnosis, that they had been abused. This resulted in some tragically broken homes and long prison terms for child care workers on the basis of stories that had no substance.
Over the past few decades the tools have emerged to support the scientific investigation of theories in the realm of psychology and psychiatry. They have been implemented more in the former. The scientific method would propose the following steps:
1) On the basis of observations, form a hypothesis.
2) Establish a plausible set of cause-and-effect explanations for why the hypothesis might work.
3) Devise an experiment, or series of experiments, to test the hypothesis. Establish and advance the criteria for a successful test. The researcher must be humble. Hypotheses can be disproven experimentally, but they cannot be positively proven.
4) Perform the experiments, measure the results.
5) Published both the experimental data and the results in such a way that they can be independently verified by any other researcher.
These steps are hard to follow when it comes to human subjects. The human being is simply too complex. Moreover, he is a free living organism and the researcher cannot control the variables. People grow up in different houses, attend different schools, are pummeled by different bullies, subjected to different textbooks… The environment simply cannot be controlled. Therefore, psychology especially depends on statistical analyses, when possible with large numbers of subjects. This is always been hard to do. Many researchers, Freud among them, didn't want ugly facts to mess up beautiful theories. They did not try very hard.
Laboratory studies on human beings would be immoral. The federal government set specific limits on human subjects research. But there are three naturally occurring conditions which can easily be studied. Paris notes that researchers have taken advantage of the opportunities, and many modern conclusions in the realm of psychology and psychiatry have come from them.
1) A regression analysis comparing the similarity of adoptive children to their adoptive parents with the similarity of natural children to the same parents, and to the natural parents of the adoptive children.
2) Comparisons of the similarity between fraternal twins and identical twins. The correlations in personality are significantly higher for identical twins. The assumption is that all sets of twins grow up in virtually identical environments.
3) The absolute gold study standard, the Minnesota Twins study. Researchers located 56 pairs of identical twins reared apart. They therefore were genetically identical but reared in different environments. Any correlation above random had to be attributable to genetics instead of environment. As far as intelligence went, genetics explain 70% of the similarity in intelligence. The number was somewhat lower for personality, but still incredibly high as correlations go in the social sciences. Similar data sets on twins have been compiled and used in Scandinavia.
Paris refers often to Steven Pinker, "How the Mind Works." Pinker was apparently one of the pioneers in evolutionary psychology. What is interesting is that relatively few of Paris' quotations are from books written in the 21st century. I located this book in my search for work which would validate Judith Rich Harris' theories in "The Nurture Assumption" and "No Two Alike." Paris is quite attracted to Harris's theories, but Harris herself says she is in no position to do the empirical studies herself. I wondered if anybody had done them. Paris seems to wonder the same thing – it appears that the pace of research has not picked up. There is no rush to verify Pinker's, Harris's and other interesting hypotheses.
Paris writes that "finally, additional evidence for the underlying biological nature of personality comes from transcultural research. The same broad dimensions of personality traits have been found to be measurable and cultures all over the world." I will add that personality tends to be more uniform within cultures. See Geert Hofstede's "Cultures and Organizations" for an account of how IBM dealt with this phenomenon in its global operations. Canadian evolutionary psychologist Philippe Rushton devoted many years to this study, producing the landmark book "Race, Evolution and Behavior."
Paris notes that political conservatives tend to believe more in genetics, whereas liberals are committed to a 100% environmental explanation. It traces back to Locke and Rousseau. The environmental explanation is attractive because it theorizes that there are solutions to the problems at hand. A genetic explanation relegates it to the sadness of the human tragedy, something which generally cannot be remedied through political action. Psychiatrists want to believe they can change things, and they tend to be politically liberal.
One of the appealing features of the book is Paris' confessions of the way he believed in traditional psychotherapy – the Freudians and their successors – and often cited them in his earlier works. When evidence-based approaches came into use, he avidly read the journal papers and changed his opinions. Many others – perhaps a majority in the psychiatric profession – did not. And that is the value of the book.
Paris notes that psychiatry has lost its luster over the past few decades, its prestige, but its theories still retain a vast amount of influence. Nothing has replaced them. He writes about how literature, and especially films, is devoted to the theory of the primacy of childhood. They blame the problems of the adult on traumatic experiences in childhood. Paris does not go into the justice system, which blames childhood abuse for the bad behavior of the adult. It exculpates whole swaths of society, especially minorities, from adherence to the rules of civilization. It is now being done with third-world immigrants entering Europe.
Every other page of the book seems to contain a very quotable paragraph. I have taken some of those that appealed most to me and included them as comments to this review. The reader should appreciate the quality of writing throughout the book.
If I had one recommendation to make to Joel Paris, it would be to price this book to sell to a broader audience. It should be priced comparably to Harris' two books, or popular anthropology titles by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, or evolutionary psychology titles by Pinker, Wade and others. These ideas need wider circulation.
That concludes a five-star review. I greatly enjoyed the book, and recommend it to anybody with an interest in psychiatry or, more broadly, in what is going on today in mental health.
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