Cheryl Fuller has a pair of posts on the brain/behavioral bias in academic clinical psychology and psychiatry:
Steve Diamond made an interesting post last week describing the longstanding tension between the brain/behavioral and the mind/psychodynamic camps in psychology as a civil war. I have written here a number of times about this conflict, one that is at the heart of what is happening in psychiatry as well (if you are interested in the state of affairs in mental health, you really should read 1BoringOldMan who does a superb job of taking apart the trail of studies and inflated promises that got us here). I wish that what we are in were a civil war because then at least there would be active debate and engagement on these issues, but the takeover of psychology by the cognitive behavioral/brain folks is near complete on the academic level so that many younger clinicians have no idea of what is/was missing in their training. My side, the psychodynamic/mind side finds voice mostly through blogs like this one and those of other likeminded psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. But together our voices are far less audible than those of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies and those of mental health professionals whose careers have been built on the effort to topple us. And the average person seeking help has no idea that these issues even exist.
Read the rest of Cheryl's post here.
And here is her follow-up post on the treatment efficacy evidence.
I have great respect for academic psychology and find all parts of the field fascinating. In graduate school, I was fortunate to gain a solid grounding in the major clinical schools, and much to my own surprise, I ended up pursuing psychoanalysis. Not until I was introduced to it by clinicians who really knew what they were doing, did I begin to remotely appreciate the richness and depth of the discipline. It's not something that can really be understood and appreciated without some serious investment in it, including experience both as a patient and as a supervised clinician. I think that the different approaches to the study of mental processes can actually be enriching to all perspectives, but academic psychologists are generally forced to go the sciency route to justify their existence.
Because there is a thriving, fairly sizable psychoanalytic community in Chicago, I don't feel quite the sense of isolation Cheryl feels. For training nearby we have the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, the CG Jung Institute and the free-standing graduate schools, all of which offer psychoanalytic education opportunities. There are also associations that offer lectures and conferences providing opportunities for connection with other clinicians.
I do think it would be a great help if there were more forums available for respectful crosstalk between practitioners working from different clinical perspectives, like this, for example. Unfortunately, such opportunities are anything but the norm.
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