[Buddha-l] Buddhism and Psychology research

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 17:30 -0400, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> But conflating "psychology" with "therapy" is misleading. 

No more misleading than suggesting that such a conflation was made by
anyojne in this discussion.

> The sorts of 
> studies I indicated (and there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of 
> these published every year, a few of them actually important, and some of 
> those are also interesting) are not about therapy, but about how the mind, 
> behavior, brain, etc. work and interact. I see that as akin to what the 
> Abhidharmikas were trying to analyze (with better tools today, but not 
> always clearer conceptual frameworks).

Not only are the tools vastly superior today, but the project of
abhidharma has nothing whatsoever in common with the project of modern
psychology. Most scientific pyschologists these days don't even believe
in minds. They believe in brains, and they are interested in how brains
work. They are scientists, whereas ābhidharmikas were dogmatic religious
apologists, most of whom didn't have a scientific bone in their bodies.
To put abhidharma into the same category as contemporary psychology is
to commit the worst kind of intellectual carelessness.

> In fact, even in the therapeutic community the Freudians (and subsequently 
> most other "therapy" systems) draw a sharp distinction between 
> "neurotics" -- i.e., basically healthy people with some "problems" that 
> could use fixing -- and "psychotics" -- those with problems so severe 
> psychotherapy alone will not be effective.

As with so many of Freud's ideas, this false dichotomy has led to some
very unfortunate consequences. One consequence is that people classed as
psychotics (people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and Fox News
Belief Syndrome) tend to be treated as brains in need of chemical
manipulation, while neurotics are treated to very expensive talk
therapy. What some psychiatrists claim to be discovering is that neither
chemical treatment nor talk therapy is very effective when used alone;
but when a combination is used, results are slightly more promising.

> As for philosophical materialism -- only a mind could come up with such a 
> ludicrous theory.

As I see it, only a complex of billions of neurons could come up with
anything as ingenious as the discovery that "mind" is a vacuous,
non-referring expression that is, at best, a convenient fiction and at
worst a disastrously misleading construct.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
Cell: 414-8757
Fax: 277-6362