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The Boulder Model

The scientist practitioner model was not simply touted as the best in my Counseling program, but was shown to be the only one that was worthy of attention. While I understand that this inculcation for 2 years into this model has molded my thoughts to a significant extent, I will still offer my support of this model.

I have worked as a practitioner, I have worked as a scientist, and bringing the two together is the best way to further a useful and practical science of psychology. As I touched on in last week’s readings, I think that while psychologists can learn from biologists, it is not appropriate for them to try and be them. This sentiment is echoed in Albee’s writings. The medical model is not what is best for either psychologists, or much of the mental health industry (whether it should be an industry at all is a question for another day). By treating everything as a disease (which can be beneficial, in the right context), we have given away the strength of the “talking cure” and moved to giving psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses the keys to the kingdom – why try to solve any of my issues when I can just walk into a clinic and get put on a pill carousel until I find the one that feels best, and makes the pain go away the quickest?

Clinicians need to receive scientific training. It prevents them from hucking pseudoscience at their patients, which, unfortunately, is where much of the science of psychology stemmed from. At the same time, clinicians must employ art if they are to connect meaningfully with their patients. The science must back up their methods, but if there is to be meaningful and positive change for the patient, the practitioner must know how to go about the science in an artful manner.

At the end of the day, I do not know how psychology disentangles itself from the clutches of psychiatry and the insurance reimbursement model that it has so willingly embraced. Firstly, I think that there are plenty who do not want to disengage. I think it is necessary, as it is the only way to take our foot off the gas of over-prescribing.

The scientist-practitioner model has made many positive contributions to the field of psychology, while also dragging it in the wrong direction on a number of issues. The pitfalls and weaknesses of the profession, at least in the world of practice, are not issues that can be solved by an individual, or even a single institution. Continuing to eschew the toxic world of for-profit healthcare that is dependent on immediate diagnoses and next to immediate (medical) cures for psychological distress is, in my estimation, the most important place for us to deposit our energy.

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Thoughts on Academic Testing During COVID

I address this more from the perspective of learning and less from the perspective of a display of knowledge. If the goal of university is to create good workers, then I believe open note/book is best, as it allows the student to approximate an environment in which they would be performing in an office. My qualm with this is – is this really what university should be for? It certainly has been during my MS and (short beginning of Ph.D) programs. If the student is coming in with the explicit goal of a college degree being to get them a higher paying job than would otherwise have been possible, I think that open book/note quizzes are best for the student. If the student comes in with the explicit goal of learning, regardless of the applicability of that learning to a job, then I believe that close book/note would be better.

At the same time, through COVID, I think that it is rather obvious that cheating has become (more?) rampant, as cheating is far easier on online courses than in person. I believe that open notes/book reduces this cheating enormously, and improves the validity and reliability of the quiz scores.

At the end of the day, I think that the question of being able to use material on a quiz/exam can only be answered in context of the purpose of the course. If the goal of the class is to establish a base of knowledge that the student will need as a foundation for other courses, I think that closed materials is best, as it forces the student to commit the information to memory, thus (hopefully) making this foundation firmer and easier to access in following courses. This is not the goal of all courses, and some courses, I believe, are made better by allowing the student to access materials, as it is unreasonable, or perhaps purposeless, to ask them to memorize certain materials.

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Thoughts on Searle’s 1980 article “Minds, brains and programs.”

In reading through this article, there were more than a few thoughts, questions, issues and otherwise that presented themselves to me. The first thing that I found myself disagreeing with Searle was less of a disagreement with what he said and more of a disagreement with one of his unsaid assumptions. In his response to “The Combination Reply” from Berkeley and Stanford, he discusses intentionality as it relates to the “mental” world. While there is a definition given from Newell, as “the essence of the mental is the operation of a physical symbol system” I did not find this helpful in understanding what the mental is in humans. While this makes sense within a mechanistic and operationalized understanding of a robot, or within something “artificial” (nonhuman) I find that this understanding of the mental is not sufficient to understand human functioning. If we are to provide something that is insufficient in describing the human nature of “mentality” then I think it is fair to say that, when using this definition to stats if there was mentality in the robot, it, of a necessity, will be fundamentally different from what a human possesses. To try and make this more succinct, I think that the question of human mental processes needs to be answered more fully, as a prerequisite, before we can begin to understand and converse on what the nature of a program would look like that possesses intentionality and mentality.

One of the replies that I found summed up one of my questions that appeared much earlier in the article than did this reply was the “many mansions reply” from Berkeley. Here, the point was made that this question of strong AI would eventually be moved past, given the astronomical leaps in technology that would eventually be made. Here, I think that this reply is much stronger than Searle’s response. The question of AI HAS changed drastically in the over 40 years that have passed since this article was published. Algorithms now pass for a “weak” AI that plays an intimate role in many societies, including American. What I think this does is change how this article should be read. If we are to read this through the lens of 2021, it should not be read as a discussion on what is possible and what is probable as it comes to AI, but what the implications for our understanding of how humans approach their own understanding of their own “mentality” “intentionality” and, on a more global level, their essential humanity. Should AI be something that approximates human cognition, or perhaps surpasses it, or should it be something completely different, that is used analogously to human cognition? As I touched on earlier, I think that this is a question that we should not even begin to address, as the question of what human cognition and intentionality is, what it is used for and why we should be approximating/creating a new form of it are all questions that need to be answered if we are to ethically answer the question of what AI is, and what it should be used for.

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Bishops, Biden and the Eucharist

Before I begin to write about the controversy that has engulfed American Catholicism (and much of America that is not Catholic), I feel that it is only right for me to admit that I am, at best, a very bad Catholic. There are many ecumenical teachings that I am unable to incorporate into my own beliefs, I have (and still do in many ways) lived in sin and I am at odds with some of the most fundamental teachings of not only the Catholic church, but Christianity as a whole. At the same time, I do still consider myself to be a Catholic – perhaps in a way not so different from the way that Biden does.

For those who may be unaware, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops recently met and discussed possible changes to the Eucharist, with much of the purported conversation said to be on changes to who may be eligible to receive the Eucharist. For those of you who are Christians but not Catholic, this is of especial importance to Catholics, as the belief is not that the Eucharist is a symbolic meal, but the literal incarnation of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and participating in this sacrament brings one closer to Christ Himself (to the best of my limited understanding).

This then leads us to the controversy around President Joe Biden. Biden will often, both on the campaign trail and otherwise, talk about his personal life as a devout Catholic, and how it influences his life on a wide scale. However, one of the belief that Biden holds in his public life is in the legal right of women to have access to abortions. For many Catholics, this public action and support by Biden is in direct contradiction to Catholic teaching and contributes to the wholesale genocide of American pre-born children.

As an aside, in order to be transparent, I should say that I am not pro-life (if you are at all interested, you can read my thoughts on this in my essay “The Sanctity of Suicide”). At the same time, I am anti-abortion. For me, the difference comes down in two essential steps – I believe that life begins at conception, and I believe that if one is to condone the killing of a human life (specifically suicide), there needs to be a conscious decision made, which is completely impossible for a pre-born infant.

Due to Biden’s support of the legality of abortion, many Catholics believe that Biden goes in direct contradiction of the teachings of the Catholic Church – this action is one that many believe should bar Biden from participating in Communion, which is in many ways removing him from the ability to actively participate in the Catholic tradition.

At the end of the day, I do believe that Biden should be refused the Eucharist, due to his active and wilful denial of the teachings of the Catholic Church. I do not believe that there is a single practicing Catholic on this planet who can be said to be in full agreement with the teachings of the Catholic Church (I would be hard pressed to even say that the Pope himself does), the main difference in Biden and, say, someone like me, is Biden’s public and political role. Someone condoning this wholesale slaughter of innocent life that is unable to defend itself is not someone who I believe should be allowed to be in communion with the Catholic Church.

And, to be honest, someone as bad of a Catholic as myself? I am not sure that I deserve to be in communion either. Perhaps, for both Biden and myself, as well as anyone else out there who considers themself to be a Catholic (and particularly those that, like me, consider themselves to be bad Catholics on their best day), the question is not whether or not we deserve to be in communion – not whether we are worthy of being in communion with Christ, but what promotes the most Christ like behavior. And, to be honest, I do not know what the answer to that question is.

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On the Necessity of Ritual War

Many of us will have either heard, or seen a dramatized version, of the young tribal man, who having just finished puberty, is snatched out of his bed by the tribal elders and sent to complete some daunting task, often on his own and in legitimate danger of losing his life. While to some of us this may seem like something out of a horror story and in opposition to our modern sensibilities, there is a beauty and even necessity in these rituals that has been lost in our modern society.

In ancient mythology, there was a concept of the “Puer Eternaus” which was a god of eternally childlike visage. Carl Jung appropriated this term to denote the individual that occupies the body of a man but has never truly matured past the adolescent. Speaking from personal experience both internally and from others in my life, as well as countless anecdotes, I believe that it is fair to say that this is a concerning phenomenon that plagues much of our modern culture.

For myself, for half a decade I struggled with being the “Puer Eternaus” myself. I fell into this mode of being through my addiction – through a constant intoxication that prevented the both my desire and ability to engage in voluntary suffering, the necessary ingredient into becoming a man (which I touch on in other posts). At the age of 23, I made the decision to get sober, and one of the steps in this process was attending therapy. One of the first things I was told was that I had not matured beyond 15 years old. While I had been told this many times, it was the shock of hearing it from a trained and seasoned professional that caused me to begin to challenge my adolescent behaviors. I am still working on this, even after 3 years of sobriety – I imagine that I will be for decades to come.

Another term described by Jung and one that I think is prevalent in today’s proliferation of these adolescent men is the idea of the Devouring Mother. While he offers an understanding of this term that is certainly more comprehensive, intelligent and lasting than mine, I am obligated to offer my own description, as I do not completely agree with the one offered by Jung. For me, what this term represents is a parent, of any gender who, in perhaps good faith, overbears on the child to the degree that thet do not have the chance to mature past their necessity to rely on the parent for all things – all answers, physical necessities and emotional security. While this is (I believe) relatively in line with Jung’s definition, I want to expand this understanding. While there is an immense amount of responsibility to be placed at the feet of parents who play a role in the stunting of their child’s growth, I believe that there are two more aspects of the Devouring Mother that have emerged in our culture today.

The first is, again, within the individual. However, this does not lay at the feet of the parent but of the child. Again, here I am speaking from some personal insight. If this is my own foible and no others, then so be it, but I do believe that there are other men out there who have struggled with something similar. Here, I would like to call this new aspect Starving Loneliness. Even when a child has a plethora of friends, this phenomenon can begin to encompass their lives. This loneliness that seeks to devour everything in its path is spurred by arrogance. This arrogance is centered on the belief, usually with little to no proof, that the child is better than the others around them. The child may imagine themselves as the hero of their lives, often conceptualizing their lives as a story. In this, the child becomes to believe that they are the hero and thus above the others around them and likely entitled to things that others are expected to earn. This hero complex then follows this intentionally lonely child throughout their lives, until they are challenged to break it through some external cause. If there is no external force that causes the child to move past this phase of life, then there will be no end to it.

The second new development of the Devouring Mother that I believe has manifested since Jung developed this term is based not in the individual, but in Western culture as a whole, particularly American culture. This second development is a bit of a paradoxical one. In our culture today, there is a prevailing belief that both men and women should be self sufficient, independent to a degree rarely seen in history and contribute, in a meaningful way, to society (although this “meaningfulness” is left intentionally opaque). These requirements by our society, for a not insignificant portion of our young people, are simply unattainable, either in part or whole, in our modern society. When we are taught that we are to achieve certain things, which for many are impossible, the lives of our young people seem to indicate that the opposite will instead be enacted. If one is prevented by the culture at large from contributing in a meaningful way that is idiosyncratic to their nature, then they will instead use their idiosyncracies to tear down the structures in their way. If they are unable to become independent to such an insane degree as is espoused by our society today, then they will go to college for a decade, or live with their parents into their thirties, or find a way to live off the goodwill of others.

In order to counteract this inability to leave our cultural adolescence where it belongs, one aspect of the solution will lie in reestablishing meaningful, challenging (perhaps mortally so) ritual into the lives of our adolescents. However, this immediately poses the question of what these rituals should look like today. They will not look like living in the savannah, surviving off the land and avoiding predators. They will not look like going raiding with your Viking fathers. What, then, will they look like? How can we integrate our modern culture and infrastructure to create an environment that can be used in such a way so as to encourage those in our society to leave their childhoods behind and take on the responsibilities of modern society adulthood? Or do we need to redefine these responsibilities?

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Montana Memorial Day

On the rooftop,
Where the sunshine floats, and
The clouds are sovereign.

On the sidewalk,
Where the people chatter, and
The pigeons interrupt.

On the road,
Where the bikes breeze by, and
The storefronts beckon.

On the mountaintop,
Where the treetops sing, and
The snowmelt prepares the way.

On the porch,
Where the grandparents nap, and
The dog steals dinner.

On the bed,
Where the lovers meet, and
The moon presses back the night.

A Montana Memorial Day

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On Contentment

I should clarify what the title hints at – here, I will not necessarily be talking about contentment as a concept, but how it manifests in my own life. I do so in order to better understand why I act the way I do, and I do this for my own benefit. If you would still like to read, please do, but I ask that you not forget who this essay is for – any pertinence it may have for you is a coincidence, albeit a happy one.

One of the first things that I realized when trying to understand why I do what I do is that, while I certainly spent too much time experimenting if it was actually the case or not, my life cannot find purpose through the pursuit of happiness, as defined as hedonism. Where, then, do I find the motivation to achieve? (Whether achievement is a worthy goal is a conversation for another day). For many years, I believed that I kept in my search of achievement in order to find contentment – to find joy in the knowledge that I am satisfied with where I am, literally and otherwise. However, as I have tried to pay more attention to the actions that I take, these very actions hint that this is not the case, and that no level of achievement will satisfy – no earthly pleasures will give me the contentment that I so vociferously strive for.

If contentment, for me, can be defined as the satisfaction with what I have achieved and the dissipation of striving for something more, for something greater, than what is it that prevents me from coming to the end of this striving?

There are many items that I could point to within our society at large that play a role in this never ending striving. It is not these, however, but my own idiosyncrasies that I wish to explore here. I think perhaps the strongest factor preventing me from coming to the end of this road is my desire, sometimes verging on need, for external validation. This began at a very young age, with my behaviors (usually) in line with my parents and other authority figures, as doing what they wanted was the surest way to garner that external “pat on the back.” While I will certainly always seek the approval of my mother and father, whom I love more than all my earthly possessions, it is not their approval that now drives my continual striving. In many ways, I now seek an internalized definition of that same external approval – an incredibly pernicious development. No matter the level or excess of praise that I receive from others, it will only raise the bar that I have built within myself. This continual raising of the bar pulls me up along with it, but the unintended consequence of this is that, at some point in my life, a noose seems to have manifested on the bar; as I climb towards whatever subjective definition of success I have created, the slack in the noose disappears.

Following this, there is the obvious next question: if I am able to recognize this bar within myself, why not simply stop grasping at it? At the core, I think it is my belief that in letting go of the bar of success, there will inevitably be a drop, and this drop will lead into the realm of mediocrity. And of what use is contentment if it is simply mediocre? How can I find a contentment that allows me to let go of the bar and yet still not find myself drowned in the sea of mediocrity? (The elitism that I sense emanating from this sentence is something that I hope to confront one day).

Where is the answer to this question? I am not sure, but I sense that it lies in my desire for external affirmation and praise. I do not believe that the answer is in destroying this desire within in me, but finding a way to redirect it. It cannot be defined by me, as I will always find a way to shift the definition in order to never end my search. It cannot be a search that lies within society at large, for the dangers of seeking approval from the capricious nature of “society” is one that finds itself acted out again and again. I cannot even seek it from my loved ones, for this will make the relationships into a unidimensional act, with no room for the multifaceted nature that a true relationship provides. At the end, I believe that I need to seek approval from God – under which definition of God, and how to do this remains a mystery, but a mystery that fascinates me.

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The Far Side of Reason

As someone who has spent a significant amount of time in both a deeply religious and belief based world and one that is verging on what can be called scientism, I have struggled, at times quite deeply, with the seemingly irreconcilable nature of these two modalities of thinking.

Faith and belief, even in the face of my years conducting research and being ingrained in the scientific method is something that has always fascinated me. Beyond that, it has been something that I have always felt just out of my reach, just too far of a leap for me to make. Seeing those who fully believed, who had a deep faith that colored all facets of their lives, made me long for this grounding to live my own life in.

Within this longing, I perhaps saw too great a dichotomy between the world of science and the world of belief – in my particular case, in Catholicism. How could a world that is 4.5 billion years old, in a universe that is almost 14 billion years old, be defined in a book that only addresses 15,000 years at most? While perhaps not articulated at the time, it was this conflict that first brought me out of my belief and into a world that was not even defined by a lack of belief, but by a constant searching.

Throughout the millennia, from Plato to Saint Augustine to Kierkegaard to Nietzsche (and far beyond), there have been thinkers who have been both able and unable to reconcile the world of belief and the world of material knowledge. I am far from unique on this topic – it was my biggest struggle for many years, and still follows me today, and I am grateful for those teachers and thinkers who have come before me and laid the groundwork for my own discovery.

Perhaps the most important lesson that I have come to learn is defined by the saying, which I steal from Bishop Robert Barron, that true faith is found on the far side of reason.

To me, this means that we have a duty to engage in a structured, disciplined and reasonable attempt to understand the world around us. This activity does not require the Bible, the Torah or any other religious text (although many religious beliefs from these texts are present, in an implicit manner, in the reason that we do engage in). It is only after, in good faith, that we have run up against the limits of human reason and understanding that a true, living faith can find its way into our lives.

This is a faith that I find I can comfortably sit within. It is not a faith that I have yet defined with definitions provided by any major religious institution, but it is certainly one that enrichens my life and my understanding of the world around me. This is what faith has done for me – it is not something that I seek in order to abate the terror of death, to justify the primacy of my worldview or even provide me comfort. In many ways, the faith that I have found has made me far more uncomfortable than I was before. No. For me, faith is the ability to see my life in a manner that is more than simply reasonable or logical, something that is based in the material world, something that is defined by no more than the scientific method. Perhaps this is a way for me to cope with the materialistic and painfully capitalistic world that we find ourselves in. Even if this is the case, I believe that it is so much more than that as well – and the reason that I believe that is, well, faith.

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The Primacy of the Unknowable

It often seems that, when talking about what we should believe in, the prevailing consensus in the Western world is that we should only place faith in things that are knowable – things that are scientifically provable. To state that we experienced a vision from a deceased relative is pathologized, and often diagnosed. To state that we believe in an all powerful and all knowing God is scoffed at in our secularized society. To state that we are convinced of something that has no proof, as defined by our “scientific” age is to announce that we should not be taken seriously by the majority of society.

As a practicing therapist, I find that this manifests most often in what are called “evidence based practices” or EBP’s. These are heavily researched approaches to therapy and counseling, such as DBT and CBT, that have displayed scientific and documentable evidence that they produce improved outcomes in the majority of patients. What I am not saying is that these EBP’s are methods that we should eschew. However, I do believe that the presence of these modalities have pushed the art of therapy into the corners, and have made the art of therapy into something that is much more often something that companies and insurance agencies can turn into numbers, dollars and, most importantly, profit.

This marginalizing of the art of psychotherapy is, I believe, a symptom of the greater issue of our modern society’s unwillingness and sometimes downright hostility to accept that there are things in this world that affect us deeply, and oftentimes only individually, with no explanation in the material and observable world. These can be experiences of the paranormal, an intimate unspoken connection with a stranger on a bus, a powerful religious experience either individually or as a community and a number of other things that, due to their very nature, elude a description that I would be able to provide.

It is these things, these unobservable and often unexplainable experiences that comprise the most important and moving aspects of human life. This is not to deny the importance scientific progress – the material world is not diminished in importance by the existence of the metaphysical and interior world. But we should likewise not let our reliance of the material world dim the beauty and integrally important world of the unknowable either.

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The Sanctity of Suicide

As a therapist working in mental health, this statement is tantamount to heresy. I will always, as a therapist, do all that I can to help my patients recognize the gift that life is, to keep them safe and alive. This, however, is in my professional role, my role as an individual. As a society, I think that it is time that we recognize the power that suicide gives a person.

Before making my case as to why suicide may be a decision to lauded rather than eschewed, I want to highlight that I believe that there is no greater gift than the gift of life, and that, in the majority (perhaps the vast majority) of cases, suicide is something that we should work to avoid, both in ourselves and in the lives of others. Many times, suicide is an option that people will take as a response to acute suffering – the loss of a job or home, the dissolution of an integral relationship, the suicide of another person in our lives. In these cases, it is our ethical obligation to intervene and provide a reminder that acute pain does not last forever.

What then, should we say when someone chooses suicide as an answer to a chronic pain? To someone suffering with MS, who wants to end their life on their terms, in a way that does not expose their children to the suffering that it would cause. To someone with Alzheimer’s, who remembers most things still, and wants to die with their memories intact, remembering their own wife, husband, son or daughter? To the veteran, who comes home with multiple limbs and friends missing, who has decided that she no longer wants to live in her current state? It is easy to use religion and the fear of Hell as the reason to not take one’s own life. Perhaps a loving God, who sees the pain in His child that was so great that they had to take their own life would not punish them for simply being in pain. This, however, is a theological question far beyond my expertise.

At a very basic level, I believe that suicide is the last form of power that some people will ever have. In an increasingly commodified world, where people feel less and less in control of their own lives, control over one’s life is something that should be held in the highest regard. Straying out of the conversation on suicide for a moment, it should be noted that rectifying the societal organization that has caused this lack of power in individuals should be a high priority.

The argument presented here is not one encouraging people to take their lives. It does not deify the act of suicide, or argue that when someone feels like they are powerless that suicide is the best way to give a sense of power back. The argument presented is that when someone in our lives takes their own lives, perhaps we need to look it in a different light. Is it a tragedy? Almost always. Yet there may be more to the situation than is originally seen.

As always, these posts are a tool for me to think through issues, so that I can better understand how I relate to them. Through this piece, I believe it is evident that we need to develop the mechanisms to give people power in their own lives. Perhaps the power over one’s own life falls under that category.