Archive for ‘The Schools of Psychology (Part IV-B)’

I am a Harry Potter fanatic and finally had the chance to see the movie this weekend. It killed me to not go to the midnight showing, but being the procrastinator I am, I hadn’t finished my research paper. Anyway, as I was watching it, I began to think of how many characters in the movie are said to be “mad” which prompted me to do some browsing on connections between Harry Potter and mental illness. In doing so, I found a website that states that Harry Potter is not just a magical fairytale, but rather an extended metaphor about mental illness and the institutionalization of children. While I don’t agree with the blogger’s theory, he presented many interesting ways that Freud’s ideas could be applied to Harry’s life.

The central idea is that Hogwarts is a mental institution and that “every major event in the books is a fantasy/delusional version of the experiences that a child would encounter in the course of being institutionalized and forcibly treated for mental illness.” The real world is the world with the Dursely’s and the wizarding world is simply part of Harry’s imagination. His violent encounters with Dudley are what got Harry sent to the mental instition/Hogwarts rather than his magical talents.

To me, his strongest and most interesting point was about Freud’s family romance. Family romance is a fantasy in which a child imagines that their birth parents are not actual, but adoptive parents. Typically, the fantasy parents are noble, or a higher social class than the real parents. Harry fits the mold exactly. He believes that the Dursely’s are not his real parents, but adopted parents and that his real parents are well-known wizards, famous for their great bravery and love in protecting him. Interesting, isn’t it?

I’ll post the link so that ya’ll can read the original blog for yourselves. He presents loose, but interesting ideas about the series. What do ya’ll make of his ideas?

http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/forums/t/27506.aspx?PageIndex=1

In preparing recently for my major paper I came across some very interesting information.  My paper was over the history of the role of psychology in relation to good and evil.  I chose to drill it down a little deeper and look at the role of behaviorism and environment on the influence of evil.  I read Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s book called the Lucifer Effect in which he discusses the intense role a situation can play on a seemingly “good” person to be able to produce “evil” acts.  He discusses the American held prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the genocide at Rwanda and so forth.  He makes a very convincing argument that human beings tend to change their viewpoints on what is an evil act depending on the immediate situation that they are in.

While reading Zimbardo’s book I thought to the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940’s where in the world court tried the executive branch of the Nazi military high command.  At the time many of these men were claiming that they were simply following orders, so the goal of the prosecutors was to establish that the highest ranking members of Hitler’s Military cabinet had actually conspiratorially planed to expand war.  German efficiency being what it was, the prosecutors found that the Germans kept written transcriptions on every meeting.  Evidence showing that Hitler knew that the country’s biggest problem was that of real estate, and that if they were going to expand the German holdings that it would have to be done through war.  He also speaks of knowing that the German people would need a common enemy to rally behind.  The psychological warfare against the Jewish and Polish people begins.  By dehumanizing his neighbors, imaginary, and passionate speeches Hitler slowly changed the mental mindset of his people into a weapon of hate.  It could be argued that Hitler understood human behaviorism better than any other person alive up to that point.  He shaped the mental image of an entire culture of people into a weapon of hate.

VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cac99V5cNpE

I was thinking a lot of the bombardment of truth that I apparently found out about myself, i.e. the nazi lover missing the frontal lobe, and just started reflecting on the experiments shown. It seemed as though it was saying that the things and messages around us shape us. Moreover, it showed how easy it was to get us to perform in the way others want, or to pick what another wants us to because of hidden agendas and messages. I do believe in free will, but I also know that it is not so far fetched to think that we can be, “taught,” so to speak, to do and pick what others say to. This is subliminal advertising, and it is everywhere. Take, for instance, the McDonald’s color of the arches. It has been proven that yellow is most significantly paired with hunger, and people tend to feel hungrier when presented with yellow. Thus, they made their arches to be yellow, as well as put a lot of yellow in the joint itself, so that people would more than likely buy and consume more food.

That’s more of a blatant one, so think for a minute about beauty commercials and how they are structured. When you see a hit name artist or celebrity sitting there, all beautiful and tricked out with a bunch of photo shop and make up, you are thinking, “I think I may need to buy this.” They show you how beautiful they are and how beautiful you, “can be,” by showing off their own thoughts of beauty. In a deeper way, they are also showing you what your definition of beauty should be. Even if you say, “well she looks so trashy like that,” it helps shape what you think beauty is, which will then make you look towards another brand or style that has been touched on. Sadly, we wouldn’t even know how to define these words, or even put more than a 5 minute thought or conversation on them, if we weren’t influenced.

This is also why I chose this link. I personally love this link because it shows two things in my opinion: it shows that there are, in fact, people out there specifically taught and educated to manipulate what you want and desire, and that ALL people can be affected. The best thing is, reverting back to me saying that I believe in free will, once we become conscious of all that affects us we can thoroughly define our lives as individuals instead of just people or products.

Our discussion the other day in class over the unconscious and priming was really interesting to me. We learned that people walk slower after they are primed with words related to old people and that people are more aggressive when they see words related to aggression. This made me wonder, how much of our behavior can we attribute to our unconscious perception of visual stimuli? In the field of psychology, it would  be ignorant to believe that one has complete control over their own behavior, but as a person I like to think that I choose to behave how I want to. Yet, experiments on the unconscious show that people are influenced to behave a certain way without even realizing it. How often do we do and say things only because of how we were primed right before we did them? One thing that comes to mind when I think about this is subliminal messaging. The Budweiser ad is just a simple example of messages that you do not realize are there. Subliminal messaging is very interesting to me. How much do these messages prime us for a desired product or sexual behavior? Some of the subliminal messages that I came across looked normal to the untrained eye, but when pointed out the messages for very explicit and almost pornographic. These messages are a cause for concern when you think about how many you see daily. These messages are not only in advertisements, but also in movies and television. Even Disney adds scenes to their movies that are so quick that they go undetected. Knowing that the research shows that priming influences thoughts and behaviors  makes me wonder how much of an affect they are having on me subconsciously. I think the important thing is to be aware of what stimuli you are experiencing. Of course, if you are perceiving stimuli unconsciously then its difficult to be aware of it.

I recently watched a documentory on the solitary confinement of prisoners in america. The show went through the stay of inmates who were sometimes locked up for years with out being allowed human contact (besides the guards who brought them meals). It was interesting that often these inmates would try to kill themselves, hurt themselves or disobey the guard just to get some attention and human contact. It makes me think that this chart is not completely accurate about the human needs as i once thought it was. It appears that in many cases the psychological needs outwayed the safety needs even survival needs by a fair amount. Although one could argue that the psychological needs were so dismissed that they became a basic need , forgoing safty needs.  The same effect happens to people in general who do not become self-actualized. Those that can not change themselves into what they may consider a better human being often go into depression and basic needs as well as safety needs are bipassed. Again one could argue that the chart is merly an example of the order in which a functioning human works, but as i had mentioned in solitary the pscyhological need became a necesity, so would that be a functional mind. Im interested to hear responses.

So…as I began to think about what I would blog about for our final blog post (at least what I believe is our final blog post) I decided to comment on something I think everyone will enjoy; cinema.

I, for one, am an avid movie-goer and because of the “simple life” provided by the lovely city of Abilene, I’m sure the rest of you are too.

As such, I have decided to compile a sort of list of the movies I have watched recently that shed some light on mental illness and institutionalization. So, here it goes.

There is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is my all time favorite Jack Nicholson movie. Here we have a very dark image of what it meant to be institutionalized when lobotomies and electric shock therapy were still the common treatments for mental illness. Throw in an extremely stoic head nurse and everything just gets dismal from there.

Then there’s Girl, Interrupted where Angelina Jolie won an academy award for best supporting actress. Also, a dark picture of institutionalization in the 60’s. Jolie plays a sociopath and Winona Ryder plays a young girl with Borderline Personality Disorder. Obviously, institutionalization is still highly stigmatized, but at least at the end of this move, Winona receives treatment and actually recovers.

There’s also Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which I’m sure every psychology major loves. This is a deep journey into the mind of a severely dysfunctional paranoid schizophrenic. The picture of institutionalization in this film is much more positive than the first two, although in Leonardo’s case, he ultimately cannot be helped.

Lastly, there is the cult classic Fight Club. But alas ladies, this Chuck Palahniuk adaptation is not only valuable because of Brad Pitt’s almost constant lack of a shirt. In this film, we identify with a somewhat timid man we later find out has multiple personality disorder and has been wreaking havoc across the country. Interesting to say the least.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I like to see the cinematic version of mental illness (most of the time). It reminds me of a lot of the history of institutionalization and how much it has changed and become more humane. What do you guys think about these movies and the comments they make about mental illness and institutionalization?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo\'s Nest Trailer

I do not think that automatic responses (as we discussed in class on Friday) are an indicator that all our behavior is predetermined.  I understand that we have automatic processes.  I think that these exist in order to help us sort through the massive amounts of data and stimuli that enter our senses and minds every day.  We need these automatic responses in order to sort and respond to information quickly—sometimes these responses are even used to help us in life and death situations when it is imperative that we act without much thinking.  That being said, I believe that we have the capacity as humans to choose not to accept or act upon these automatic responses.  If we know that we are responding due to an automatic thought process, we can make a different choice.

I found the studies that Dr. McAnulty presented to us on Friday to be interesting.  I would like to proffer another example of an automatic response test.  When I was in my social psychology class, we took an implicit association test.  This test is supposed to measure whether a person prefers one race (white or black) to another race.  In this test, the participant has to perform four tasks.  The first task is to identify European American faces or African American faces as quickly as possible.  Secondly, the participant is asked to identify “good” or “bad” words (such as “glorious,” “awful,” etc.).  Next the participant is shown faces and words; “bad” words and African American faces are identified with the same key stroke and “good” words and European American faces are identified with the same key stroke.  Finally, the previous step is reversed.

Every time I have taken this test, I have scored “strongly prefers European Americans.”  If I believed that only automatic or implicit associations informed my actions, I would be very upset.  Instead, I know that I form opinions about people based upon the people individually.  I like African American people and I like white people.  I also dislike some white people and some African American people (although I can think of more white people I dislike than African American people.

If you would like to try out the implicit association test (and I would strongly recommend taking a few minutes to try it out) the link follows.  It only takes a few short minutes and the results are interesting.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1

PS: one of the flaws I find with the test is the order in which things are presented.  First you are asked to associate African Americans with negative words, then, when you are used to that set of information, you are asked to change and associate African Americans with positive words.  I think that the order may influence the test results–but that is just my opinion.

Over the past couple chapters, I noticed the term self-actualization believed by a few psychologists like Jung and Maslow. The term holds the meaning that to be self-actualized is to reach one’s potential. Jung believed more in human beings understanding the underdeveloped aspects of the psyche to become self-actualized. Maslow believed in satisfying the hierarchical needs as becoming self-actualized. Both were in agreement that not many people reach this point and that no one could reach their absolute full potential.

I began thinking about several different times in my life where people mentioned the word “potential.” There were times in my athletic career where coaches would say something about the team having a lot of potential. If we could just reach it, then we would have a huge amount of success. I had a coach tell me that he hates the phrase “you have so much potential.” At first, I didn’t understand why he would say that; however, he explained that having a lot of potential means that you are currently underachieving. This idea really hit me and made a lot of sense. When a teacher tells a student they have a lot of potential, how do they react? Does that make them want to be better or does it make them stop caring altogether? I think it can go either way and there are examples of this happening all the time. Some people have the drive to reach their potential or to become self-actualized, but how can you really measure that? How do you know that you have reached your potential? This concept is something I have really been questioning because I know that I personally will never settle. I always want to try and be a better version of myself and I have the feeling that I am not the only one. Does this mean I will never reach my potential as a human being? I would love to hear anyone’s opinion on this matter. What do you think?

Over the last couple of weeks we have talked a lot about humanistic psychology and while I think that it has an important part in the world of psychology I found that I was not a fan of it. There were some major concepts that I did not like especially the idea that since humans are unique, anything learned about one person is irrelevant to the understanding of others.

I understand why people support this school of psychology because it protects against the process of placing people in a box. Humanistic psychology began as a protest movement against the other schools of psychology and diminishes the major contributions that people like Watson, Skinner, and Freud made to psychology. These people along with others in their school of psychological thinking made efforts to improve the human condition which is what humanistic psychology is all about.

The rejection of the other schools as well as the methods and contributions that they have made seem to me, a regression. Over the course of the semester I have seen many important experiments and research done by behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and other schools of psychology and feel that they have been helpful to treating the human condition.

Lastly, I would like to briefly talk about unconditioned positive regard. While I do not mean to take away from the contributions that Carl Rogers made on psychology, I do think that his idea of unconditioned positive regard to be a little overemphasized. I think that it is important that children and human beings especially children to be loved and treated with decency even when they mess up, but I think that it creates a feeling of false hope. I think there are times when a child does bad things because he does not know that it is bad and it is the parents’ job to step in and teach the child why it is bad. I believe that you can love and respect a child for who they are as you teach proper behaviors. I know that this is a bunch of random stuff but I really wanted to know how yall felt about humanistic psychology. Is it realistic?

In many ways humanistic psychology appeals to me, but none more so than the interest shown by Maslow for “the other half.” I just find that whole idea so brilliant and even though I may never have thought of it, it is very much so in line with the way I feel. I’m a sucker for success stories, I yearn to be a success story. Even if people fail, watching people valiantly rail against seemingly insurmountable odds will get me every single time. I can’t help it. Thus, finding out everything we can about those who are healthy, stable people and examples to the world around them is an appealing idea to me in every way.

I also think it is interesting that we have such a propensity to focus on the negative. Perhaps it is out of fear. I remember reading Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen and one of the most vivid parts of the book to me is when postulates that the first thing people think about in response to a person having psychological issues is the likelihood of something similar happen to them. Perhaps that is a satisfactory explanation, we gawk at those who have messed up to make us feel like we could never end up that way. Maybe we’d all be more likely to be success stories if we spent that energy watching those who did it right.