MUHARRAM 10, 1430 A.H.
TUESDAY JANUARY 6 2009
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How psychology can become a true science (I)
By Ozodi Thomas Osuji
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
I believe that one of the reasons Africans seem unable to govern themselves is that in the main they lack self knowledge. I therefore made it my business to pay attention to psychology and sharing information on it so as to enable Africans develop insight into themselves. I believe that with better insight into their personalities that Africans would do the right things. This paper, based on self exploration, hopefully, could help Africans to develop insight into their individual psychologies.
This paper points out that for psychology and psychiatry to become a true science that they must be rooted in the biological sciences, especially on the study of human physiology, and not just the human nervous system. The paper also pointed out that in as much as psychology deals with human existential matters, such as whether there is meaning or not in existence, that existentialist psychology and existential spirituality seem appropriate responses to the apparent meaningless of living on planet earth. I have had what can be characterized as love-hate relationship with psychology.
Psychology fascinates and at the same time repulses me. Psychology makes me angry because I believe that its practitioners, from Psychoanalysts to behaviorists to neuroscientists, take the tree for the forest. They have a tendency to focusing on the wrong thing when what they needed to focus on is very clear: human physiology.
Psychology focuses on tangential causal aspects of human behavior. Psychoanalysis focused on constructing mythologies about the causes of human behavior, such as Freud’s Id, ego and superego, entities that do not exist in the human body; behaviorism focuses on a true but negligible aspect of human beings, the fact that we do learn things but ignores that we do think and that thinking often precede behavior (as a person thinks he acts, is an axiom); and neuroscience focuses on symptoms rather than causal factors in human behavior.
Screwed up neurotransmitters, as is currently correlated with the various mental disorders: dopamine in schizophrenia, norepinephrine in mania, serotonin in depression, GABA in anxiety etc are probably the by products of malfunctioning biological processes in many parts of the body and are hardly the cause of the mental illnesses themselves.
For psychology to become a real science it must be rooted in the study of human physiology and medical issues, not just the study of the human brain. The brain is like the headquarters of a large organization and responds to events that take place in all parts of that organization. If there are problems in parts of that organization the brain responds with problematic functioning but the problematic function is not independent of the problems in those other parts of the body. To fix the problematic brain functioning you have to fix the problems in other parts of the body.
Human behavior is a response to biological and sociological realities, hence biosocial factors are the causal factors in human behavior and those are where psychologists ought to be looking at in their aborted efforts to understand human behavior. Fairy tales, such as those provided by psychoanalysis, behaviorism and even neuroscience are no replacement for real science; a real science of psychology must be biological and demonstrated rather than merely speculated and people asked to believe the speculations.
YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND OTHER PERSONS
I attempt to understand what is going on in my mind. Sometimes, I also attempt to understand what is going on in other persons’ minds.
Much as I try I cannot understand what other persons are thinking. Of course, I can guess and speculate about what other persons are thinking about but my conjectures are not facts. Extrapolating from my situation I conclude that no human being can know what other people are thinking. May be my conclusion is wrong, so, let me ask you: Do you know what other people are thinking? I suspect that your answer would be no.
Now, if none of us is a mind reader and understands what other people are thinking, how in the world would psychologists know what other people are thinking? Obviously, psychologists do not know what other people are thinking and therefore can not fully understand other persons.
Sigmund Freud posited what he called Id, Ego and superego. As he sees it, the Id is the compendium of instinctual drives in the individual, such as sex, aggression and death. In his view, these instincts make the individual do what he does. The individual, for example, is motivated to have sex with members of the opposite gender. Society posits how the individual goes about having sex with the other persons. How society determines the sex dance to be danced is the Superego. If the individual tries to step outside that social dance he feels guilty, and if he, in fact, does step out of it his society punishes him. The ego balances his wishes and social reality. The result of these three forces interacting in the individual’s mind is perpetual conflict, Freud believes.
Now, here is a question for Freud. Where are the Id, Ego and Superego in the brain? As far as I know they are nowhere in the brain. The Id, Ego and Superego are hypothetical constructs, models of how the mind supposedly works, that Freud posited that hopefully enabled him to understand his own mind. What helped him understand his behaviors, if at all, hardly helps other persons, especially those who come from different cultures, to understand their behaviors. In as much as Freud’s views are hypothetical models, mental constructs and not real they are not science, if by science we mean that which can be universally demonstrated as empirically factual.
Psychoanalysis is not a science; at best it is a mythology that is as useful as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, The Christian Bible, the Muslim Koran and Hindu Scriptures.
Beliefs are views on which some individuals predicate their thinking and behaviors, and they seem to influence behavior but if the beliefs are rejected they do not influence behavior. On the other hand, what is self evident does not have to be believed to influence people’s behaviors; facts are there and influence the individual’s behaviors whether he likes it or not. The sun is there and determines whether human beings live or not live on planet earth; human beings beliefs about the sun are irrelevant to the self evident fact that the sun makes life possible on planet earth.
Watson, Pavlov, B. F. Skinner and other so-called behavioral psychologists recognized that much of what we know we learn from other persons. Clearly, human beings are learning animals. If learning were not possible we would not go to school.
Clearly, there is some truth in classical and operant conditioning. Some behaviors can be learned and or modified through Skinner’s behavior modification technology. Now, is it then the case that all there are to people is their learning? Let us see. I see a tree. I am fascinated by it. I stand in front of it thinking about it, trying to understand it. I go back and take courses on botany to know what other people have said about trees. Having learned what others said about trees and am not yet satisfied I keep on thinking about trees. Perhaps, if I am diligent I would come up with additional information about trees. If I do I have added to our knowledge about trees. That is to say that learning and thinking produced my contribution to our knowledge of trees.
Simply stated, learning is not enough to explain a human being. We must factor in the element of thinking. Skinner is simply idiotic to dismiss what he believed is the black box for it is actually that element that produces knowledge. Albert Einstein learned what there was to learn about mathematics and light and thought about them and from his thinking came up with general and special relativity theory. It was his learning and thinking that gave us that knowledge.
Neuroscientists study the nature of neurons and the interaction of neurons in the body (central and peripheral nervous system). Clearly, we need to understand how the neurons transmit information from one to the other. But does understanding how information is relayed from one neuron to another explain the information relayed?
We know quite a bit about the various neurotransmitters and their receptors, dopamine, serotonin etc. Those neurotransmitters play critical roles in the relaying of information from the synapse of one nerve to another. Other factors, such as the various electrical ions: sodium, calcium, phosphor, potassium, magnesium etc also play roles in the transmission of information from one nerve to another. Now, are these the same thing as thinking?
Did neurons ask me to write this paper? How so? Clearly, it is salient that we
understand how the brain works but to extrapolate from that fact and conclude that we have understood thinking is arrant nonsense. We do not yet understand thinking and consciousness.
As I see it, psychology is still part of philosophy, a field that rationally tries to understand human behavior on a speculative basis. Philosophy posits interesting views on the nature of things but those are not demonstrated as factual hence are not scientific. No one takes the views of, say, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bacon, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, William James, Bergson etc as science; they are seen as interesting speculations on the nature of reality but not reality itself.
To be continued.
