Voices in the Wilderness

And a path out of it

These posts examine modern psychiatry from a critical point of view. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists usually react badly to any sort of critical analysis of their activities, labelling critics as “anti-psychiatry,” whatever that is. Regardless, criticism is an integral part of any scientific field and psychiatry is no different. As it emerges, there is a lot to be critical about.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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Bob Whitaker’s group, Mad in America, will hold a seminar this week entitled Madness, Mysticism, and the Reenchantment of Psychology, introduced along these lines:

… the loneliness that has become the defining mood of our age. Despite our technological advances and growing scientific knowledge, many of us experience a deep sense of loneliness and disconnection from each other, from nature, and from any shared sense of meaning. Psychology, as the field intended to help us understand the human mind, could have provided a source of resistance to this growing sense of disconnection. Instead, it has come to treat people as mere objects of analysis, divorced from the webs of relationship that compose the ecological landscapes of our lives. In doing so, psychology has overlooked what makes us human: our capacity for wonder, imagination, and connection to something larger than ourselves. Experiences that fall outside of rational explanation, such as mysticism, madness, or moments of deep communion with others, are too often pathologized or simply ignored.

That arrived just after somebody had sent me a Substack link to a file called Radically Genuine by Roger McFillin, a PhD psychologist in New York. This is more un cri du coeur, a heartfelt cry lamenting the state of modern psychology, not dissimilar to the MIA seminar. He describes how, despite our wealth and state of knowledge, wherever you look, things seem to be getting worse. He puts a case that this is not an accident but is the result of something called the “materialist paradigm,” essentially the modern notion of science. This, he doesn’t quite say, eliminates the mind, replacing it with a chemical soup operating in the dark but, in so doing, it destroys everything that we might call human: “The failed paradigm is not just failed methodology. It is failed metaphysics. A spiritual error with medical consequences.” His solution involves god, life after death, quantum physics, universal fields of consciousness and all that but he worries that his colleagues will snigger behind his back and dismiss him as “well-meaning but fruity.”

Despite the vast amounts of money and effort that we throw at modern psychology and psychiatry, it seems some fairly smart people think these fields have somehow missed the boat. I believe they’re right, and the quotes above point to what’s missing: the human element. McFillin sums it up: “I see a spiritual attack on human beings. A systematic severing of everything that makes us whole.” However, he is aware that the moment he mentions the word “spiritual,” a lot of minds in his audience will snap shut. Perhaps he should have said: “I see an attack on humans as spiritual beings,” which is different.

This is the dilemma: on the one hand, we all have first hand experience of all this truly amazing stuff going on in our heads. On the other, we have an immensely powerful thing called modern science which says: “Pay no attention to the magic lantern show, just stick to observable facts.” So far, the science juggernaut is winning. The moment anybody mentions spirituality or mysticism or universal consciousness, a massive steel mallet swings out of the machine and pounds them into the ground, never to be seen again. Before we can do anything about it, we need to ask: What exactly is going on? How did it come about? What is meant by “materialist paradigm” and “failed metaphysics”? Fortunately, we have clear answers, it’s just that the same fairly smart people don’t seem to grasp their significance. Let’s start in that interesting place in the library marked “History.”

1821. Potsdam, seat of the Prussian kings, was then a separate city from Berlin. One of the local gymnasium (high school) headmasters had a son who was destined to change the direction of biology: if anybody deserves the title of “father of modern physiology,” it is Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894). Helmholtz was a polymath, he had fingers in a dozen pies, taking the first giant steps to build precision sciences from lyrical description. He measured things and showed how that made all the difference in understanding the hidden mechanisms: optics, mathematics, physics, philosophy, acoustics, nerve conduction, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics and circulation, on and on. Helmholtz was a major figure in making German science the powerhouse that it became.

One of his students was a young physician who became a lecturer in Helmholtz’s department but was actually more interested in studying the mind than working on frogs’ hearts. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) trained in philosophy and also studied religion, so he was more or less destined to apply Helmholtz’s approach to matters of the mind. He was one of the first people to refer to himself as a psychologist and, in 1879 in Leipzig, he opened the world’s first dedicated psychological laboratory. This is always taken as the birthdate and place of psychology as its own discipline with a defined technical methodology, as distinct from philosophy which took place in armchairs and went in circles (hence “armchair philosopher”). Wundt was interested in all matters of mind and published extensively on what he called folk psychology.

However, by the end of the century, the core medical disciplines of histology, physiology, microbiology and pathology were racing ahead but, after only 20 years, psychology was drifting. When it came to dealing with mind, Helmholtz’s trusted experimental methods just didn’t seem to work. Psychology was in danger of ending up in the same sort of muddle-headed mess as philosophy. Then a young and opinionated psychologist rode to the rescue, out of the West, as it happened. John B Watson was barely 35 when he was appointed president of the American Psychological Associaton and was determined to make a mark. In his 1913 presidential address, he declared war on the older academics, many of whom had studied philosophy before changing to psychology. He argued that all “speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content” were driving psychology into a quagmire:

… I, as an experimental student, feel that something is wrong with our premises and the types of problems which develop from them ... I can state my position here no better than by saying that I should like to bring my students up in the same ignorance of (the mind-body problem) as one finds among the students of other branches of science [1, 163,166].

That is, total ignorance. He believed that all talk of mind and mental contents, of consciousness and introspection “bound (psychology) hand and foot” so that it couldn’t progress. He was right. There could be no certainty in dealing with mental matters when everybody was an expert by first hand experience but had nothing to allow them to decide who was right. Get rid of the mind, Watson shouted, replace it with biology and measurable data, meaning behavioral inputs and outputs. Thus was behaviorism born, which dominated psychology for a hundred years (and also went in circles, see [2] Chap 4). But it meant that, in 1929 when a group of physicists and logicians in Vienna decided the direction of science should take, psychology was already racing down that road [3]. “Get rid of everything metaphysical,” they decreed. “Science can only deal with observables; if it can’t be measured and duplicated, it ain’t science.” All scientific observations had to be explained in terms of prior observations, and those in turn, all the way back to the most basic statements about the universe, which defines reductionist explanation. There is no place in science for unobservable forces or entities, out they go. That meant out with the mind, which suited Watson and his growing band of excited followers, they hated talk of the mind: “Just give us the facts, you can stick your opinions” (Watson was an objectionable character; he insisted on raising his five children strictly according to the rule book of behaviorism he was writing; three of them attempted suicide and one succeeded).

So that’s it. Anything that couldn’t be established empirically, i.e. by observation, could not be the subject matter of scientists proper. This is the materialist paradigm, the opinion (note that) that the universe consists of matter and energy only, and is the specific origin of what McFillin calls “a failure of metaphysics.” The reason is very simple: if you decree that the universe consists of matterial entities only, you have thereby made a metaphysical decision. Worse still, you have made a wrong decision by deciding that the universal human experience of being a sentient creature will not be studied. This reached rock bottom with Burrhus Skinner’s Operant Conditioning model of learning, where he alternated between saying the mind is irrelevant or that it doesn’t exist (see [2] Chap 4). Maybe his didn’t exist but mine sure does (which reminds me of a joke*).

In all the excitement of the “brave new world” of scientific psychology (this is why Huxley wrote his novel), everybody overlooked an important point. The Vienna Circle, as they’re known, didn’t say there is no such things as mind or mental matters or the supernatural, only that they aren’t the province of science and should be left to priests, poets and philosophers. Unfortunately, over the next fifty years, this warning was forgotten. Somewhere along the line, academic psychologists and psychiatrists, being the narrow-minded unsophisticates that they are**, decided that “Science can’t talk meaningfully about the mind” meant “Mind doesn’t exist.” Thus, they have built their careers on pretending that there are no mental matters, that biology is everything, which leads us back to the quotes at the beginning, what McFillin called “the failed metaphysics of the materialist paradigm.” As it happens, he’s right but he’s lost in the undergrowth and can’t see a way out so we’ll give him a map and a compass.

Always, the first step out of any mess is to go back to the beginning. Metaphysics means essentially anything we can talk about that is built on opinion, not on observations. The nature of reality, being and identity, ethics and morality, art and music, all these complex but essential matters that allow undergraduates to talk endlessly without resolving anything are branches of metaphysics. The most basic of all such questions is: “What is the nature of reality? Is there room for minds or are they impossible?” That is, do we live in a universe with only one order of being, a monist universe, or are there more, as in a dualist universe? The materialist metaphysics says there is only one order of being, material matter. Everything without exception can be reduced to bits of matter and energy moving in the time-space continuum. Thus, everything that we normally call mind must be explained in terms of matter and energy. Historian and philosopher Richard Carrier is crystal clear on this point:

(Reductionism says)… society can be reduced to humans, and humans can be reduced to cells, and cells can be reduced to chemical systems, which can be reduced in turn to sub-atomic particles. So therefore societies can be reduced to sub-atomic particles. The natural corollary of this view is that the sciences follow the same pattern: sociology can be reduced to psychology, psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics. So, theoretically, all of sociology and psychology can be described entirely by physics [3, S.III.5.5].

All very good but he doesn’t provide any proof or even a suggestion of how such matters as ethics and a sense of humour can be reduced to basic particles [2, Chap. 14]. It is on this point that the materialist metaphysics fails: we can’t pretend that ethics and morality don’t exist, otherwise we’re authorising people to behave like monsters. And there’s enough of them already. The alternative to a rigid materialism is called dualism, which simply says that the universe consists of two apparently incommensurable orders of being, mind and matter, that have to be reconciled if we wish to make sense of things (Richard Watson). In today’s mainstream science, and entirely due to misunderstanding the Vienna Circle, dualists are generally regarded as either cuckoo or crooked.

So it is that Bob Whitaker and friends from Mad Activism and Bro. McFillin are voices in the wilderness. Science is failing, they shout, but their words are lost in the gales of confidence blowing from the professorial “key opinion leaders” in their well-financed laboratories backed by their very generous friends in the drug industry. However, the voices of dissent are growing louder and more persistent:

“If mind can be reduced to brain,” they argue, “show us how. Don’t say ‘One fine day, science will do it,’ give us some clues now. And while you’re at it, prove why your vaunted materialism can’t be wrong, prove that you are not trapped in a self-reinforcing loop of pseudoscience.”

They’re right and the reason is quite clear. In 1929, the members of the Vienna Circle cast their concept of science in the form they knew, which is fair enough, they couldn’t have used a form they’d never heard of. For them, stripping from science all the metaphysical baggage of values and minds and unprovable forces, leaving only what could be proven by being measured and duplicated, that made perfect sense. Barely ten years later, however, the tree of science developed a new bud, then a twig and now a mighty branch they had not foreseen. A revolution was built on the work of mathematician, Alan Turing, on the concept of non-human computation, followed soon after by engineer Claude Shannon who showed how this could be implemented in a standard physical machine. It meant that, as a matter of demonstrable fact, the universe consists of two incompatible orders of being, matter and energy on the one hand, and information on the other, and that information is both real (causally effective) and insubstantial. From this arose the modern science known as “information technology.”

Understanding the full impact of this takes time but all we need do to answer the cri du coeur is this: by claiming that the mind is actually an informational state, meaning both real and insubstantial, we are not invoking anything forbidden. We are simply using the vast repository of established modern science to throw a net over the mischievous and slippery mind to domesticate it. All well and good, but where does this elusive imp come from? How does it arise? McFillin was in no doubt: “The brain does not produce consciousness.” Really? Then what does? Here, he starts to blather on about quantum fields or something, which is a mistake of the same order as believing morality reduces to molecules, i.e. another failure of metaphysics. To resolve his confusion, we need a rational informational state or space that will do the job of the mind, and a computational machine to bring it into being. As it happens, we have in our heads a vastly complex machine capable of the prodigious feats of computation that Turing and Shannon showed would lead to the emergence of an informational space in a physical machine. Where’s the problem? We’ll come back to that.

This is the core of the biocognitive model for psychiatry [5] (in fact, it’s a theory for all fields, not just psychiatry, but let that pass). It starts with two sets of accepted knowledge, neurophysiology, which establishes how brains process data, and information theory, which provides the mathematical basis for implementing insubstantial informational spaces. By combining those two fields we get an insubstantial mind, generated from the brain, that is real and effective, entirely private and (don’t underestimate this point) shows that we have true free will. It also outlines the medium in which mind is implemented, a mechanism of mind-body interaction, accounts for intensionality (the directedness of thought), generates a theory of personality, and leads directly to models of mental disorder and personality disorder as purely psychological disturbances in a healthy brain. The biocognitive model also sets limits: no magic of any sort. No telepathy or telekinesis, no “universal consciousness” (whatever that means), nothing supernatural and no life after death in this system. If you want to believe these things, go ahead but there is no conceivable proof. The biocognitive model conveys everything people mean when they say “spirituality” but without any of the squishy baggage, all while remaining entirely within the constraints of today’s science. As far as paths from the wilderness go, that’s not a bad start.

At age 94, Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is one of the Grand Old Men of American psychiatry but he has never failed to ruffle feathers. He said:

Psychiatry remains the discipline of medicine that has yet to grasp the nature of the disorders it treats. This explains why it lacks the power to resist social and political fads claiming to solve the problem of human mental distress.

That’s absolutely correct. Driven by the Vienna Circle’s naïve positivism, psychiatry long ago put all its mental eggs in the biological basket. Today’s psychiatrists have no idea that the model of science in which they trained is a hundred years out of date. Their confidence that chemicals or circuits or genes or quantum fields will tell us everything we need to know about mental disorder with no questions remaining is pure bluster, it has no provable foundation. Now all we need is to convince them that there is a better model available and that they have a duty to read it. And it’s free, they didn’t have to shell out anything for it. Which leads to …

** Narrow-minded, unsophisticated academics. The first and over-riding duty of any and all academics is to question everything they believe, everything they have been taught. This almost never happens because, as Chomsky pointed out years ago and as I know too well, if you question your professors, the doors of academia will slam shut in your face (I have serious doubts about Chomsky, see [2] Chap.7). Psychiatrists above all, but also psychologists, never question what they’re told; they do not have any knowledge of the intellectual background of what the professor is spouting, mainly because the professor doesn’t know him/herself and resents being questioned (yes, a sign of insecurity). And finally…

* Boy comes home from school with his report card. Father looks it and chortles: “Oh boy,” he crows, “straight As. He’s sure got my brains, hasn’t he.” “He must have,” says wife from the kitchen, “I’ve still got mine.”

References:

1. Watson JB (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20:158-177.

2. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

3. Hahn H, Neurath O, Carnap R (1929). The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle. Ernst Mach Society, University of Vienna. http://rreece.github.io/philosophy-reading-list/docs/the-scientific-conception-of-the-world-the-vienna-circle.pdf

4. Carrier, R. (2005). Sense and Goodness Without a God: a defence of metaphysical naturalism. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse. See also Carrier R. About Dr Carrier. Available at: https://www.richardcarrier.info/about.

5. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London: Routledge. Amazon

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

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