How psychology undermined Western civilization

How psychology undermined Western civilization

by Jon Rappoport

January 30, 2012

www.nomorefakenews.com

After the Sandy Hook murders, psychology and psychiatry have taken another leap forward in expanding their influence throughout society. “More mental-health services” is the catch-all phrase our leaders use in “solving” these massacres—along with gun control.

But just as grabbing guns won’t reduce the bulk of gun violence in America, the vague mental-health dictum won’t work, either.

This article focuses on psychology, which is a branch of false knowledge different from the false knowledge of psychiatry.

A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who has received special training in diagnosing and prescribing drugs for “mental disorders,” none of which disorders can be confirmed to exist by any test.

A psychologist doesn’t need to be a medical doctor. With an advanced degree and a license, he can do therapy with patients and try to resolve “mental and emotional issues,” for which no diagnostic tests exist.

From the beginning of the history of psychology, it was really a simple trick. Establish a loose category called “mental problem,” pour money and research into solving it, and enroll patients.

This approach has become so pervasive that most people can’t conceive of an alternative. A person is acting strange, he has a problem, and a mental-health practitioner can help him solve it. What else do we need to know?

Well, for starters, we need to know why the category of “mental problem” is necessary. Why should we assume it means anything?

Instead, for example: what about people making an inventory of their own deeply held convictions, followed by a self-assessment, to see how well or badly they’re living up to those convictions?

Why did that approach go out the window?

Because it’s based on some sense of responsibility, which is now verboten in a society where “intervening” and “fulfilling needs” are paramount.

If a person can’t or won’t discover what his most deeply held convictions are, what hope does he have? What problems can he solve that are going to make any great difference?

Let’s see. I’m living a life I don’t want, and that life is throwing problems at me. If I solve the problems, I’ll be okay, right?”

Are you kidding?

Academic psychology, if you read its history, its textbooks, its methods, has nothing of value or substance to say about a person’s most profound personal convictions. That’s not on the radar. It never was. What you get is sophisticated babble about mental conditions and unresolved issues.

The existence of these issues and conditions is PROMOTED by psychology. Psychology is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you assume these conditions actually exist and if you believe they are real, then you can chew on them for ten or 15 years and come up with explanations, answers, and solutions.

Yes, that’s right. The human being is a very adaptable creature. If you can insert a primary assumption into his mind, where he accepts it as authentic, he’ll begin to cogitate and calculate around it.

Because the assumption was never his to begin with. He bought it. He went for it. He took the bait.

Now if you consider that millions and millions of people are working on this fake reality, having accepted that they suffer from mental problems, what do you get?

You get a society that, more and more, is paralyzed into inaction. You get passivity. You get an overall depletion of energy and power. You get a victim-club mentality.

Freud picked the “Oedipal Complex” out of a hat. The incest fantasy. He made this the foundation of his breakthrough. He sold it. He sold it as the underlying trauma and taboo that was always and forever twisting the minds of every male on Earth. He decided that this fantasy had to be exorcised with years of specialized therapy.

It was a new version of old guilt. Forget about the Garden of Eden and eating forbidden fruit from the tree. The incest wish was the real source of human guilt.

Psychology, from Freud forward, quickly became a prison term from which the inhabitant could be released when the therapist determined basic problems had been defeated.

Freud’s opponents and detractors argued for their own version of the correct prison (the basic mental problem). But the whole underlying notion of “a person captured” needed to come under scrutiny, and of course that never happened, as long as psychologists and psychiatrists ruled the roost.


Psychology became a major force that undermined freedom, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution in America. It asserted or implied that no rights or responsibilities meant anything as long as people were chained to their own problems and issues. This was an argument from Inherent Limitation. It was persuasive.

From the perspective of psychology, only rubes and Neanderthals would claim freedom was a core fact of existence. The more educated classes would realize they had to swim through an undersea jungle of their own mental and emotional restraints, guided by a steady professional hand, before they could finally emerge and come to experience the meaning of freedom.

So of course that journey became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There was one catch. Most people, after years of therapy, felt no dramatic difference. This disappointment translated into a deep cynicism about life. It meant more passivity.

Psychology has not only promoted the existence of mental problems, it has stated that these conditions are rock-bottom facts: there is no way to overcome them, short of talk therapy or psychiatric drugs. Psychology argues that it is useless to try to “ignore mental conditions.” That won’t work. It can’t work.

And if the patient agrees, he can go on to manufacture problems without end.

Whereas, the truth is, every so-called mental or emotional condition is a signal. It alerts a person that he is heading the ship away from its destination. He’s experiencing a crisis that has everything to do with the question: WHAT IS MY COURSE IN LIFE?

Finding an answer to that question makes all the difference.


I know somebody is going to write me about how nutrition can solve mental problems. Somebody is going to write and tell me how vaccines, medical drugs, chemtrails, GMOs, dyes and colors in food, etc., create mental problems.

I’ve written about these factors for years. Understand, however, that, in these cases, what the person is really suffering from is a severe nutritional deficit, or from the toxic overload of the vaccines, drugs, GMOs. To say it’s a mental problem is to misname what is really going on. In the same way, saying a person has an irresistible itch when what he really has is poison ivy is a diversion from the main event.


Psychology says: “Here is the mind. It contains conditions and issues. We can resolve them.”

That’s false. That’s the illusion. The mind doesn’t CONTAIN CONDITIONS or issues.

The conditions-hoax is perfectly paralleled by the disorder-hoax of psychiatry. These are, at the very best, metaphors. At their worst, they’re intentional ruses.

Here are ACTUAL rock-bottom conditions: freedom, independence, deep and profound desire, the power and energy to fulfill those desires, a sense of what is right and wrong, the wish to see others succeed brilliantly, community, expressing self, creative power, action in the world.

These are the elements of a philosophy, not psychology. These are elements of life abundant.

These are loci of decision for every conscious person.

And, as it turns out, psychology came late to the party. For millennia, humans have been engaging in philosophy and the exploration of spiritual dimensions.

The assumption of “gross limitation caused by internal problems” is a very recent concoction.

The assumption is simply the result of propaganda bought and sold.


The Matrix Revealed


When we delete such nonsense, we can discover the kind of personal truth that rings the bell clearly, if we are up to the task.

The rise of psychology was in part fueled by the notion that science could resolve human problems. But humans aren’t machines; they aren’t closed systems; they aren’t planets moving in fixed orbits. The analogy doesn’t work. It fails miserably.

Exploring instead, for example, what the ancient alchemists were really up to, and the original teachers of Tibet who employed the techniques of itinerant adepts from India, gives us a startling perspective on the UNLIMITED human being.

These teachers weren’t, in any meaningful sense, psychologists. They were philosophers of action. They were adventurers and explorers. They didn’t sit in offices dealing with the latest symptoms of people suffering from the malaise of a brainwashed society.

They knew there was a Matrix; they knew it was a heavy blanket of illusion; they knew it both corralled the individual and the community; and they knew it could be dispelled. It was their mission to make that happen, and they didn’t stint.

Theirs was a heraldic enterprise. It surpassed, by light years, stirring sand in a childish playpen of therapy.

That heraldic thread of adventure never dies. It can be stifled at times, but it remains alive under the surface.

Liberating the creative force in a person is the key. Not through some external and removed and remote process. The process involves everything you’ve got.

It goes down to the center of the Earth and out to the stars, and beyond. When so engaged, the mind cooperates and collaborates with the adventurer. It moves through so-called mental problems like a rocket burning up old paper.

One summer in the 1980s, when I was just starting out as a reporter, I scored a few front-page stories for LA Weekly, because other writers were out of town. I managed to squeeze in one of the weirder features the Weekly had published up to that time: off-the-record interviews with therapists detailing their private fantasies—all of which turned out to be intensely anti-social.

I later learned the “therapy community in town” didn’t appreciate my approach.

Similarly, I expect some psychologists will rankle at this one. But the point is, all these fantasies, of both patient and therapist are outcomes of the creative force in action—nothing less or more—and they should be seen that way.

Instead of assigning fantasy A to mental condition A and fantasy B to condition B, why not just throw all the insanity overboard and acknowledge, finally, that what underlies fantasia is the beginning and end of the answer to what’s bothering people and troubling them and driving them into despair and deep boredom:

Imagination and the creative force are tigers waiting to be let out of their cages so they can invent astonishing Futures.

This would be a truly modern psychology and a thoroughly contemporary reflection of what we all know.

From our deepest wellsprings, we:

INVENT;

IMAGINE;

CREATE;

IMPROVISE;

BUILD;

WORK TO MAKE WHAT WE IMAGINE INTO FACT IN THE WORLD.

Exploring the meaning and action of THIS is a worthy undertaking, and it would happily supersede what has absurdly been called psychology.

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

25 comments on “How psychology undermined Western civilization

  1. linda b. says:

    psychology is being used to label people so they can be controlled.
    roy masters was also onto this decades ago and still has the textbook of
    russian psychopolitics as a free download on his site, foundation of
    human understanding. how handy to have labels, so that people can
    be denied gun purchases if they had any history of anxiety or
    depression–which most people experience if they are normal !

  2. Eliza says:

    I appreciate this article and point of view, especially with the recent focus by so many folks on medication of mental disorders and the coming lack of privacy in health practitioners’ offices and schools (screening for guns, for violent thoughts, for domestic violence) so that “intervention” can happen. And refusing such interventions also earns us being labeled. Where is this leading us, and how can we escape from its snare?

    We *do* have a society that aims to squelch the individual.

    By putting a name or label on every imagined, artificially constructed condition or category (whether of the mind, mindset, or way of thinking or organizing any kind of stream of input or output, mostly intangible), it is as though we have all become or are in danger of becoming generic bugs on pins, splayed open in a museum display box, categorized, labeled, permanently “so” and the labeling and displaying makes it seem so real.

    And lying to us that this is all that there is to us, all that we are, affixing value judgments to this characteristic or that, and completely concealing our true natures.

    Most of this is done with the best of intentions by people who have been led to believe that they know what’s best for everyone.

  3. Jeff Swanson says:

    Wow, harsh.
    I suspect that the harshness is necessary i order to compensate for the unearned high esteem in which both psychiatry and psychology are held today.
    I was a psych major in university, but dropped out -resolving that if I wanted to learn more about the human psyche, I would find a good English Lit course somewhere.
    My problem with psychology as it was taught then (late 60s) was that every year the text books changed. Not for any other science, nor most of the arts courses, only psychology. I was told that different “schools of psychology” became more popular or less popular each year. The humans they wrote about remained the same.
    One of my profs admitted that people who remained untreated for psychological issues were at least 10% more likely to recover than their medically or psychologically treated counterparts. Not a good advertisement.
    I asked my professor of Abnormal Psychology to point me to some kind of definition of “Normal”, and she had to admit that, at that time, at least, no such definition existed. How could we treat or even diagnose “abnormal” without it? We couldn’t of course.
    At that time the entire industry was abuzz with excitement about Behavioural Psychology and Skinner’s Box. Forget about anything spiritual or even thoughtful, they said. We can only quantify and therefore study external behaviour. We were nothing but a series of biochemical reactions and all this internal stuff was nonsense.
    People like Jung, Erickson, and eventually Maslow and others who tried to introduce a spiritual dimension to psychology were cast into the outer darkness. Philosophy lost logic as one of its key components and became people posing with their various opinions. Nothing more.
    75% of all psych graduates went into marketing, rather than therapy, I was told. My papers on the psychology of advertising seemed to confirm those statistics. At that time, it was estimated that the average person received 10,000 commercial messages per day, many of them for only a second or two. Which means that even if you could afford to hire all the therapist, each of us is outnumbered 3 to 1 by psychologists attacking us!
    I left university and decided to try to find “normal” or at least, healthy. I decided to read the biographies of people whose lives had made major contributions to humanity, to see if I could find common denominators. After a few false starts (you can’t always believe the PR about people), I did come to at least a few conclusions.
    These people were ostracized or isolated during their developing years. This taught them to think for themselves.
    They tended to be people of spiritual conviction, though not necessarily religious at all. This saw them through the rough patches.
    They were people who had overcome some kind of adversity in their own lives, which strengthened them.
    Over the years, various friends and loved ones have turned to psychologists for assistance, and it has been pretty much, the luck of the draw. If the psychologist had grown beyond the bounds of what is presently defined as “psychology” and engaged the patient on a soul level, they didn’t do too badly. If the shrink followed the professional guidelines only, they were screwed, and destined for a life of misery.
    And that was the people who went to psychologists rather than psychiatrists. The psychiatrists prescribed drugs every damn time. A brave few managed to escape.
    Me? I ended up in marketing as a graphic designer.

  4. Jim says:

    I believe in the efficacy of what is called cognitive therapy.
    If we pay attention to the things we tell ourselves we can uncover the source of our suffering. Most unnecessary suffering from desires that are impossible or beliefs that are exaggerated. We can believe that we a subject to our emotions as is a common idea. Or we can believe that we a RESPONSIBLE for our emotions. We can tell ourselves damaging suffering things such as the exaggerated rage with regard to a small thing. Most people believe that suffering such as jelousy, rage and fear are emotions. Sufferining is not an emotion. Emotions are joy, luck and elation. Suffering is not emotion.
    Freud was not a scientist. Science requires reproducible results from specific experiments. No one calling themselves a psychiatrist today subscribes to or applies freudian psycho-analysys.
    Psychology may be called a philosophy. Philosophy is morality.
    They are one and the same thing. Psychology is a philosophy which concerns the application of human states of conciousness to moral questions.
    Ivan Pavlov was not a psychologist. That there are subjective states of human experience is a fundamental tenet of psychology which is denied by Ivan Pavlov. Ivan Pavlov was a violent butcher that worked for Joseph Stalin. He tortured dogs to death in order to find ways of terrorizing and controlling people.

  5. joanie says:

    One point I contest – Our bodies are machines. The human body is a complex system that obviously isn’t understood very well by the average individual. The body is an amazing apparatus that works well with very little effort, though when it’s running poorly, it speaks – obvious symptoms the language. Diagnosing the inner workings is much like car repair but how many persons have their fluids checked? Needing regular oil changes or other fluids are standard affair for vehicles, yet unfortunately humans do not consider standard care, instead taking health for granted. Indeed it is odd people are more concerned with their possessions than their bodies, all the while empowering the various institutions outside of themselves, and specifically trusting medicine in fixing what ails with substances foreign to the body.

    Plenty of studies prove the affects of toxins as well as vitamins and minerals. With veterinary practices, there are standards concerning nutrition in maintaining healthy animals so why isn’t this information applied to human health…

    I offer this link (you won’t be disappointed) though don’t trust just one wise man, seek out other honest individuals with decades of experience, promoting nutrition – though nourishment comes in many forms.

    “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie”. Dr. Wallach performed thousands of autopsies and discovered – “Every animal and every human being who dies of natural causes dies of a nutritional deficiency.” http://www.kingmaker.net/DeadDoctorstxt.html

  6. Outsider says:

    Dr Chiappalone has written a book about this subject:
    ‘Psychiatry – The Struggle For Your Soul’
    The book is available in digital format as an ebook from:
    http://www.jchiappalone.com

  7. nerdo says:

    see: Thomas Szasz … and don’t forget Margaret Hagen’s expose of psychology and “expert” testimony by shrinks: “Whores of the Court”

  8. Brad Smits says:

    Fantastic article I would like to add to the thread if I may…All one has to do is do their homework on a man who was at one time the right hand man of Herr Freud.. Im reffering to a certain Willhelm Reich who went on to discover a force (still not recognised by mainstream science) which he reffered to as Orgone Energy AKA Chi Prana etc etc… He is also the man responsible for the creation of the now nefarious weather modification geoengineering programs. Look up Reich Cloudbuster. Once the military had chewed him up and spat him out Reich ultimately like many others ended up being destroyed and dead by the AMA and the FDA and virtually all of his published writings were seized from Libraries all over the US and incinerated… Why? Because he (like Tesla, Rife, Hulda Clarke …had legitimate treatments that actually worked and he wanted to share them.. not profit from them. Research Orgonite Peeps… The positive effect it has on even the most severely depressed individual is undeniable .. Im living proof. There is one psychological condition however im certain exists … its called Pschopathy and its prevalence in corporations and high powerered Elite types is undeniable. Another symptom of these Pscho’s who run our planet is the perpetual state of misery and virtual slavedom 6.9999 billion souls experience every day of their lives.

  9. angelfire says:

    Jon: I generally enjoy your blog. You have a great mind and heart.

  10. angelfire says:

    Sorry more on the above message:

    But there is something I need to say. All this recent talk about Psychology and the call for “more mental health services” is moot, and none of the politicians really mean it. There is no way they will make available the funds to do this. Its all for show. The profession (and not so bad as you might think) is nearly dead. The insurance industry did not want to pay for services and destroyed it for the most part, and the powers that be just stood by, because they did not want people to figure themselves out, along with the problems living in this society as it is now and for decades before this. It is the insurance industry that requires labeling, and wants disclosure of people’s private thoughts and behaviors. Many in the profession do not subscribe to the matrix dogma, and work on helping people cope with and understand the craziness of this culture, which is a huge and pervasive problem. Many others could not stand the system and left for other professions. But, If you are a rape victim, a child abuse victim, the victim of a crime, a few examples from many, from whom do you seek help? Help used to be the family and the community, preferably informed in both cases. Where are we now? As families and communities, do we really know how to help people whose problems are the result of crazy behavior or a culture driven and shaped by those behind the curtain?

    A huge problem is that in this country we have all been conditioned not to trust each other or to help each other, much less stand together in agreement. Taking responsibility for oneself is a critical priority. How do you learn this when education, the family, the community, the ability to work, our value systems, and the ability to think critically have all been fractured? I am not saying that is the job of psychology, but you have to learn it somewhere! Any idea?

    I would agree that Psychology is headed in the wrong direction, but this is not the direction most in the profession want. This is what is being shaped for them. The existential old guard is going now, and a new generation of behavioral and cognitive psychologists is coming. Less education and more dogma, and psychiatry at the helm. Thanks to insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

  11. S. Bee says:

    Brick by brick the country that many knew is being purposefully dismantled.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Z3-KHd514

  12. Gary Corseri says:

    An excellent article and discussion! I wish there were more of such thoughtful pieces on the Web… and fewer of the name-calling, ad hominem arguments one finds among too many commentators!

    I agree that psychology has taken Westerners on some weird detours away from the crucial self-examination that Sages like Solomon, Socrates and Jesus urged on us millennia ago. As Rappoport suggests, psychology (and psychiatry) replaced genuine insights gained from the Arts with manufactured, commercially viable “insights” gained in master’s and doctoral programs. Psychology has also served to professionalize and fragment insights! The best art, on the other hand, is comprehensible to a wide range of those participating in it–either as creators or audience; Its effects can be immediate–physical, mental, emotional, even psychic… and long-lasting.

    I hope Mr. Rappoport will turn his eagle eyes on the issue of the diminishment of the Arts in Western society–particularly in the US. I speak, of course, about Art that has the power to elevate and rectify. How did we ever allow the Arts to become so debased that we confuse the mindless, violent, pornographic counterfeits of our “Entertainment Industry” with the life-sustaining nourishment of a Shakespeare, a Rembrandt, a Mozart, Picasso, the Brontes, Thoreau, Anna Akhmatova, etc.?

  13. ramonthomas says:

    Twice in my life I’ve been in intense therapy. The first was the most enjoyable and gave me coping mechanisms. Since that time I’ve also experienced psychiatry because my family helped convince me I needed medication for depression. Underlying all of this I felt either overwhelmed or bored. Getting in touch with Jon Rappoport helped me see the foundation of my life going forward as the creative imagination from my own art. So I make time for art, poetry and find life has never been better.

  14. hats off Mr. Rappoport, you certainly are voice of reason.

  15. derek longley says:

    as a very small 4 year old I watched as they took my mother away and electrocuted her brain….it took her about 20 years to get it back….as a 20 year old I watched as they took my best friend away and put her in a drug cloud for almost a year….not even allowing us, her friends from school to visit her…I don´t think she ever recovered….
    I warn everyone I meet now……be careful of the mindeaters!

  16. James says:

    Great eye opener. “Everything is a matter of perspective and intent”, and these people have a very jaded perspective. I have been with [roommates] a double PhD. psychotherapist for 12 years and she will never get it. I see what worked in the old days, philosophy and spirituality were the reality and still are!! My PhD honey can only go 2 dimensions and any more is woowoo. Great article , I see so much more now. Thank You

  17. Dutch says:

    This article is about 99% spot on. I despise psychiatry which is as flagrant and dangerous to our minds and our society as any weapon of mass destruction. I also agree that psychology is, to a great extent, the ugly stepsister of psychiatry, with many parallels. Furthermore, most psychologists I’ve encountered harbor their own deep issues, and use their judgements of others as a defense against facing their own malfunctions.

    That said, it remains true that if you are going to attack something from a scientific perspective then you owe it to yourself and others to be true and consistent in your application of scientific principles. This is why I hate psychiatry. It pretends to be ‘scientific’ but uses non-scientific arguments and non-existent metrics to force drugs upon you that have significant detrimental effects on you that CAN be proven and measured scientifically. We can also scientifically measure the number of psychiatrists that commit acts of sexual misconduct with patients, and in so doing find that it is 10 times the per capita figures of any other medical discipline. For this reason I am for imprisoning or executing all psychiatrists tomorrow. As for psychologists, the numbers are only slightly better. And its pretty obvious that most are in it for satiating their powerlust and feelings of inadequacy by spending all day telling OTHER people what’s wrong with THEM.

    But where I get lost is the assertion that there is no scientific basis behind the study of psychology. This is where this changes from being a fact based discussion to a shoot-the-messenger-fest. Yes there are many low grade people in and drawn to the field of psychology. Yes Freud and others have floated tragically wrong theories. But this in no way compromises the scientific reality behind real and legitimate psychological conditions, or the absolute fact of their existence. To be as blunt as John is, claiming otherwise is a flat out lie. And it can be proven in one word: stress.

    Have you never heard this word? Are you not aware what it means? Have you never felt it yourself? Stress is at the core of every psychological condition (the legit ones anyway). Stress is a verifiable tangible thing, written into our genetic code. There are stress genes, and stress is quickly being realized to be at the core of some epigenetic mutations in the study of genetics and genomics. This basically means that experiencing mental and physical stress can and does physically change our body, sometimes permanently. It IS true (who doesn’t already know this deep down). It CAN be measured and quantified. And its not even that hard to grasp. It is an evolutionary defense mechanism. When we put ourselves in positions that challenge our instinctive tendencies, our body alerts us. Consider the compulsive gambler who mortgages the house to bet on the Super Bowl. He has put his shelter, food security, family stability and more at risk. We all understand that it would be logical that he would have a few restless nights. This is a verifiable and measurable reaction to the stress of putting so much at risk. And has direct and measurable effects on his physical health. Similarly we would not be surprised if after a few sleepless nights, he asked himself “why am I doing this?” “What is wrong with me that I have put so much at risk just to indulge a compulsion”. At which point he might be inclined to seek insight about the self destructive pattern of behavior he is engaging in. Should he be FORCED to? NO. Should he simply be given pills to dull the stress? No. But if he chooses to take a scientific approach to explain his pattern of behavior, what is wrong with that? In so doing he would find that similar patterns of behavior exist in alcoholics, sex addicts, etc. PRECISE AND MEASURABLE patterns of behavior, well documented for decades. Or he may be discover the trait of self loathing often found in vegetarians, anorexics or some Type-As. Again PRECISE, MEASURABLE and REPRODUCIBLE patterns. And in all of these people the evidence of physiological impacts of stress gene action can be verified and quantified completely and scientifically through gene expression, and correlated to these conditions. It is an absolute fact.

    So what am I saying? Am I absolving the fields of psychiatry or psychology? Not even kind of. What i am attempting to do is accurately draw the lines between fact and fiction in response to Johns failure to do so. ‘Science’ is not some tool we can call on when we need it, and ignore when we don’t. There are rules, and facts, and without proper acknowledgement of what they are, we all end up on Prozac and shopping for carbon credits. Your mind body connection is protected by a genetic alert system that manifests itself as stress. Disrupt the balance and both your mental and physical state are compromised. The manner in which they are compromised is scientifically verifiable. The impacts on your mental state are scientifically verifiable (don’t you feel crappy when you get a cold? Its no different). The patterns among the general population in how these stress reactions manifests themselves are stark and easily recognizable. Because we are all human. And there is most certainly value in being cognizant of what these patterns are, so as to address the causes and remedy your health. In this regard psychology is valid and accurate as a scientific discipline. Just much less so as a theraputic practice.

    Does this mean you need some koo-koo bird, sexual predator psychologist to help you work through it? Or some mind-altering psychiatric drug. Of course not. As John correctly asserts, you have to act to change yourself. But there is no crime in the fact that someone did a thousand case studies of people struggling with the same things, in order to help you do this. And all the koo-koos in the field don’t negate the scientific reality, veracity or usefulness of this manner of scientific study. I would not recommend anyone go to any of these quacks EVER. But there is value in studying the consistent patterns of behavior in people struggling with common stressors. Far more than “sending your mind out to the stars”. I say this only in the interest of preserving the truth and scientific integrity. Beware those who make blanket assertions and call them ‘science’. Or counter them with equally vague mysticism. No matter how much you want to believe them. This is the worst psychological crime you can commit. Its called deception. And your disdain of it is probably what led you to agree with even John’s disingenuous arguments. BE CAREFUL. Only the TRUE truth will set you free…

  18. Magnus Göller says:

    Dear Jon,

    this piece is, again, one I should be loudly lauding. Even though not quite everything (very little) in it purports exactly what I think. As Your potential translator, it cannot be mine to set more praise.

    Most of it, the core of it, can hardly be better expressed.

    I would thus again gladly stand for a viable German translation.

    As before, first published by myself on my website only.

    Of course, if You grant me permission therefore again, all other publishing rights of my version shall be, as for the afore done, the texts correctly given, my name therewith, be worldwide Yours without any fee or further questions.

    Yesternight I was with an old friend, and he endorsed me to tell You more or less that. After I had said: “Der Mann ist ein As!”

    (“That man is an ace.” A quite colloquial saying in German.)

    It will, with Your admission, take me a few hours again. But it will certainly be worth that bit of time.

    Greetings, best wishes,

    Magnus

  19. Magnus Göller says:

    Just found that above:

    “I hope Mr. Rappoport will turn his eagle eyes on the issue of the diminishment of the Arts in Western society–particularly in the US. I speak, of course, about Art that has the power to elevate and rectify. How did we ever allow the Arts to become so debased that we confuse the mindless, violent, pornographic counterfeits of our “Entertainment Industry” with the life-sustaining nourishment of a Shakespeare, a Rembrandt, a Mozart, Picasso, the Brontes, Thoreau, Anna Akhmatova, etc.?”

    Only one word against that.

    “…particularly in the US” is not right. It’s everywhere in “the West”. Britain, France, Germany, you name it.

    We see a decline, a decadence to the extreme in all arts since the end of the First World War. The twenties brought some shake-off. The main question I’ve been pondering on for years is: How and Why?

  20. Drunken Sailor says:

    I love this. Although I strongly disagree with the premise that there is no such thing as mental illness, I fully agree that psychology and especially psych drugs are over relied upon to correct problems that have nothing to do with mental illness in many, many cases.

  21. Jim Fennell says:

    I recommend a book by Dr. Tana Dineen titled “Manufacturing Victims”, ‘what the psychology industry is doing to people.’ (rdppub.com published by Rober Davies Multimedia Publishing Co.)

    —–

    Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1552070328/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1552070328&linkCode=as2&tag=wwwnomorefake-20

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