I got behind a few weeks on my project to read along in my college notes from of the current date in my first year. Now that the Jewish holy days are over, and despite all the demanding important things out in the world, I'm catching up today.
First to psychology. I don't think I mentioned earlier how excited I was to take a psychology course in college as soon as possible, and possibly to make it my major. I had always thought of myself as someone trying to understand people and to use that to advise them and help people out in their relationships. We only a tiny bit touched on psychology here and there in high school classes. I wanted to take the straight-up intro, "Psych 1" as we knew it (I guess 101 elsewhere), but my schedule didn't fit for that so I went with the course on intro to human development. Boy was it a good and lucky choice.
Where I left off in the class Professor Demick was making the final few notes about gender issues as a critique of psychological theory and research, and I did say I am surprised to see how soon in the course this came up (I remembered it coming a bit farther along) and foundational that could be, and also how much this was in the psychology discourse apparently in the mid-1980s. In the lectures I'm catching up on, we were looking at some major developmental theories on the early/mid-twentieth century. One helpful reading was Karl Popper on "world hypotheses." This really helped me organize my thinking and recollections, and probably to structure how I think about a lot of things. He posited that theories of "everything" tend to be centered on a single "root metaphor" which organizes things and makes other things hard to see, and that there is no objective place to stand to judge between them. It's possible to critique things within a big theory, but really hard to come up with a substitute.
Popper talked about formalism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism. It's easy to see the behaviorist theories as mechanistic, and theories like Bowlby's as organicist. Contextualism is hard for theories to start with, and then becomes irresistible after a while (this is my talking today), a way of acknowledging both the uniqueness of individuals and of times and places, and of being humble about grand theorizing. Then it's also unsatisfying, because of the relativism problem. I didn't remember but this is where I first heard the idea of being so open-minded that your brains fall out.
Freud's theory is interesting against this partly because it's got elements of a lot of these root metaphors. It's mechanistic, but the mechanisms fight with each other (I wrote in my class notes "conflict in Freud's theory is all over"). Another thing I noticed in my notes is the word "overdetermined." Professor Demick said people who oversimplify Freud and then trash him mistakenly think there is a one-to-one correspondence between a childhood experience or trauma and a symptom in adulthood. It's not that; there are always so many causes, and many of them are accidental or situational. I go back to the caution of "overdetermined" a lot when I am tempted to think I understand everything about someone, or about a social/political dynamic. This is where I first heard that and it stuck.
It "imprinted" -- we touched on Bowlby's and Lorenz's theories, and Professor Demick talked about how they put too much on one mechanism and one relationship (mother-child).
We got to the idea of "personality disorders", particularly "borderline personality disorder", which would come up again and again and I think turned out to be one of Professor Demick's particular interests. He defined these disorders as a group as between "neurosis" and "psychosis". He talked about research into BPO as stemming from a problem of differentiation and boundaries at some still-researched early phase, and I imagine this is why it's a really hard thing to find good therapy for.
In my notes is an interlude that might possibly be a note from the first lecture or maybe just a call-back, about Heinz Werner and the "orthogenetic principle." Professor Demick was definitely part of the Werner-ian (?) school, and the idea here is that each developmental thing starts in a global phase and then comes its differentiation within in, its finer nuances, and the exceptions that to other theories look sometimes like going backward. He cites Carol Gilligan as saying first we learn rules and we overapply them, then we learn to make exceptions, by experimenting in ways that look like we're not getting the "rule" idea but actually involve practice in when to apply rules categorically and when to take other factors into account. Then Werner says later on when we reach a more advanced overall stage of development, something earlier falls into its proper place. So I guess that means we do a lot of growing in our relationships as teens (hopefully) but we don't completely finish that work until we develop the brain of an adult, and can sort out the earlier habits, memories, notions, principles, commitments. (My words sitting here, not in my notes.)
Then we hopped out of Freud to the next theory, the maturational-developmental theory of Andrew Gesell. This was much more biologically focused and genetic, with an idea that biology sets the trajectory, culture adjusts the pace, and experience creates a certain range of individual differences. But no one can "outmature" the pace of nature. He adopted the idea of "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" (the development of the individual tracks the evolutionary development of the species), which if it didn't sound smooth probably wouldn't make sense (that's me talking today).
Gesell's theory also accounted for seeming regression, suggesting an "innovation" cycle of trying a new thing and integrating it awkwardly before finally organizing it. Apparently he noticed things that are pendulum-like, such as a child who is shy at 3 and loud six months later and inward again in another six months. Unlike Freud's stormier theory, Gesell thought this is a normal trajectory within a given stage. Apparently there are a lot of critiques here, some because the stage theory is too rigid in terms of ages, and some from evidence that environmental and social effects are higher than Gesell credited.
More interesting to me were the conditioning and learning theories -- classical, operant, and social-learning. I remember (and who would be surprised) being particularly interested in the social learning theory of Bandura. I'm intrigued by something in my notes, which is that the classical conditioning studies (Pavlov's dog etc.) weren't about development at all, but there was an interest at some point in developing theories that didn't depend on getting "inside someone's head" which seemed impossible. A reaction to Freud, I guess, but what would have been going on in the world? Anyway the opening was for a more outside-in and objective approach, and I imagine also this tracks with the growing industrialization of more of the European world.
Looking now at the notes, social learning theory seems like a catch-all that really fuzzed the mechanisms on a global level. But this is the theoretical framework we rely on a ton in education, and parenting, and it has a lot of local application even if it's not unified. Maybe only now in the age of neuroscience do have a better chance at nailing down the magnitudes and mechanisms, but I think we're way early on still. It's still a lot of feeling and judgment, very hard to isolate what are the learning factors in the rich world we all live in. But I know I tried to learn more about that family of theories early on, and I think there's more than what was in my class notes.
This is where I first learned about things like token economies, payoff schedules, aversion therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy. I feel like I was stuck in my early conceptions of them for a good decade if not way more, and needed when I started to think about being a rabbi-counselor to let go of an overconfidence in these simple methods or mechanisms. I know now that CBT for instance is a really nuanced and sophisticated and hard thing to do well, and how could it be otherwise -- as I said, there are so many factors that are "stimulating" us and eliciting "responses", so getting ourselves to focus on a subset or just one is incredibly hard.
My first paper in the class was handed in on October 25! I guess not the first college paper because I was taking Expository Writing. I think this is the one where I had to stay up all night, and relied at 3 or 4 am on a diluted instant espresso from a packet given me by Marco/Kevin, my Italian next-door neighbor. I hand-wrote two drafts before typing the final one, 4+ single-spaced handwritten drafts. The paper was a report and critique of five studies on when children can differentiate between moral rules and conventional rules (like the rules of kickball). I was so excited to do this topic both because of the Justice class and my interest from Talmud Torah and Earl Schwartz in moral development theory.
I was intrigued to discover studies that show this differentiation all the way back to age three. My TA wasn't blown away by my paper (said I had too much detail and too little conceptual analysis), and it looks like at the end I was grasping for an interesting critique or two. I did say one interesting thing, which was to hypothesize that even when children could differentiate different types of rule-breaking, they might have trouble showing it because their language for talking about it might not have caught up to the intuition.
Wow, that was a lot to reread. I'm going to take a break, and come back to Justice probably tomorrow.