Critique of a Book Used by Many Psychologists and Psychiatrists to Oppress Patients, Part Two

Introduction

This is the second part of a five-part series of posts that criticize a book that serves to oppress individuals, whether they have mental health problems or not.

As I indicated in another post (A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Nine), I engaged in a partial critique of the book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns, M.D. (1999). This book is used by many psychologists and psychiatrists as a basis for the psychological technique called “mindfulness”–and with reason since Dr. Burns defines human problems independently of social context–quite convenient for the class of employers since the economic, social and political oppressive and exploitative contexts are thereby ignored–or rather suppressed.

The reason why I read the book was that I was required to see a psychologist as a condition of receiving disability benefits from the Manitoba Teachers Society (a kind of union of unions for teachers) (see A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Ten). As I pointed out in that post, Marxists and other radicals often fail to take into account how various professionals function to oppress members of the working class–such professionals aid the class of employers in maintaining its power. The radical left needs to address this form of oppressive power if it is to be more successful in organizing workers and convincing them of the need for a socialist society.

Mr. Alan Slusky, a psychologist in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, recommended the book and, in fact, it was supposed to be part of my “therapy”–bibliotherapy. According to Wikipedia:

Bibliotherapy is a creative arts therapies modality that involves storytelling or the reading of specific texts with the purpose of healing. It uses an individual’s relationship to the content of books and poetry and other written words as therapy. Bibliotherapy is often combined with writing therapy.

I refer occasionally to John Dewey’s philosophy of science, which I will look at in the last post of this series. I also refer occasionally to my dissertation. My doctoral dissertation compared the philosophies of human nature of John Dewey (an :American philosopher of education and author of, among other books, Human Nature and Social Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology, Democracy and Education and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) and Paulo Freire (a Brazilian philosopher of education and author, among other books, of Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

Critique of the Contents of the Book

Let us now turn to the contents of the book and some of my criticisms. I do not present my criticism in the order in which I wrote it since the initial points are fairly abstract (I leave those for the fourth and fifth posts in this series).. My critical comments are usually either in square brackets or separate points :

P. 27: “Many individuals have the delusion that they are extraordinarily powerful and brilliant, and often insist that they are on the verge of some philosophical or scientific breakthrough or some money-making scheme.”

P. 28: “Depression is not an emotional disorder at all!”

[This claim is interesting—it is a problem of cognition—of bad thinking, of illogical thinking. Depression is—a cognitive disorder.]

The sudden change in the way you feel is of no more causal relevance than a runny nose is when you have a cold. [Note the complete divorce of symptom and “cause.” Consequences are irrelevant in determining causes.] [This view of science contrasts sharply with that of Dewey. See my dissertation.] [A runny nose is just as relevant for the determination of the nature of the problem and for its solution as the “cause.” Burns’ conception of cause is probably similar to common-sense inquiry—something occurring before and producing the specific effect. However, the “cause” of the cold and the symptoms are what science attempts to unite in one descriptive-narrative process. See my dissertation. See also the complete account of malaria by Dewey in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry—a logic grounded in scientific inquiry. See also Dewey’s remarks about induction and the nature of evidence or data as forming both a sign for the determination of the nature of the problem and a sign for the determination of a solution—that is to say, as having a double function.]

Every bad feeling you have [Every? Such a generalization is unscientific. No scientist would say that every “cause” results in the same consequence regardless of mediating conditions. Furthermore, such a conclusion, if ever it were warranted, would be subject to massive research into the negation of conditions that might lead to the contrary conclusion.] is the result of your distorted negative thinking. [Bad feelings are “caused” by distorted negative thinking. Eliminate the distorted negative thinking and you will eliminate the bad feeling. Do not “bad feelings” portend a problem sometimes, though? Some “bad feelings” may indeed have no basis in reality, but others may. To assume that bad feelings are somehow “bad” is absurd.]

Illogical pessimistic attitudes [note the conjunction of the adjectives “illogical” and “pessimistic.” To be pessimistic is, probably, to be illogical] play the central role in the development and continuation of all your symptoms. [I suppose, with the same logic, that if you hit a person constantly on the shoulder for days on end, it is your “illogical pessimistic attitude” that is causing you to experience pain for a number of days. And what of Sister Dianne Ortiz? Consider the case of Sister Dianne Ortiz (2002). She was an American nun who went to Guatemala in 1987 to do what for her was God’s work by working with the poor there. In 1989 she was kidnapped, gang raped, forced to cut another woman with a machete and tortured by being burned with a cigarette over 100 times—within a period of 24 hours. It could of course be abstractly said that she was in “unity with her environment” since she did not die. However, her own self was destroyed. She did not even recognize her parents at first. She reconstructed herself in various ways, such as by fighting against the Guatemalan government to find out who tortured her, by fighting against the American government to find out who was the American who supervised torture operations where she was tortured and by meeting others who also fought in various ways (such as the American woman who fought to find out if her Guatemalan husband was alive or dead). For many years, she was in conflict with herself and her environment. She kept a razor blade with her for years in case she needed to kill herself. Was there not an objective conflict between her and her environment that led her to expand her life in various ways? Her reconstructed self involved a process of clarification of her situation and, through that process, a substantially reconstructed unity.]

Page 28: “Intense negative thinking always accompanies a depression episode, or any painful emotion for that matter.” Firstly, to say that negative thinking is the “cause” in the usual, common-sense way of thinking does not involve “accompanying” but antecedently occurring. If the negative thinking is accompanying, then it is simultaneous. So, which is it? Antecedent or simultaneous?

Page 29: “You will learn … that the negative thoughts that flood your mind are the actual cause of your self-defeating emotions.” [Now, they are considered the cause. Before, they accompanied. What does he mean by cause, by the way? If not antecedent?]

“Your negative thoughts, or cognitions, are the most frequently overlooked symptoms of your depression.” Symptoms? Symptoms are end results of a process. Before, however, he wrote that negative thoughts are the cause of negative feelings. From page 12: “The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your “cognitions,” or thoughts. … You feel the way you do because of the thoughts that you are thinking in this moment.” So: negative thoughts are the cause of all your moods, but negative thoughts are the symptoms of depression. Is cause the “independent variable” and the “symptom” the dependent variable in typical positivist terms? If so, he is simply contradicting himself—hardly scientific. Furthermore, the second principle is: “The second principle is that when you are feeling depressed, your thoughts are dominated by a pervasive negativity.” So, it would seem that it is not your negative thoughts that create your negative feelings, but your “feeling depressed” that causes your negative thoughts. Which is it? Or is there a dialectic here? If so, then he contradicts himself on p. 29: Page 29: “You will learn … that the negative thoughts that flood your mind are the actual cause of your self-defeating emotions.” On page 28, he also contradicts himself in this regard: Page 28: “Intense negative thinking always accompanies a depression episode, or any painful emotion for that matter.” Does he mean “simultaneous”? So, negative thoughts cause negative feelings, accompany them, and are a symptom of them? Is this his logic? His scientific thought? His claim to be logical?]

From page 12: “…it is based on common sense….” He contradicts himself here as well. Common-sense and scientific inquiry have different problems, one concerned with the instrumental means and the other concerned with ends. To claim that cognitive behavioural therapy “is based on common sense” is to exclude scientific inquiry from the very beginning. The “data” of common sense inquiry must be reworked in order to perform inductive inquiry. See for example, the reworked data of the capitalist economy in Karl Marx’s Capital, where Marx begins with the commodity as the unit of analysis. See also Hegel’s description of the problem of a beginning in his The Science of Logic.

P. 29: “Every [my emphasis] time you feel depressed about something, try to identify a corresponding negative thought you had just prior to and during the depression.” [my emphasis] [Which is it? If thought is the cause of negative feeling, then according to the conventional view of “cause” as the “independent variable and “effect” as the dependent variable, the cause occurs before the effect. If it occurs simultaneously with the “effect,” then it could be the depression which is “causing” the negative thoughts. Such imprecision and confusion from the “scientist.”]

P. 29: “Because these thoughts have actually created your bad mood [a problem here that Burns is unaware of—a lack of cognitive thinking on his part. According to his own theory, then, he should be feeling something negative—but he evidently is not, so not being aware of your bad thinking does not necessarily “cause” you to feel in a bad mood. But this only by the by. Rene Descartes faced the problem of how to relate the “mind” as spiritual or intellectual, without physical space, with the “body” as physical and existing in space. How could they be related as cause and effect if they are in different dimensions? Descartes, if I remember correctly, used the pineal gland as a sort of mediator between the two. Burns does not even see that his reference to thought causing feelings might pose a problem if they are different dimensions. Are thoughts physical? What are thoughts? If thoughts are not physical, how can they “cause” anything at all? What of feelings? Are feelings physical? If thoughts and feelings are both not physical, why speak of “cause” at all? Are they causal in the same sense as the cause of a pen falling to the ground is the gravitational attraction of material things? Another problem is with the concept of “created.” Did thoughts magically engender feelings out of nothing? To create anything, it is necessary to have an object on which to work in order to transform the object into a different form. How can thoughts “create” feelings? What is the process that establishes the linkages?], by learning to restructure them, you can change your mood. [So, our lives in a capitalist society are not characterized by a lack of control over our own lives—which contributes to depression. It is rather our “interpretation” of it. What nonsense. This leads to a lack of control over our lives by not acknowledging the situation in which we live.]

“You are probably skeptical of all this [Burns mentions somewhere Epictetus—a Stoic. Now he refers to skeptic—the ancient opposition of skeptics and stoics in modern garb? Where are the Epicureans?] of all this because your negative thinking has become such a part of your life that it has become automatic. [A nice piece of defensive reasoning there. Any person who is skeptical of his so-called science is labeled irrational or illogical. Only Burns is rational; any who dare doubt or question his propositions are irrational.]

“p. 29: The relationship between the way you think and the way you feel is diagrammed in Figure 3-1.” [I will look at this in a moment.]

“This illustrates the first major key to understanding your moods: Your emotions result entirely [my emphasis] from the way you look at things.” [Which came first, feelings (let us use a different term for emotions, which are more concrete than feelings) or thoughts? Do animals think? Do animals feel? If animals—other than humans—feel but do not think, then the relationship historically is feeling first then the emergence of thought or cognition. Then cognition is related to thought in terms of the life process and not as some “independent cause”. Human beings are living beings—not pure cognitive objects. Burns in essence is reducing human nature to thought and knowledge—a nice trick. How impoverished a view of human nature he has. Human nature is much more complicated than that. Burns follows the school view of human nature—as beings of knowledge, like most philosophers as well.]

[This whole approach is characteristic of philosophers throughout the ages—an approach that both Marx and Dewey fought against—to treat human beings as pure beings of cognition. From John Dewey, Lectures on Psychological and Political Ethics: 1898, pages 135-136):

The result is that along with the growth and partly as a result of it, in the intellectual class at least, the emotional concomitants of the emotional process have become very much reduced.

We have no right, however, to take our typical illustrations from that sphere [which is what Burns and most philosophers in the past have done] because this marks a highly specialized development of attention; this is not a normal or average case of attention by any means; it is a technical case. What we call the sphere of prejudices and opinions is the normal and average case; and one only has to think of these prejudices and the part which they play—not simply for bad, but for good as well—in the life of the ordinary man, to realize how truly the emotional element is bound up with the intellectual. … The emotional agitation is harmful, disadvantageous, in a strictly scientific process because it tends to attach too much interest to the outcome [Burns obviously is emotionally concerned that his theory is valid] while the scientific man must be relatively indifferent as to what sort of a product he is to get. [Consequently, when a person opposes those who defend the capitalist system, that person should learn to become indifferent to the consequences.] He must be equally open to have his thoughts move in any line where there seems to be a fair prospect of reaching any conclusions. …

The story of Isaac Newton will illustrate the point. When his calculation regarding the moon upon which depended the verification of his theory of universal gravitation was approaching completion, he was obliged to give the calculation to somebody else to continue because he was in such an excited state he could not carry it on. That simply illustrates the disturbance when any tension is reaching its climax. [Burns, the Newton of psychology, undoubtedly became excited when his book was to be published and when it sold so well: “national bestseller—more than four million copies in print.”]

Critique of a Book Used by Many Psychologists and Psychiatrists to Oppress Patients, Part One

Introduction

This is the first of a five-part series of posts that criticize a book that serves to oppress individuals, whether they have mental health problems or not.

The reason why I read the book was that I was required to see a psychologist as a condition of receiving disability benefits from the Manitoba Teachers Society (see A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Ten). Mr. Alan Slusky, a psychologist in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, recommended the book and, in fact, it was supposed to be part of my “therapy”–bibliotherapy. According to Wikipedia:

Bibliotherapy is a creative arts therapies modality that involves storytelling or the reading of specific texts with the purpose of healing. It uses an individual’s relationship to the content of books and poetry and other written words as therapy. Bibliotherapy is often combined with writing therapy.

I refer occasionally to John Dewey’s philosophy of science, which I will look at to some extent in the fourth post but especially in the last post of this series. I also refer occasionally to my dissertation. My doctoral dissertation compared the philosophies of human nature of John Dewey (an :American philosopher of education and author of, among other books, Human Nature and Social Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology, Democracy and Education and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) and Paulo Freire (a Brazilian philosopher of education and author, among other books, of Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

Critique of the Contents of the Book

Let us now turn to the contents of the book and some of my criticisms. I do not present my criticism in the order in which I wrote it since the initial points are fairly abstract (I leave those for the fourth and fifth posts in this series). My critical comments are usually either in square brackets or separate points as a continuation of my comments:

p.xxx: “Depression is one of the worst forms of suffering because of the immense feelings of shame, worthlessness, hopelessness and demoralization. Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem. Many depressed patients have told me, in fact, that they yearned for death and that they prayed every night that they would get cancer, so they could die in dignity without having to commit suicide.”

P. 9: “In fact, depression is so widespread it is considered the common cold of psychiatric disturbances.” [Would that not be evidence of a social problem for a scientist? Would not even the lay person who is curious wonder why it is so common?]

Page 10: Note: “The idea that thinking patterns can profoundly influence your moods has been described by a number of philosophers [why did he not name a few?] in the past 2500 years. More recently, the cognitive view of emotional disturbances has been explored in the writings of many psychiatrists and psychologists including Alfred Adler, Albert Ellis, Karen Horney, and Arnold Lazarus, to name just a few. A history of this movement has been described in Ellis, A., Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy.”

Page 11: “2. Understanding: A clear understanding of why you get moody and what you can do to change your moods. You will learn what causes your powerful feelings; how to distinguish “normal” from “abnormal” emotions; and how to diagnose and assess the severity of your upsets.”

Page 11: Self-control: You will learn how to apply safe and effective coping strategies that will make you feel better whenever you are upset. … As you apply it, your moods can come under greater voluntary control.

Page 12: “The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your “cognitions,” or thoughts. … You feel the way you do because of the thoughts that you are thinking in this moment. [One of the categories that he uses is “overgeneralization.” Here is a good example of overgeneralization. What is a thought? What is a feeling? What is the relationship between the two? Do feelings cause thoughts? What is the specific causal mechanism that leads from thoughts to feelings? What narrative structure, in conjunction with the descriptive structure? Furthermore, the “self” of human beings is constituted by a set of ways of acting, which are linked to how others act. Money. A set of habits is generally unconscious until a problem arises.] [Which came first? Thoughts or feelings in the process of evolution?]

“You create those feelings [feelings are products of the self—the environment plays no part for Burns. The subject of the action of creating feelings is “you”—apparently, you do not consist of feelings—they arise out of thin air. You are feelingless, and the feelings then are magically produced by something completely different from the feelings—thoughts.” Does Burns explain anywhere how people create feelings? Unlikely. This is mysticism, not science, or rather it is mysticism parading as science. How do thoughts “create” feelings? What is the difference between thoughts and feelings?] by the dialogue you are having with this book. [Presentation of the individual self as purely internal. There is no relation to an environment. Feelings are purely internal as are thoughts. But if both are purely internal, are they not the same in some way? This is idealist—and subjective idealism at that—by reducing the individual to purely internal processes. Anti-evolutionary.] [Burns is inferior to anything that Dewey has to offer. Burns assumes the “you” without inquiring into what he means by the “you” Does he mean the person or the body? The formation of the human person? If the “you” is itself a social process that has its focal point in an individual who becomes conscious of processes between the environment and the living being, then this “you” is itself a product and a cause. This one-sided reduction of the “you” to pure thought cannot begin to grasp the complexity of the nature of human beings. Burns does not even reflect on the use of his terms—a lack of critical thinking.]

If “you” are a product of a social process, what then is the relation between the “individual” and the “social”? Burns does not even try to determine the relation since he reduces human nature to the isolated individual who is already formed—and assumes that this isolated individual is the point of departure.

He assumes, in effect, that the human individual is a formed individual, and simply ignores the environmental conditions that contribute to the construction of the “you.”

From Burns’ point of view, prehistoric people merely had to change their way of thinking and they would be like us.

Is not the “you”—and thoughts and feelings—linked to the kind of society in which we live? Would Burns have the you that he does without the Gutenberg press?

“Your emotional reaction is generated not by the sentences you are reading but by the way you are thinking. Your thought actually creates the emotion. [creates? How? There is an organic aspect to all reactions, and that organic aspect, when grounded in the cns (central nervous system), can be called feeling. Feeling becomes emotion (something with an object attached to it. Feeling has organic roots and is quite independent of “thought.” Let us see whether this “scientist” explains how thought “creates ”emotion.”]Thought does not create emotion; it is a necessary condition for emotion to arise, but then so too is the environment. This person is an idealist and so too is his theory—despite the “scientific research” he claims. As for science, if thoughts “cause” feelings—in a real scientific sense and not in his pseudo-scientific conception of science, then he should be able to link up the “cause” with the “effect” in one narrative structure such that the beginning and the end form a history. See my dissertation.]

“The second principle is that when you are feeling depressed, your thoughts are dominated by a pervasive negativity.” Really? Such a generalization independent of context? His principle must be a physical principle since only physic-chemical principles are universal. Even if it were true—and? The implication is that “negativity” is an unreasonable or unjustifiable response to conditions. Such an assumption is unjustifiable. See the article on justifiable depression.] Social science that pretends to be universal is ideological—except for a few generalities that cannot grasp any definite, concrete relation (cannot exist independently of determinate, concrete relations).

p. 13: “This feeling is absolutely illogical, but it seems so real that you have convinced yourself that your inadequacy will go on forever.” [Does this person live on this planet? There are many individuals who live in hopeless situations. How many children die each year throughout the world from malnutrition and starvation? Should their parents not be depressed? Has he ever experienced depression? This “scientist” becomes ever more pompous and lacks any depth of understanding of what people in this world experience.] [In any case, his statement that it is “absolutely illogical” is itself illogical. No rational scientist would make such a categorical statement independently of circumstances. [Watched a movie recently called “Guilty,” in French. The man was accused falsely of sexual abuse; he was imprisoned; his children were taken away from him (his children were his life); his wife eventually was let go, but she began seeing another man. His mother died while he was in prison. He stayed in prison for almost two years. Despite the recantation of the woman who accused him of sexual abuse, the judges condemned him to 18 months of probation. He tried to kill himself several times. Was it his negative thoughts that led to his depressed feelings? Was it the total situation? “Negative thoughts” may be a contributing determinant of depression, but to reduce depression to just this aspect is a fallacy—a fallacy of reducing a total process and situation to one event within the process or one aspect of it.]

P.13: “The third principle is of substantial philosophical and therapeutic importance. Our research has documented that the negative thoughts which cause your emotional turmoil nearly always contain gross distortion. [Why the emphasis on “always.” Obviously because negative feelings have no real basis—always. But what happens if they do have a basis in reality, but that Burns and company have neglected to determine this in a scientific manner? Do they consider the context in which people live? That is to say, the environment? Or do they act like pre-evolutionary scientists and pretend that human beings are isolated monads, cut off from their environment?] [Who determines what constitutes gross distortions? Burns has such a grip on reality that he does not live in a distorted world? If capitalist society is by its very nature a distorted world, then what are the implications, psychologically?] Although these thoughts appear valid, you will learn that they are irrational or just plain wrong and that twisted thinking is a major cause of your suffering.” [If so many people have twisted thoughts—at the beginning, Burns claims that depression is like the common cold for psychiatrists since it is so prevalent a problem for them, then is not the educational system a possible cause for such twisted thinking? Is not education supposed to teach people how to think? See John Dewey, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Education Process—the need for reflective thinking (not rationalism as usually defined as pure reason independently of context. Would it not be rational for a person who finds that depression is common to inquire into the conditions of its emergence? But Burns has the magic answer in his cap—negative thoughts. Why so many people have negative thoughts never enters his “scientific” mind, which seems to involve a curious lack of desire to inquire into anything that may contradict his theory. If schools contribute to the lack of a capacity to think, then individual solutions of “changing” thoughts will not do. Burns will have none of that, of course.] [It can be concluded that Burns’ theory ‘nearly always contain[s] great distortions.]

: “Some of the major symptoms include… the conviction that external forces are controlling your mind or body….” [There are—necessarily—in a society characterized by commodity production—a lack of control over forces that determine our body and mind.]