Scientology - Psychology - what's the difference?

ddt said:
Behe's creationism doesn't make it to peer-reviewed journals. Cold fusion only the one paper by Pons and Fleischmann - and then the whole world wanted to replicate it and couldn't and that was it. "Recovered memory" made it definitely further than that - it was a respected theory within psychology and it's still labeled as "controversial" rather than "quack".
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I'm unaware of recovered memories ever being considered respectable. Do you have a cite for that?
 
ddt said:
Behe's creationism doesn't make it to peer-reviewed journals.
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Sure it has, as IDers are happy to point out. Now, granted, they're fringe biochemistry / bioinformatics journals...



ddt said:
Cold fusion only the one paper by Pons and Fleischmann - and then the whole world wanted to replicate it and couldn't and that was it.
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Well... notice it's become quibbling now.

Plenty of other examples, of course. Wakefield was published in Lancet and it took over a decade to denounce it. Is medicine no longer scientific?




ddt said:
"Recovered memory" made it definitely further than that - it was a respected theory within psychology and it's still labeled as "controversial" rather than "quack".
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I reject this description. "respected theory" No way.

At best it could be described as ignored too long. But that's precisely because it was a fringe practice. We're talking about probably no more than half a dozen pratitioners.
The APA has issued explicit statements saying it is an inappropriate practice. Here's their 1998 report: [Report of the APA Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse] It is consistent with previous announcements on the topic.

My understanding is that the Royal College in the UK will strike a member from their lists for attempting to obtain 'repressed memories' through hypnosis or other techniques.

It's pretty hard to implicate recovered memories as some sort of smoking gun.
 
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shandyjan said:
Psychology or psychiatry arnt usually homophobic. Scientology claim to cure gayness!
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To be fair, homosexuality was considered a disorder as recently as 40 years ago, although I don't think any psychiatrist claimed to have an effective cure.
 
Last I checked it's not common in the field of psychiatry to trace human behavior to clams:

From LRH's "History of Man:"

Many engrams, for example, could be traced back to clams. The clam's big problem was that there was a conflict between the hinge that wanted to open and the hinge that wanted to close. It was easy to restimulate the engram caused by the defeat of the weaker hinge, Hubbard pronounced, by asking a pre-clear to imagine a clam on a beach opening and closing its shell very rapidly and at the same time making an opening and closing motion with thumb and forefinger. This gesture, he said, would upset large numbers of people.
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The Clam itself is "a deadly incident" involving a "scalloped-lip, white- shelled creature" which suffered from a severe split personality or "double-hinge problem. One hinge wishes to stay open, the other tries to close, thus conflict occurs." According to Hubbard, the hinges of the Clam "later become the hinges of the human jaw" and the Clam's method of reproducing using spores is said to be responsible for toothache. In one of the most famous passages of the book, Hubbard advised that
Should you desire to confirm this, describe to some uninitiated person the death of a clam without saying what you are describing. "Can you imagine a clam sitting on the beach, opening and closing its shell very rapidly?" (Make a motion with your thumb and forefinger of a rapid opening and closing). The victim may grip his jaws with his hand and feel quite upset. He may even have to have a few teeth pulled: At the very least he will argue as to whether or not the shell stays open at the end or closed. And he will, with no hint of the death aspect of it, talk about the "poor clam" and he will feel quite sad emotionally.​
He goes on to warn the reader that "your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the "clam" to someone, you may restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw pain. One such victim, after hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days."
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Puppycow said:
Well for starters there's
Quote:
The church was founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who declared that the galactic dictator Xenu dumped millions of corpses in volcanoes on Earth 75 million years ago and blew them up with 17 hydrogen bombs. The souls, or ''thetans'', of the dead were contaminated and in turn contaminated humans, who can be cleansed only by Scientology.
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is this true, according to hubbard?.....really?
 
blutoski said:
Well... notice it's become quibbling now.

Plenty of other examples, of course. Wakefield was published in Lancet and it took over a decade to denounce it. Is medicine no longer scientific?
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False dichotomy; I never said psychology is not scientific. I argued that its standards are still considerably lower than in "hard" sciences like physics.

blutoski said:
I reject this description. "respected theory" No way.

At best it could be described as ignored too long. But that's precisely because it was a fringe practice. We're talking about probably no more than half a dozen pratitioners.
The APA has issued explicit statements saying it is an inappropriate practice. Here's their 1998 report: [Report of the APA Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse] It is consistent with previous announcements on the topic.
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That's well after that craze had taken its toll on thousands of victims. I could name at least six proponents/practitioners from the Low Countries; if you PM Roma, you'd undoubtedly get another list of practitioners. Or look for more names in the threads on this board here, here and here. Oh, and there's of course Colin Ross, a member of this board. Your "half a dozen" is a gross understatement.

blutoski said:
My understanding is that the Royal College in the UK will strike a member from their lists for attempting to obtain 'repressed memories' through hypnosis or other techniques.
Good for them, unfortunately not all countries do so.

blutoski said:
It's pretty hard to implicate recovered memories as some sort of smoking gun.
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I acknowledged before, psychology moved on. But the practitioners still work on, only one recanted, while their practices got numerous people in jail or at least falsely accused. Pons & Fleischmann's paper on cold fusion never ruined anyone's life, at most their own pride.
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bikerdruid said:
is this true, according to hubbard?.....really?
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Yes, it's in OT3 (OT = "Operating Thetan"). See the annotated copy with commentary by Karin Spaink, approved by the Dutch courts to pass the copyright laws. :) (Spaink first published OT3 "raw", then was sued by Scientology for copyright infringement, and then she added the commentary, and the court was OK with that one as "scientific work").
 
godless dave said:
You mean the "recovered memories" therapy that was nearly universally denounced by practicing psychologists and psychiatrists?
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nearly universally denounced? Here's guidelines from the CPA -

GUIDELINES FOR PSYCHOLOGISTS ADDRESSING RECOVERED MEMORIES, Canadian Psychology Association

You might as well blame astronomy for astrology.
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Only if astronomers are practicing astrology.

As others have noted, plenty of professionals got on this bandwagon.

But this is just one example. I can't speak for today, but when I was educated a couple of decades ago, we got quite significant teaching about, for example, psychoanalysis, and I've no doubt there are still significant numbers of practitioners.

Care to point out the scientific support for it?
 
blutoski said:
I reject this description. "respected theory" No way.
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Google scholar should give you an idea it has been, and continues to be, treated seriously.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=20&q=recovered+memory

Here's the abstract from a 2009 paper in Psychological Science, the journal of the APS, Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Recovered-Memory Experiences of Childhood Sexual Abuse -

ABSTRACT—People sometimes report recovering long forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse. The memory mechanisms that lead to such reports are not well understood, and the authenticity of recovered memories has often been challenged. We identified two subgroups of people reporting recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. These subgroups differed dramatically in their cognitive profiles: People who recovered memories of abuse through suggestive therapy exhibited a heightened susceptibility to the construction of false memories, but showed no tendency to underestimate their prior remembering. Conversely, people who recovered memories of abuse spontaneously showed a heightened proneness to forget prior incidences of remembering, but exhibited no increased susceptibility to false memories. This double dissociation points to mechanisms that underlie recovered-memory experiences and indicates that recovered memories may at times be fictitious and may at other times be authentic.
 
Science is self-correcting. We know about the fallibility of memory because of the research of psychologists.
 
Alan said:
Science is self-correcting. We know about the fallibility of memory because of the research of psychologists.
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And you're assuming religion isn't? It is.
Much much much much slower, sure, but it still changes and auto corrects itself.

How many people claim the sun revolves around the earth today?
In the western world, we see less of the barbarian acts that were carried on in the bibilical eras.

Not saying the situation is perfect, far far from it. We have a long way to go will people drop their idiotic religious nonesense and act like decent human beings.

But religion does change over time and corrects itself as well.
It's a basic evolution thing. Religion must adapt to survive or perish.

The difference is, because of its mentality and popularity, it doesn't require to adapt to reality as fast as science does.
There lies the difference.
 
I was replying to icerat, not commenting on the larger topic. :)
 
Alan said:
Science is self-correcting. We know about the fallibility of memory because of the research of psychologists.
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I'm not arguing that point. My point is merely that a lot of people have little clue how much of the commercial practice of psychology/psychiatry remains with little scientific foundation.
 
icerat said:
I'm not arguing that point. My point is merely that a lot of people have little clue how much of the commercial practice of psychology/psychiatry remains with little scientific foundation.
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What are you basing that statement on? There are hundreds of thousands of psychological studies published in scientific and medical peer reviewed journals. I would challenge you to read Martin Sielgman's work on learned helplessness and tell me where the design flaws in his experiments are? Same goes for research on classical and operant conditioning. Have you considered that psychology and psychiatry are successful because they are supported scientifically and they help people?
 
Craig4 said:
What are you basing that statement on? There are hundreds of thousands of psychological studies published in scientific and medical peer reviewed journals. I would challenge you to read Martin Sielgman's work on learned helplessness and tell me where the design flaws in his experiments are? Same goes for research on classical and operant conditioning. Have you considered that psychology and psychiatry are successful because they are supported scientifically and they help people?
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I'm one of Seligman's biggest fans - but afaik his work isn't yet widely influencing the commercial practice of psychology or psychiatry.

As a starting point, can you point me to the scientific underpinnings of psychoanalysis, one of the most popular forms of therapy?

Or how about the efficacy of CBT (which I believe is overall the most sound form of therapy) for something ike treatment of schizophrenia? It's promoted quite extensively based on some research, but more rigorous analysis indicates it doesn't work at all.

How about Maslow's heirarchy of needs? Still commonly taught in behavioural psychology, and especially in fields like marketing - but we've known for almost 40 years that it doesn't fit the research.
 
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