Once or twice in my life, I've been through 'counseling'. They both happened at a time in my life when i was investigating the liberal arts in recovery for what I believed I missed in my state school technical education. So I have always referred to Dr. K as my 'witch doctor'. I brought up the subject of what difference blackness makes in the field of Psychology and he mentioned the book: Even the Rat Was White.
I tend to be rather dismissive of Freudian ideas and Jungian ideas. I don't even know enough about them to have much of a base for distinguishing between them. From my philosophical perspective, most of psychology is guesswork at cognitive science. That is to say, we really don't understand enough about the hardware function of the brain to debug its software. So I've always considered most of psychological analysis and counseling as witch doctoring to normalize and rationalize people into socially acceptable behavior. The only person I ever thought had a clue was Oliver Sacks, and only because his subjects were so bizarre that they might be the first ones to become obvious with regard to the function of thought vis a vis brain hardware.
I'm interested to see what folks think about psychology and analysis. Isn't it a bourgie conceit? Have you been through it? Is it truly liberating? Are Americans mentally ill? Are we making excuses? How is mental fitness expressed in different cultures? Does it physically hurt to be immoral? How aware are you about cultural bias in psychology?
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