| Dr. Tana Dineen, in her book "Manufacturing Victims" (ISBN 1-895854-58-X,
Robert Davies Publishing, 1996, http://www.rdppub.com,
e-mail: rdppub@vir.com) makes an indictment of the
Psychology Industry and its successful attempts in turning people into victims while the
harm that's being done by the Psychology Industry to our society is immeasurable. Here
are a few more points from Tana Dineen's book:
The section "Science Fiction" (page 166) provides one condemning example
after another of how the Psychology Industry has attempted to cloak itself with the mantel
of "science" but has in fact achieved its claims of success by methods that can
only, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered as nothing more than Science
Fiction.
"Science fiction, whatever its focus, evokes intrigue by blending the known, the
believable and the fantastic," Dr. Dineen states, and explains how the Psychology
Industry does exactly that, from "helping" victims of UFO abductions to adult
recollections of childhood sexual abuse. In respect to the latter, she questions how
an adult's recollection of forgotten childhood memories can be any more exact than those
of a child immediately after the occurrence of an alleged offense. She cites Peter Wolfe
in relation to his observations on "repressed" memories: "The
clinical reconstruction of early childhood experiences [some of which are said to be
recoverable from an age of 7 *months*] deals with the subject's present view about
his past, and not with the discovery of archeological artifacts that have been
buried." [I guess if the powers and skills of psychologists extend to that, then it
should not surprise us that a psychologist can convince one of his victims that she is a
personification of Satan as well as a duck, amongst hundreds of others, and then convince
the health insurance plan to pay him for group therapy to boot. That number of
manifestations of entities in one "patient" would be somewhat hard to deal with
on a one-on-one basis, especially after he induced the
patient's belief in these entities in the first place. That situation bring to mind the
situation described in The Sorcerer's Apprentice
and should more aptly be called science fantasy.]
Dr. Dineen, in relation to recovered childhood memories cites a study to disprove the
credibility of such extreme statements as "Children don't lie about sexual
abuse!" The study she used to illustrate the fallacy of that statement is one in
which anatomically detailed dolls were used (Bruck, Maggie, Ceci, Stephen and Francour,
Emmerett. "Anatomically Detailed Dolls Do Not Facilitate Preschoolers' Reports
of Touching. The Abstract Paper" presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the
Canadian Pedriatic Society, St. Johns, Newfoundland.) In that paper it was reported that
forty 3-year-old children were indeed very inaccurate in their reporting of touching of
their buttocks and genitals (done under controlled conditions during a medical
examination). 45% of the children who had a genital examination denied having been
touched when asked directly, with the level of accuracy increasing to 57% after the
children manipulated the dolls, although some of the children let their fantasies run away
from reality and indicated that the doctor had inserted a finger into a genital or anal
cavity. Nevertheless, accuracy was also low for children who had not been
touched. 42% of them had falsely reported genital touching when asked directly and 38% of
them showed genital touching when manipulating the dolls. Dr. Dineen asks then how all of
that can be related to repression of memories.
In the last part of this section, Dr. Dineen cites the circular argument of Bass and
Davis, who wrote: "If you think that you were abused and your life shows the
symptoms, then you probably were," and continue: "so far no one we've talked to
thought she might have been abused and then later discovered she hadn't been." [Not
exactly an unbiased statement by itself. Note that they refer to *she*, obviously
leaving out one half of the population in reaching their conclusion]. Dr. Dineen concludes
in her last sentence of the section: "Once having achieved this level of absurd
thinking, the psychologist can lead the patient into the belief of abuse, the pursuit of
memories and the creation of their own science fiction."
The section "Caveat Emptor:" Buyer Beware (page 173), starts with the
following quote: "The aim of science is not to open the door to everlasting wisdom,
but to set a limit to everlasting error" (Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo) Dr. Dineen
provides an array of statistics that illustrates that the "successes" of the
Psychology Industry have no foundation in either duration or quality of therapy. She
provides a condemnation of the methods used by the Psychology Industry in its attempts to
gather statistics for the surveys with which it bolsters its claims. The example used by
her is Martin Seligman's comments on Consumer Reports' (CR) "candid, in-depth
survey" ("Mental health. Does therapy help?" Consumer Reports, November
1995, pp 734-739) regarding its readers' personal experiences with the benefits of
psychotherapy, may be a counterfeit one which reflects no more than the economic and
business interests of psychologists. Following that, Dr. Dineen explores the history of
claims by the discipline of psychology to be the panacea for society's ills since the
beginning of this century. She also explains that, contrary to its claims, the growth of
criminality and the Psychology Industry itself have gone hand-in-hand for the last three
decades, with the Psychology Industry all the while failing to deliver and to prove
itself.
Martin Seligman's comments appeared in the APA's journal "American
Psychologist". When one considers that that he was not only the author of the
article in which his comments were expressed, but that he was also the consultant to the
CR survey, it becomes clear, after Dr. Dineen has put both the article in the APA's
journal and Martin Seligman's categorization of the readers who responded in the CR survey
into perspective, why she states that both, the article in the APA journal and the results
of the survey published in CR, "mislead the public by, amongst other things,
substituting people who want therapy for those who need help,
and by treating feelings as if they were facts."
The CR survey is described by Dr. Dineen. She points out that of the 180,000 readers
surveyed, 23,400 responded, 7,000 answered mental health questions, 4,000 sought
professional help, and 2,900 saw a mental health professional. The figure of 2,900
represents 1.6% of a self-reporting sample population. The fact that the conclusion of the
CR survey should have been called nothing more than a "Psychology Industry consumer
satisfaction survey," but that its results were nevertheless presented as fact in CR,
shows that CR has "abdicated its role as an independent, non-profit testing and
information organization serving only consumers."
Three questions are asked by Dr. Dineen in her analysis of the CR study:
Does therapy help?
Do psychologists (i.e. mental health professionals) do better?
Does long-term therapy make a difference?
She answers all three questions with a resounding "No!"
Clearly, as in many traitorous activities, the psychologists too need collaboration to
succeed in their efforts to bamboozle the public, and gain the reputation of
professionalism in the process. The mark of a really good con-job of the first order is
when the victim defends the perpetrator of the crime, even gets to like him and what is
being done by him. Is the manipulation by the Psychology Industry of the general public in
the western world a prime example of a large-scale instant of the Stockholm Syndrome?
Read the book and judge for yourself. |
