A Dangerous Plot for Boys

Greetings, friends. I feel the need to hail you because it's been so long between posts; days at a time. Life is a whirlwind here in Thinkuland.

Charles McGrath has an interesting article in last Sunday's Times about The Dangerous Book for Boys. (See my post on the book here.) It seems Disney has contracted with director Scott Rudin ("The Queen" and "School of Rock") to produce a movie based on the book. Hard to conceive, really. I liked the book, myself, but come on: A Rudyard Kipling poem and a piece on how to make a paper water-bomb hardly seem like blockbuster material.

McGrath points out that the book's not nearly as dangerous as it makes itself out to be, since "there is less stuff to do in [it] than to read about." True, though making a vinegar-powered battery might be as dangerous as we can hope for from today's plugged-in, tuned-out lads. (I spent the summer with 50 of them, and getting them to put their GameBoys away for more than five minutes -- even in favor of interpersonal games they really loved -- was a continual struggle.) And besides, dangerous or not, a vinegar battery is still pretty darn cool.

But like McGrath, I'm skeptical of the movie, and I enjoyed the plot line he predicts:

A dad who, worried that his son is becoming a softy and a wuss, buys an under-the-counter copy of a mysterious Edwardian tome and forces the boy to listen as he reads aloud from it. “Don’t swagger,” he says, quoting Sir Frederick Treves. “The boy who swaggers — like the man who swaggers — has little else that he can do. He is a cheap-Jack crying his own paltry wares.”

Pretty soon the two of them are off in the woods together, killing rabbits, talking Latin, reciting Kipling and, safely away from women, companionably breaking wind. Junior ties knots, makes flint arrowheads and recites the rules of Rugby while Dad — Pater, that is — sucks on his pipe and lectures the lad about cold showers and avoiding “beastliness.”

Meanwhile, Mom has bought a book of her own, a home-repair manual, and has set about changing all the locks.

Carl Rogers Pumps his Fist

Interesting article in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday by Laurie Abraham: Can This Marriage be Saved? Abraham followed a couples therapy group for one year, and provides an insider view on both the interactions between the participants, and the therapist's thought process. I liked the thoughts and personality of the therapist very much -- she's well-educated, but at her best when she lets her instincts guide her and her quirky personality shine through. I find the same approach works for me, but I haven't had her years of experience to prove that it's safe (and more effective) to go that way. Reading about experienced clinicians at work is often helpful.

There are a few interesting segués in the article, and I wanted to call out one regarding what the literature has to say on the nature of an effective therapeutic relationship:

Investigators have repeatedly tried to single out specific "therapeutic factors" that can distinguish good therapy from bad, and the only unequivocal winner is what's termed a "positive therapeutic alliance," meaning the client feels that the therapist exhibits qualities like empathy and support.

Jay Efran, a psychologist and emeritus professor at Temple University who surveyed the last 25 years worth of trends in therapy in an ambitious recent article (...) has another idea about what makes for an estimable therapist. He suggests that therapy boils down to a facility for conversation and therefore is a creative and contingent act that does not lend itself to formulas. "The profession has gotten itself into a bind," he told me recently, "because it wants to be seen as a science and it wants to collect money and it has made this category mistake of thinking it provides treatments for diseases and not just conversation or community or human contact or offering new slants on life."

In school, I've had the point in the first paragraph drilled into me so many times I can't count. It's one of the foundations of the humanistic approach that Carl Rogers, a founding father of modern psychology, first defined. And it feels right on to me. (Note that there is a silly, 40-year-old myth related to this which holds that therapists are simply trained to either a) say back to you what you've said to them, or b) gush vague, unexamined supportive statements. Neither is true of a good therapist, regardless of his or her theoretical background.)

The second point seems to me simply to take point number one a giant step further. It may be stated just a little too loosely for my taste, but the gist, again, feels right to me. And while I can hear my more scientifically-oriented friends in the field (and the HMOs, and their panels of well-paid MDs) groaning loudly in the background as I type this, there is a boat-load of truth in this quote.

Thinkulous readers know that I'm a big fan of what science can tell us about our minds, emotions, and behavioral patterns. Neurological breakthroughs in the last 20 years have taken our understanding giant steps forward. Social scientists blaze wide swaths of fascinating new information, cutting through the vast forest of ignorance about our inner workings. I adore reading this stuff, and I try to integrate it into how I approach the field.

At the same time, I've always believed that science, art and mystery are not only highly compatible (in this and any field) but are actually three parts of one whole. What I know, and what I've yet to know that I know, flow together indistinguishably and create my unique approach to clients and clinical situations -- the art. Heck, they create me. And while I adore what science can add to that picture, there isn't an argument in the universe that will convince me that science is any more important than mystery, intuition and subjectivity. We're talking about the mind, about emotions, about self-hood. If it isn't subjective, we are, by definition, off track. How could we possibly quantify why certain people are healing to be around?

One well-recognized marker of mental health is flexible thinking. Practitioners spend a lot of time fostering in our clients a balance of healthy empiricism and risk-tolerant acceptance of the unknown. If the field of psychology doesn't admit pretty soon that the dynamics of pscyhological healing are at least somewhat unquantifiable -- while also unmistakable -- are we then practicing what we preach?

Autistic Girls Essentially Different from Autistic Boys?

If you've been enjoying my many earlier posts on my work this summer with teens with Asperger's disorder, I have a nice link for you. The New York Times Sunday Magazine has an interesting article on the gender differences within autism, focusing especially on Asperger's patients.

Now, it's been a mother of a week, and I'm supposed to be resting today, so I'm not going to launch into one of my usual psychology screeds right now. I need to get outside and enjoy the gorgeous summer day, and try to do as little as possible today.

I'll just say that the piece appears basically well-balanced. There are exceptions; in the seven weeks I've been working directly with kids with Asperger's, I've seen various examples that contradict some of the generalizations the author makes about boys or girls with the disorder. But even she admits that the field is still making up its mind about the larger facts on gender differences. Those points she does state firmly seem reasonably well substantiated. Moreover, the questions she raises are quite interesting and have important implications.

Enjoy!

Freud Pumps His Fist

I'm a bit foggy tonight after nearly finishing the fifth of six weeks straight with my campers with Asperger's. (Today was a most victorious day, by the way.) And I'm up extra-early tomorrow in order to be able to take them on their weekly field trip. So tonight, a quick link to a really interesting article in the Times claiming that the unconscious drives our daily actions far more than we think. A tip of the Thinkulous hat to Goat Rope blogger El Cabrero for hipping me to this article.

I can just see old Freud coolly releasing a cloud of cigar smoke, and saying, "Well, duh!" (A rough translation from the German.)

Herr Sigmund may have named the concept over a century ago, but it's only recently that science, that stodgy older sibling, is grudgingly admitting that psychology was right all along. Some key 'graphs:

On the way to the laboratory, [participants in a recent study] had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.

Like a lot of academic psychology, the implications of the new research are far more interesting than they are practical. That doesn't stop me from gobbling them up...