Wednesday 24 June 2015

theological contamination of psychology

Vlog CXCII - YouTube





+Jennifer Armstrong Good point. I also had to scratch my head when I heard that. Because my narcissist and other female narcs I've dealt with are very normal looking. They are as feminine as any other woman. You couldn't tell them apart just by looking at them.

In the most extreme cases, we've all heard about the black widows who lure men with their soft, feminine seductive charms and then end up killing them.
+Breakthrough Moment It is worth noting that anything that comes out of the USA TENDS to have a Bibilical bias to it, up to a point. I've noticed that Biblical gender roles are far more normalized throughout the USA (if YouTube videos are anything to go by) than they are in Australia. Also, to some degree what is considered psychologically normal often has a theological taint to it. It's something to watch out for. The aspect of this that concerns me most has to do with the notion that inner injuries are sustained in early childhood, which someone lead to a lack of wholesome moral integrity. Whereas there is doubtlessly an element of truth to this, the insistence of some theoretical platforms that all the injuries that are significent take place in early childhood smacks of theological notions of original sin, because childhood is tied in with parental corruption, so that, as the narrative goes, the sins of the fathers are passed onto the sons (likewise the sins of the mothers to the daughters, etc.) If we assume that all the major damage happens in early childhood, then therapy and fixing the (often imagined) broken cracks in one's psychological integrity take precedence over addressing hostile attacks in the here and now, in a realistic and mature manner. In fact, society is further infantalized by these notions of how inner-psychological corruption is said to take place. Not only that, but victims are compelled to go into therapy to find out what might possibly be wrong with them, when the answer is probably either, "very little" or else is more likely "susceptibility to right-wing dogma and its notions of perfectability".
In all, I think we ought to be on our guards against those theological tones and solutions that creep into more general psychological theorizing.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity