After recently listening to to an
Intro to Psych Class from MIT I then decided to cross the aisle and check out a class in Pastoral Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary. Here's a brief comparative analysis of the two classes.
First, a brief description of the classes:
From MIT: This course surveys questions about human behavior and mental life ranging from how you see to why you fall in love. The great controversies: nature and nurture, free will, consciousness, human differences, self and society. Students are exposed to the range of theoretical perspectives including biological, evolutionary, cognitive, and psychoanalytic.
From RTS:An overview of current trends in counseling theory and practice and the role of counseling in public, private and church settings. Basic counseling skills taught in this course include interview, assessment, and listening. Application is made to premarital, family crisis, grief, and substance abuse counseling, with emphasis on developing strategies and applying scriptural principles.
The teachers:
The MIT Professor is Dr. Jeremy Wolfe. He is Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. In addition, he is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT where he teaches Introduction to Psychology, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University. He received his AB in 1977 from Princeton and his Ph.D. in Psychology from MIT in 1981
The RTS Professor is Dr. Andrew J. Peterson, a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania where he worked for six years as a mental health practitioner, he also served as a professor of psychology for counseling and teacher training courses for Grove City College, and professor of pastoral counseling at a seminary in Escondido, California. He is currently the campus president of the Charlotte campus of Reformed Theological Seminary.
Out of the gate, the striking contrast between the two classes is that while both have as their goal the exploration of the various fields of psychological study, the MIT professor (hereafter "Dr. Wolfe") merely presents the data on each with only a tinge of his own personal feelings about them. The RTS professor (hereafter "Dr. Peterson") opens up with a very pointed statement that psychology as a study is antithetical to "biblical counseling" and that the only point in studying these disciplines is to be aware of what's out there in the world and to see the "glimmers of truth" that some might hold. Regardless of Dr. Peterson's constant attestations that he is giving a "fair" presentation of psychology, he makes no secret of the fact that he finds it in opposition to a "biblical" approach.
The MIT class begins with the science behind psychology including the basic study of the brain and its parts, how we perceive things, memory functions, visual stimulation, etc. There is no real contrast in any of the material given at RTS, since the anatomy and the function of the brain is never discussed at all. In-depth information about conditioning, reinforcement schedules, Pavlov, et. al. receive the same deafening silence from Dr. Peterson.
The next striking contrast in the two classes is the source material used. The MIT class consists of many, many peer reviewed studies and reams of outside material from recent scientific journals showing various psychological studies done -- often by people that the professor knows personally. The RTS class generally sticks with one or two textbooks supplemented by anecdotal evidence from the Dr. Peterson's own experience and the occasional news article that references a study done but very little technical information about the study itself. In the scholarship wars, the MIT class wins hands down.
Dr. Peterson repeats in just about every session that psychology is based on four tenets: "evolution, nihilism, relativism, and atheism." At least the first one is evidenced in the MIT class as evolutionary psychology plays a large roll in interpreting the "why" of experiment results. For example it is suggested that we throw up when we see others throw up because our primitive ancestors learned that if another animal threw up after eating the wildebeest I'd better throw up too to save myself from being poisoned. Although Dr. Wolfe does say at one point that this could be explained by either "evolution or the hand of God whichever you prefer."
Dr. Peterson makes much of discrediting Freud even spending some time sharing the fact that he kept "statues of Egyptian gods on his desk" although not exactly sharing the relevance of this fact to Freud's theories. It would seem that he could have saved his time for Dr. Wolfe declares about Freud that there are only "two things you need to know about him. 1. He's dead 2. He's wrong." It would seem that the nouthetic obsession with combating Freudian thought is a battle that has already been won to a large extent. The playing field has shifted whilst nobody was looking.
As I listened to the entirety of the lectures the major contention between two points of view would seem to boil down to the following points
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Answering the "why" questions. Why does a man enter a school and shoot children? Why does date-rape occur? Why does someone beat their spouse? In Dr. Peterson's view this is simply sin that occurs because the heart is desperately wicked. He sees no reason to delve further into the "why" of the matter than that.
The psychologist on the other hand is not satisfied with this answer. There must be a reason why some people react to a situation one way and some react in another. Even if we assume that all people are wicked, there must be some different stimulus (be it genetic, environmental, or whatever) that causes people to act out in different ways.
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Approaches to 'talk therapy.' Dr. Peterson made the statement that no counseling should exceed five or six sessions. In his view more meetings than this will create a dependence on the counselor instead of a dependence on the Holy Spirit and Scripture. Since there is no need to determine the "why" in a case, the only problem then is labeling the "what" (i.e. the sin) and proscribing a Biblical remedy such as Scripture memorization, substituting one activity for another,etc.
In contrast Dr. Wolfe describes a scenario where sessions may be required for extended periods of time, perhaps even years. This allows the counselor to dig deeper into the person's past uncovering layers of experiences and motivations that may have been suppressed or purposely avoided by the counselee.
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Mental Illness as a disease. While Dr. Peterson initially concedes that there may be a medical basis for behavioral problems, he puts forward the opinion that once "you've had a brain scan and a good night's sleep" you no longer have room to make excuses. The idea that there would be a gene that makes a person more prone to addiction he dismisses by saying that researches have been looking for it for years and never found it. Apparently, Dr. Peterson is unaware of exactly how many genes there are in the human body. He also dismisses the idea of "chemical imbalances" as being an industry term that doesn't really mean anything.
Dr. Wolfe also conceeds that there are issues with putting a diagnosis on a mental problem. Often times things will be diagnosed solely for the purpose of receiving money from an insurance company without a complete ability to fully diagnose the specific problem. However, he also points out that there are a wide spectrum of mental conditions that can be replicated by psycially damaging portions of the brain. Simply because the brain is very complex and hard to define at times does not mean that mental conditions may not very well have a physiological aspect.
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Medication as a treatment. Dr. Peterson says that medication has a place. However, what exactly that place is remains unclear. He dedicated the majority of his time on the topic to the subject of SSRI drugs (paxil, prozac, zoloft, etc.) which he are not much more helpful than a placebo and have terrible, awful side effects. Although he never explicitly says that these drugs shouldn't be taken, no student could possibly leave the class with any other impression than that these drugs are both a waste of time and possibly even related to 'sorcery' (yes, Dr. Peterson does reference pharmekia to support this point)
Dr. Wolfe also references SSRI drugs and admits that we don't always know why the drugs work. However, he points out that in any medical science there is a long-term process of refining these drugs and new treatments and breakthroughs are happening all the time.
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The problem of responsibility. The main point that Dr. Peterson continues to return to is that 'psychology' is a method of displacing the responsibility from the patient and blaming the problem on either environmental or biological factors. His response to this is that the counselor needs to identify the sin problem, assign 'homework' to the counselee, and help them to acknowledge Biblical truth about their situation. Nothing else is needed in order to restore this patient to a right mind. In his words if we didn't have one shred of psychology but had the Bible, we'd be just fine. The great fear seems to be that if we accept that there are biological or environmental influences that we leave the door open to a person not being responsible for their own actions.
Dr. Wolfe points out that just because we can show a reason for a behavior does not make it into an excuse. Just because a violent person was abused as a child does not give them justification for their violence. It can, however, provide a starting point to helping a patient to deal with the underlying cause.
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Topic: Psychology vs. Nouthetic Counseling: The Tale of Two Classes (Read 723 times)