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From: marilyn
Date: 30 Sep 2005
Time: 02:25:26 PM
Starting a new thread; this is a very important issue and I want to bring up some interesting sidelines. Jean, I agree for the most part on your response re the antecdote on the gal who was subjected to stealth hypnosis, etc. But if I read your post correctly, you dismiss her account as highly improbable--is that correct? ....here is her account. The doctor (who was quite elderly--even perhaps senile) took out a large medalion on a long chain. He swung it like a pendulum and chanted something in a sing-song voice. She immediately sensed that there was something odd going on and broke off eye contact with both the doctor and the swinging medalion. This, IMO, is the heighth of questionable professionalism and ethics. And admittedly not sound pychological approaches. There must be communication between a provider and the client or patient in order to secure a bond of trust in any profession. Without that basis, there is no meaningful social interaction. As I pointed out in that first post on the subject, medicine is an art, not a science; what may cure one person could kill another or do great harm. Dealings with the human brain are even more experimental. I would never knowingly allow someone to practice or do on-the-job training using my psyche. Did a paper in college on the highly-touted psychologist B.F. Skinner's book, "Beyond Freedom and Dignity." My paper was titled, "Beyoned B.F. Skinner: People Shaping in Modern Context." His views, IMO, comingled technology with medicine in such a blatant way as to relegate human beings to semi-robotic status. I referenced Vance Packard's "The People Shapers" for my arguments. Packsrd was a social critic and homed in on the commercialization of all facets of American life through advertising and manipulation by sales-pitches. Many psychologists act as consulting agents to the advertising industry--seducing customers with hard-sell campaigns. That mentality has seeped over into the way political campaigns are engineered. With the aid of the corporate media, by and large, candidates play out their run-up to elections via TV/radio commercials or staged, faux debates which offer little in the way of information on which to base a vote. Vance Packard wrote his book in the mid-seventies and was remarkably prescient on what was to come. If you can get a copy at your library, please do so. It will blow your mind and forever change the way you view reality. "Something wrong," as Dr. Lee said at OJ's trial. And that something is the distortion of our perceptions through many unethical channels. Misused psychology being one....marilyn