Where exactly do we end up when those who can see how fucked up the world is getting are so smart they deconstruct their own tongues before they can stick them out? What do they then let out? Opportunism? Excuses for cowering in an attic somewhere?

I don’t believe in a Neo Eden any more than you do. But I do believe in a vector that points away from where we are and towards that unattainable Neo Eden. Well, maybe not. But at least enough of one to act as a brake or counterpush to the direction we’re headed.

There’s a quote I like, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

Would you ever pick up an axe? Somehow I doubt it. You’re too smart for that.

I don’t have the depth of knowledge in this field to win an argument with you, but I have read some of the more influential books that shaped psychotherapy, and they are, frankly, a bit nuts. The Case of Schreber is fascinating, but how Freud read the poor appellate judge’s memoir (having never even talked to the man himself) and concluded that Schreber wanted to be turned into a woman so that he could be God’s only object of sexual desire, and that God here represented Schreber’s father, etc., is mindboggling to anyone who prizes logic. Or the whole matchbox bit in The Case of Dora, where noticing a matchbox on Freud’s table, or failing to notice it (I forget which), proved Dora was a bed-wetter (because of the proverb that “He who plays with fire will wet the bed”), and bed-wetting, in turn, proved Dora masturbated. Freud had a dozen (mostly sexual) conclusions, and he actively worked to channel his reading, er, psychotherapy, to arrive at them. Down to placing matchboxes on his table ahead of the session (GW‑V:233/­SE:VII:71).

The other leading light of the field, Jung, is again, great for a fiction writer. But he was also the man who coined the term “synchronicity,” and reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections it becomes clear that his “science” was driven by his own emotional conclusions to nearly the same extent as Freud. I know that I’m referring to lay writings rather than their medical stuff, but the lay writing is informative because it cuts through some of the jargon-armour through which they defend their beliefs. Both of these early leaders of the field are perfect illustrations of Shermer’s quote that “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

And these two guys are the foundations of psychology as a “science.” If you compare the foundational works of a social science like economics, you also have arguments that are no longer applicable — there are nearly no atomistic markets in the Adam Smith sense, and no economy actually follows Ricardian comparative-advantage trade patterns — but you’d never look at Adam Smith or Ricardo and say that their logic is loopy.

As to psychotherapy having helped lots of people, I have no doubt. But social support of all sorts has huge benefits, both psychological and psychoneuroimmunological. [E.g., Friedman, Hofer, and Mason, "Relationship between psychological defenses and mean urinary 17-hydroxycorticosteroid exretion rates. I. A predictive study of parents of fatally ill children." Psychosomatic Medicine 26 (1964)]. And if someone can’t get their social support from friends or the bartender, then by all means they should go to a psychologist.

Though even that is far from clear. One of the main reasons women suffer so much more unipolar depression than men is (now theorized by some cognitive psychologists to be) that they ruminate rather than getting drunk, climbing a mountain, getting some exercise, etc. Each time you relive a bad experience in psychotherapy or simple memory, you strengthen it. Our modern psychotherapeutic society prizes rumination and frowns upon repression — no wonder so many are depressed. A bowling league, unlike a psychologist, would offer social support without this rumination effect.

And in terms of solving behavioural problems, I wonder how many psychologists are willing to lose the patient by telling them hard truths. It’s far easier to validate someone’s emotions than forcing them to confront the fact that their emotions and intellect point in different directions, and perhaps they should try following their intellect for a change. I suspect that in most such cases the only thing that would change is therapists.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about psychologists here. There are clearly psychoses that require chemical intervention and a psychiatrist with a medical background and an understanding of neurochemistry is a crucial doctor for many people. But I’ve seen a loved one avoid a psychiatrist like the plague in favour of continued regular and useless visits to a psychologist, simply because the psychologist was emotionally easier.

Finally, however, I’m clearly citing psychologists here several times, many of whom have added a tremendous wealth of knowledge to our understanding of ourselves as human beings. I don’t have a dislike of the field as a whole. But I do think that it is far less scientific than it makes itself out to be and has a lot more tarot-card-like quackery among its practitioners, and significantly fewer self-correcting mechanisms, than other social sciences. A gifted psychologist is far closer in nature to a gifted artist than she is to a gifted scientist.

As an endnote, since I started by bashing Freud and Jung, I’d like to add that the single most intelligent book I’ve ever read (if I had to pick one) was written by a psychiatrist, Robert Musil.

This is manifestly untrue. There are many thousands of empirical studies in psychology (and a smaller but still signifiant number in the sub-field of personality psychology, which was my point on the NYT blog). Richard Feynman will be frustrated if he seeks the precision of physics in the social sciences. Nonetheless, psychology, economics, anthropology, criminology, etc., have some degree of empirical grounding. For example, they have hypotheses that can be disconfirmed by evidence. Tarot cards (and Chinese aphorisms about happiness) do not.

I’d hate to imagine that you’d generalize from a single visit with one psychologist. Most practitioners of any field — psychology, law, writing, take your pick — are lackluster. The potential of such fields lies not in the average but in the exceptional. Many, many people are helped by psychotherapy, as shown both by empirical studies and consumer surveys. Many, I’m sure, are not.

Psychology is a big field, encompassing clinical practice, animal and human research, psychological assessment, academic teaching and writing, and so forth. The very Barnum effect you write about has been studied in detail by psychologists. Even though I’m not a psychologist myself, I hope you reconsider your stance toward the field.

I can see what you mean about peoples personal diet regimes on the web, I will try not to take too much notice of that.

Ok again thanks for your insight !

The difficulty is that for all their arrogance, most doctors are quite rigid thinkers. A dermatologist or GP will equate immunosuppression with AIDS, and will say if you don’t have AIDS you can’t have systemic candida. Talk to a psychoneuroimmunologist, on the other hand, and he’ll go on at length about how stress suppresses the immune system. Similarly, environmental stressors can do the same thing, including (in my case) living in the jungle in a pile of mold. The problem is that the dermatologist learns what he learns in school, and even if you’re lucky enough to get one who keeps learning after graduation, he’ll be reading dermatology journals. Good luck getting one who bothers to talk to anyone outside his field like, for example, a psychoneuroimmunologist.

The problem with Candida is that once it’s established a pathway to, say, your skin or your joints, then even if you eliminate the stressors and bring your immune system back up, the Candida continues to travel along the pathway. But the immune system is still your only real defense, so if whatever you’re doing is making you weak and listless, change what you’re doing.

I’ve also seen websites that throw in the kitchen sink in terms of the writer’s personal nutrition biases. For example, I can’t imagine how coffee would exacerbate Candida, and yet lots of Candida websites say no coffee. When pressed as to why, they say because milk has lactose (a sugar). But coffee is not equivalent to milk, and a tiny quantity of milk in your coffee is not likely to cause an outbreak. Especially if you drink it first thing in the morning, when your body has used up its glycogen stores overnight, or after a workout, for the same reason.

Basically, this is something you have to figure out over time yourself, and base yourself on principles rather than strict rules. Simply put, avoid mold, and avoid foods that will spike your blood sugar and thereby feed the yeast. But what causes a blood sugar spike is a complex nutritional question that has to take into account factors like exercise, when you last ate, etc. Also, keep in mind that this is something you’ll have to do for months, so a certain degree of flexibility and common sense is necessary.

It is tough, but the silver lining is that other than the limits on fruit, this diet is very healthy in other ways. Good luck!

Is it ok to eat Spelt flakes? And I have been eating nuts quite a bit in pro biotic yoghurt and as a snack, but they are not freshly cracked… this is bad I read in some places, and not in others. Can any one gimme a hint?

Thanks and good luck to every one else doing this thing. You have to be so stron not to give in argh !!!

I want to give the rest of Derren Brown’s Barnum Statements, from his course on how to read Tarot cards:
1. You have a need for other people to like and admire you
2. You are overly critical of yourself.
3. You have some personality weaknesses but are generally able to compensate for them.
4. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not yet turned to your advantage.
5. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you are worrisome and insecure on the inside.
6. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
7. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety
8. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
9. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
10. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved.
11. Some of your aspirations can be rather unrealistic.
12. You become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
13. Security is one of your major goals in life.

These aren’t copyrighted to Brown, by the way, because they’re taken directly from a 1948 experiment by psychologist Bertram R. Forer. Forer gave a personality test to his students. Afterward, he told his students they were each receiving a unique personality analysis that was based on the test’s results and to rate their analysis on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent) on how well it applied to themselves. In reality, each received the same analysis, which consisted of the above 13 statements.

On average, the rating was 4.26. After the ratings were turned in, Forer revealed that each student had received identical copies assembled by Forer from various horoscopes. These statements later became known as Barnum statements after P.T. Barnum, who used them in his “There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute” performances.

I find it interesting that Forer was a psychologist. I had my first-ever visit with a psychologist yesterday (at someone else’s request), and was struck by how similar the psychologist’s approach was to that of the tarot-card reader. Obviously, the need to reveal cold-reading powers isn’t there, but the advice and motivational language she used was generalized in exactly the same way. There’s an artificial quality that you can hear in a psychologist when their listening to the client is a form of searching for hooks onto which to hang statements learned in Psych 101. You can hear the learned statement of insight or advice as it comes out, though the more experienced the psychologist the better she’s able to weave it into a regular conversation. I think I have a sort of allergy to the pre-learned insight, the person speaking feels almost possessed to me. Possessed by their job, their education and as disconnected from the present situation as if she’d undergone a hippocampectomy. You could stand there all day repeatedly introducing yourself.