|
Academics
Departments Special Interest
Navigation
|
Psychology: Science or Ideology?
For both sides in the debate about homosexuality, there are reasons to want it both ways.
Right Answers, Wrong Reasons: Revisiting the Deletion of Homosexuality from the DSM, by Gary Greenberg, Review of General Psychology, 1997 vol 1, no. 3, pp. 256-270.
Reviewed by Linda Nicolosi
"Right Answers" describes the social-constructionist view, which has been gathering support recently in the psychological profession, and explains why it is both shunned and welcomed in the debate about homosexuality.
In the 1973 debate over the normalization of homosexuality, both sides claimed justification for their arguments on the basis of science. Each accused the other of taking a politically based position, and each agreed that "politics" invalidates an argument.
A Debate Over First Principles
The American Psychiatric Association claimed the decision to normalize was based on new empirical evidence that had recently been gathered; and that after careful deliberation, they had reached the scientific conclusion that homosexuality was not a disorder. Quite the contrary: this was not, Dr. Greenberg says, a battle over new evidence; in fact, both sides were in a political debate over first principles--with one side beginning from the ideological presumption that homosexuality was normal, and the other side, that it was not. Science, Dr. Greenberg says, could never have settled the 1973 decision, because the debate about "normality" is inevitably culture-bound and political.
Why has Psychology Resisted Social Constuctionism?
Most psychologists, Dr. Greenberg believes, are well aware that our opinions about psychological normality are inevitably shaped by political, moral and cultural considerations. Most "psychological disorders" are conditions that are judged, by social consensus, to represent either faulty character, or socially undesirable behavior. However, both A.P.A.'s promote the public illusion that psychology is an objective and value-free science for one main reason, he believes: they do not wish to lose their authority, and thus their power.
Furthermore, both organizations function as trade associations, anxious to maintain the psychotherapist's eligibility for medical-insurance reimbursement. Trade concerns dictate that psychotherapy not be disassociated from the medical/scientific model.
Interestingly, in academic settings, gay theorists broadly favor a social-constructionist approach because it supports the idea that man has no inherent "human nature" (i.e., he is free to fashion his own sexuality as gay, bisexual or transgendered, and free to dismantle the "gender system"). However, gay activists within professional psychology know this model is dangerous--because they have gained much public support by promoting the concept that "objective science reexamined homosexuality and declared it to be normal and healthy." It was the power and respect accorded to science that gave gays, through psychiatry, the power to radically overturn public opinion, religous theology, and legal precedent about homosexuality. If scientists said gay was normal and healthy, then dissenters must be simply guilty of "animus."
Themes of Social Constructionism
Dr. Greenberg's argument--that homosexuality should be normalized, but that we should admit that ideas of normality and disorder are inevitably ideological--relies on three familiar social-constructionist themes. First, the idea that there exist no universal, transcendent values, or any objective natural law outside what man chooses to fashion for himself; second, that freedom from sexual restraint is good for society; and third, that life is not so much a struggle between good and evil, played out within the individual soul--but essentially a battle for power ("social justice") between competing interest groups (in essence, a struggle of "identity politics"). Each of these views conflicts with the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which modern Western civilization was founded.
The social-constructionist worldview has been forcefully criticized. Many psychologists say that without a model of healthy human development, applicable to all, the study of human nature will degenerate into chaos. Without shared ideals of right and healthy functioning, humanity will be consigned to a downward spiral of emptiness and hopelessness. If we prepare to challenge the longest-standing shared conceptualizations of truth, beauty and goodness, with the idea that "each man has his own, equally valid answer" to each of these questions, will we not be on a road to social and moral anarchy?
If we choose this "empancipated" line of thought so popular today, philosopher Francis Canavan tells us--that the objects of our choices are good just because we have chosen them, and that we could, if we so chose, just as well make the opposite choices-- we have given up the idea that there is any objective good, and even the very belief that there exists such a thing as "human nature."
Along this line of thought, one psychiatrist--after the 1973 decision--publicly questioned what condition would be next: would schizophrenics, like gays, picket and demand that their condition be normalized in the interests of self-determination and social justice? Would paranoia be reconceptualized as just "a different way of being"?
But Dr. Greenberg sees no real threat from the social-constructionist approach. He is happy with the DSM decision to de-pathologize homosexuality. He believes it well serves social-justice interests, based on the conception of sexual freedom that emerged in the 1960's, of which he approves; likewise, he approves of the A.P.A.'s "reformist stance toward American society" as it throws its support behind progressivist social/moral platforms and loosens sexual restrictions through its "vision of justice."
There will of course need to be some changes, Dr. Greenberg admits, when psychology openly embraces the social-constructionist view and concedes that its conception of mental health and illness is ideologically rooted. For one thing, we will have to redefine the therapist's role. Stripped of the illusion of scientific authority, will the therapist still be the client's mentor and guide? Or will his role be merely that of a professional friend--no more than collaborative and egalitarian?
The Psychologist Redefined as Moral Philosopher
"Right Answers" furthers yet another interesting debate. Psychotherapy could, he suggests, reconceptualize itself as an explicitly moral-philosophical practice. If psychotherapy was explicitly declared to be a practice of moral guidance, then clients will then simply interview different therapists to determine which therapist's moral biases about "truth, goodness and beauty" best fit the client's own life philosophy.
But we see from Dr. Greenberg's own examples that a consensus that "psychology is mere ideology" could well lead to a surrealistic anarchy. For example, he discusses the case of borderline personality disorder. The borderline client (deprived of stable identification objects in early infancy, lacking a sense of autonomous self in adulthood, and notoriously dysfunctional in relationships) is not necessarily to be judged unhealthy, he believes. Society is responsible for some of the borderline's perpetual dissatisfaction with life, he claims, because of its expectations that a person be a "certain kind of self" (with a stable, autonomous identity). The very idea of an "autonomous identity" is, he says, ideological because it is culture-bound.
According to Dr. Greenberg, the therapist who treats such a client must first tell him what principles justify the therapist's claim that borderline functioning is to be eliminated. Presumably, the therapist should then not treat the borderline client if the client doesn't agree with his "personal opinion" that an autonomous identity is desirable.
One wonders if the approach for which Dr. Greenberg argues will simply prove to be a Pandora's box of hopelessly irreconcilable ideologies. It clearly opens the way for a very unattractive possibility: that if psychology were dismantled--which is essentially what Dr. Greenberg is suggesting--then that discipline would degenerate into a chaos of dis-unifying world views, in the same way that multiculturalism has drawn up seemingly intractable battle lines in our culture by race, class and gender.
Dr. Greenberg believes that social-justice interests have been served now that homosexuals have been freed from stigmatization by psychiatric diagnosis; but other observers would say--just as confidently--that it is no justice at all when psychology frees homosexuals to rationalize their psychosexual disorder as developmental maturity.
Is Natural Law a Fantasy?
How can a social constructionist be persuaded that there exists any transcendent, natural law--in this case, that male-female complementarity is the essence of human nature--which proceeds from the nature of the universe, and is approximately knowable through reason? The late philosopher Russell Kirk says that for the man who does not feel himself in some sense the child of a creator, who is not possessed by "the desire and pursuit of the whole, and for whom words like 'honor' are meaningless, the notion of natural law must be...a fantasy."
"There exists a certain way of approaching politics, just as there exists a certain way of approaching literature or painting, which can prevent the critic or student from ever perceiving the heart of the matter," he tells us. One could not "prove" the existence of a natural law, as one could not "prove" the importance of Shakespeare or Michelangelo to a man who insists that "painting is a waste of time," or "poetry is nonsense."
"Right Answers, Wrong Reasons" exposes the fragility of the concept of "science" as it applies to the "soft," or social sciences. It reveals much about psychology's reluctance to concede that what we label emotional disorders are typically socially undesirable conditions, added and deleted according to the temper of the times. And it suggests why the social-constructionist argument is both attractive and threatening, particularly to gay theorists. Gay theory denies innate gender differences, disregards the significance of male-female complementarily, and dismantles the age-old concept of family--but it was under the mantle of objective science, not social constructionism, that gays won over public sympathy when psychiatry proclaimed them normal and healthy.
Under this same mantle of "objective science," there are priests within the Catholic Church today who are arguing for the affirmation of homosexuality. In the Jesuit magazine America (11-1-97, p. 16), priest-psychologist Stephen Rosetti and priest-theologian Gerald Coleman assert:
"A list of psychological disorders is the proper domain of the science of psychology; it is not a matter of faith and morals."
They refer repeatedly to the "science of psychology," as if the concept of mental disorder was devoid of social-moral influence.
Is there an objective, natural order of man, approximately knowable through reason and observation--or is man infinitely free to fashion himself as he chooses, because all science is mere ideology? Gay theory can't have it both ways.
Copyright © NARTH. All Rights Reserved.
copyright © 1995-2010 Leadership U. All rights reserved.
Updated: 14 July 2002