Author: Michael Karson, Ph.D.

Those who reject Darwinism point to elegant works of nature and find in them an intelligent design at work. They argue that you can tell just by looking at Mount Rushmore that there was a designer behind it; it’s not makeshift, jury-rigged, or accidental. Certain features of nature are so elegantly well-suited to their environment and function that they seem as crafted as a sculpture. Typically, the biologist responds by accepting the design of Mount Rushmore while disputing the design of, say, the human eye or some bacteria’s flagella. The biologists then provide a detailed account of how the flagella or the eye evolved, the crucial elements of which are that each variation arose at random as a small step, and each step produced reproductive or survival advantages and was thus “selected” by the environment. The engine of change in evolution is random genetic variation that gives the possessor of the gene an advantage so that more genes like the useful one get passed on.

Another way to refute the claim would be to argue that Mount Rushmore wasn’t designed, either. This argument is annoying, even enraging, because it implies that you are not the boss of you, that when you “decide” to do something, you are no more in control of what you do than Al Michaels is when he describes what is happening on the field during a football game. Even the offensive coordinator “chooses” a play that works best in his imagination, and his success as an offensive coordinator depends on the extent to which the opponents in his imagination are like the opponents on the field. We want to believe that we control ourselves, and attachment to that belief creates great confusion in psychology. A science of natural laws holds that if there is a God in Heaven, he isn’t affecting events on earth; a corollary is that if you have a soul, it isn’t pulling any strings, either.

From my book on early memories:

There is just no getting around the fact that Skinner does not believe in the mind. In a behavioristic account, there is the body and there is behavior and there is nothing left over to ascribe to a mind. … Put simply, the only evidence we have of a mind is the seeing of images that are not in front of us, hearing ourselves think, and feeling, tasting, and smelling things that are not there. The fact that every bit of evidence that we have of minds comes from our five bodily senses I find a bit suspicious. The fact that the mind is said to be the part of us that is immortal I find even more suspicious. We believe in an entity of which we have no evidence and the existence of which would allay our deepest fears. Descartes said, I think therefore I am, claiming that the existence of his mind was the one thing he was certain of. A behavioristic reply might be: I hear words when nobody is speaking them, and even though I call this thinking, all it proves is that I have ears and I have heard people speak.

The behavioristic notion of not having a mind analogizes people to rats and pigeons. Even biologists who are utterly committed intellectually to our descent from other animals balk at this analogy. They think there must be something in the complexity and size of the human brain that produces consciousness, and they believe that this consciousness distinguishes us from other animals (Wilson, 1998). As noted, though, there is nothing in what is called consciousness that is different from what we hear, see, and so on. Behaviorists think that people are certainly more complicated than pigeons, because our bigger brains make us more responsive to deferred consequences, conflictual contingencies, and peculiar reinforcers. However, behaviorists do not see us as fundamentally different from pigeons. Objections to behaviorism include statements like, pigeons roost on statues of people, not the other way around. These arguments are designed to appeal to our pride, not to our reason. Skinner (1971) answered these arguments in his book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and I will not rehash his rebuttal here, except to note his use of the word, dignity. A behavioristic account of humanity is an undignified account; it is therefore a humble account, and it is not surprising that many behaviorists are drawn to similarly humble accounts of humanity, such as Taoism and Buddhism (Hayes, Follette, & Linehan, 2004; Baer, 2003).

Mount Rushmore did not spring full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus. Tourism was sparse in South Dakota. One famous tourist beacon was New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain, which virtually everybody accepted as looking like a person only coincidentally (it collapsed in 2003). I’m certain that a lot of people had a lot of ideas about how to bring tourists to South Dakota. I’m certain that even the guy who “thought it up” had a lot of ideas. I put “thought it up” in quotes because what he really did was generate a whole bunch of images and words, and then he recognized one of them as having merit and promoted it. His idea met with success and failure, and the aspects of the idea that met with success continued and the aspects that met with failure died out. For example, he suggested one mountain range for the attraction, but the Lakota said no. He also suggested that the figures depict famous people from the West, but the sculptor and eventually Congress said no. When the four presidents were decided upon, the sculptor wanted torsos included for Washington and Lincoln, but production ended with busts when war-production replaced public works expenditures.

Even the sculpting itself, like all art, was a process of editing and imagination. Imagination, selected by survival advantages, enables us to try out an action with very little cost. As noted, an imagination is only as useful as its alignment with reality. Artists have a lot of ideas and edit them. Good artists continue editing them even after they are expressed. The editing ends when the artist sees what she expected to see, or when she sees something better and can’t imagine anything even better than that, or when she runs out of time. An artist can only be as good as her aesthetic judgment, just as someone with no sense of humor cannot reliably write comedy.

So rather than concede that Mount Rushmore was designed, I prefer to say that a lot of ideas were considered, some of them were expressed, some were selected and some not. This applies not only to the blueprints but also to the execution. Chisel here or chisel there? According to the artist’s image of Lincoln, here, not there. The mountain and the expectations of funding sources controlled the sculptor’s behavior as surely as a golf course controls Tiger Woods’ behavior. In fact, what makes Tiger Woods a great golfer is that the golf course controls his behavior more thoroughly than anyone else’s.

Part of my work over the last 30 years has been to highlight the risks of moving young children from one home to another and disrupting their relationships with previous caregivers. Between roughly 5 months and roughly 5 years, but especially for the first two years of this span, children are developing attachments that, if disrupted, may never be rebuilt.

One way to think about attachment is to consider that relating to people is a skill, and we learn to relate to people and to ourselves by generalizing from early relationships. In infancy and toddlerhood, the child has only one or two or maybe three sets of skills, each set being a repertoire of behavior that is reliably reinforced by a caregiver. The child learns first how to make her parents smile, and then generalizes to learning how to make other people smile. The parents’ smiles are reinforcers because they are associated with nurturance, whereas it takes much longer for other people’s smiles to become potentiated as reinforcers. If you lose a set of skills when you only have two or three repertoires, they are hard to replace; on balance, relating to others may become aversive because a large percentage of such relationships led early on to loss. Later, there are other fish in the sea, but in infancy, there are only a few fish in the sea. Losing one of them can make a child give up on fish.

I’ve frequently said, when professionals are considering moving a child out of a home, that a child is not a can of peas. I was gratified once to hear a judge reproach an attorney with this phrase, which meant to me that perhaps I was having an effect on the system. The idea, of course, was that a child is affected by these moves, whereas a can of peas isn’t affected by transportation. A child cannot be put in storage in with no ill effects.

But now, I also see how the phrase stands for the proposition that people won’t protect something if they don’t think there’s anything to protect. Children can be taught to close the door behind them out of obedience, or they can be taught how heat escapes or flies enter. If the former, then they will only close the door when they think someone is watching, and they will feel guilty and anxious about it. If the latter, they will close the door pro-socially, and they’ll feel good about it. But first they have to see that there is something to protect (heat or freedom from insects).

Psychotherapy practitioners and rule-makers make decisions about psychotherapy often without considering whether there is anything to protect. Nowadays, every therapist is legally obligated to call the potential victim in addition to the police if a patient makes a credible violent threat against an identified person. When this incursion on therapy first developed, many therapists were aghast at the intrusion on the therapy space. The same was true of the obligation to report child abuse. All things considered, politicians decided that the potential harm to the psychotherapy process was less pressing than the potential benefits of saving a life or preventing further injuries to children. I generally agree.

Concerns about a slippery slope were, however, well-placed. Colorado politicians recently decided that every patient should be given a mini-lecture on the different kinds of licenses in the state. I doubt this was seriously weighed against the drawbacks of intruding on the therapy process; instead, it has all the earmarks of being thought up by a group that simply did not consider any drawbacks. At the last minute, this requirement was dropped from the statute, but a therapist still has to produce a document that recites the same material, along with a lot of other intrusive information, and the therapist and client have to go through the charade of pretending that the client reads the document.

No one will protect the therapy process unless there is awareness of something to protect.

The therapy process and its ground rules are designed to create a unique kind of relationship in which patients feel like discarding their social masks and in which therapists are authorized to comment on their patients’ behavior. The problem, currently, is that clinical psychology wants to be a health profession, partly to help people and partly to chase the medical dollar. The problem is that, not only is the therapy process not seen as something to protect in a medical setting, it is downright hostile to a medical setting. This is true for two reasons. One, a medical setting is about diagnosis and treatment, not about understanding narratives and changing them. Wondering about narratives makes the medical frame seem arbitrary when it is important to medical treatment that it be seen as real. Two, the kinds of therapy patients best conceptualized medically (those with schizophrenia, some types of bipolar disorder, organic depression, and so on) are the kinds of people who react most intensely and negatively to the kind of closeness promoted by a therapy process. There is less process to protect with these patients, and the process can distract practitioners from the patients’ medical needs.

So, please, treat people in a medical model who can benefit from it and, especially, who cannot currently benefit from the therapy process. But don’t tell me it’s good for everyone to have a public waiting area, a clipboard of pre-visit inquiries, a receptionist to manage payments, and a complete and utter confusion about the difference between legal confidentiality and actual privacy. Don’t tell me that patients are cans of peas.

At my dissertation proposal meeting, supposedly a scientific consultation to massage and critique my research program, one of my esteemed faculty members asked me what I thought of his idea. “Well,” I said, “naturally I want to do as little as possible and still get my degree.” A hush of epic proportions descended on the little group, whereupon my chair muttered in a barking but muted voice, “Michael, never out loud.” He made it clear by his tone that scientific culture insisted that my dissertation represent a thirst for truth, and by his words that he condoned a desire just to get it done as long as I kept quiet about it.

This is what the Jews mean when they say, “Dress British; think Yiddish.”

I wanted my children not to feel guilty about anything they thought, even as I wanted them to be careful about where they spoke it. Free thinking, like masturbation, was to be enjoyed in private and among select friends.

As far as I can recall, I lied to my children only once. Little had picked up some advanced verbiage from Big, and I was admonishing him not to say certain words in certain places while reassuring him that he could say to me anything he wanted. But then I was hit by a sense of my own power, something parents can indulge at any time, the sense that I could tell him absolutely anything and he would believe me. Did I use my carefully constructed credibility to sell him the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, or God? No. Instead, I told him that there was one word that was so bad that it must never even be written much less spoken aloud. He wanted to know what that word was, but of course I couldn’t inform him without saying or writing the forbidden word. He begged me for ownership of that weapon that was so powerful it could disrupt any occasion, so I took pity on him and told him that I would say it one time, and he must never repeat it. “The word is Jeshoshaphat.” He nodded grimly, aware of the immense power and, with it, the immense responsibility he now wielded. He was about five years old. A year later, I dropped a plate of pasta in the kitchen and I cried out, “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat.” He looked at me with horror, surprise, alarm, and finally betrayal as he realized that it was just another word. He hasn’t really trusted anything I’ve said since.

All this time, I thought I was honest with my children to make them think they could rely on me, on a benign authority whom they could question and expect an honest response from, an authority who would bless their critical thinking. But maybe the edge for generating critical thinking goes to the parents whose children learn with dismay that there is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy. Maybe their kids learn to question authority at the deepest level, the level driven by disappointment and suspicion. Maybe the therapists who come late to sessions and intrude with other agendas and pull rank on their patients to pressure them into not complaining—maybe those therapists are generating free thinkers in a way I never could by telling the truth.

A year later, at my dissertation orals, I employed the good advice I had received from a clinical supervisor: “Get them talking to each other and they won’t interrogate you.” I nearly made it through the two hours with the art of conversation when one of my committee members said, “Hey, we haven’t asked him any questions yet.” A statistician, he said, “How can you use the output of a discriminant function as a continuous variable?” I said, “Simple. If there was something wrong with doing that, you’d have spoken up long before now.” All four of them started shaking their heads, and it was the art historian on my committee who said, laughing, “Michael, never out loud.”

I’ve known several psychologists who either had sex with or started a romance with former supervisees. This is not unethical or illegal, but it creates a performance problem for the psychologist.

More than other fields, clinical psychology frowns upon sex or romance with supervisees because of the nature of psychotherapy supervision, which often involves discussion of personal matters. This makes the relationship susceptible to exploitation by supervisors—they get the supervisee vulnerable in the course of supervision and then pounce. Of course, the students don’t feel exploited, they feel special; and the supervisors don’t feel like predators, they feel like lovers. Indeed, one of the many things I love about Janna is the image of me I see in her eyes. An equally positive (but less realistic and therefore less satisfying) image of me can be found in the eyes of many of my students. (Also, of course, almost all the other aspects of our marriage benefit from our being equals, in conversation, in bed, in making decisions, and in combat.) Still, the long list of famous clinicians who slept with or got romantically involved with patients and students gives us an idea of how big a problem this is.

Another reason psychology frowns upon sex in supervision and therapy, besides protection of vulnerable people, has to do with the role of the psychologist. The clinician is invited into the inner workings of the patient’s life and mind, and this position of intimacy can be sustained only if there are certain guarantees that the clinician is there as a guide, not as a tourist. It’s a performance of professionalism that must be thorough to be effective. Much as the proverbial banker could not act licentiously or drunkenly and expect people to ask him to safeguard their funds, the clinician cannot act impulsively and expect people to ask her to safeguard their secrets. That’s why the Hippocratic Oath states, “In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or men, be they free or slaves.”

Goffman teaches us that the great story of life involves our performance of roles and our concern about whether our performance will be discredited. The way you present yourself as a supervisor dictates your performance problems. If you claim wisdom, then foolishness and stupidity undermine you. If you claim to be expert in intimate, authentic conversation, then stiffness and caution give your performance the lie. If you claim to have transcended your own psychology, then any emotion at all, instead of enriching the supervision, will mock it.

One performance of supervisor that is especially susceptible to discreditation by sexual behavior is that of the charismatic leader. One wants to devote oneself to Skinner because of the clarity and brilliance of his ideas, and his absolute repudiation of any cultlike behaviors satisfies the devotee’s anxiety that Skinner might be after admiration and not truth. If you look at actual cults, you tend to find leaders (a shout out here to feminism for providing the world with women who are as bad as men) who exploit devotion for lust, greed, political power, and admiration. When supervisors do the same, only emotional cripples stay with them. The charismatic leader is the best positioned to exploit followers and the one whose entire performance is cast in cultish and narcissistic terms by any sexual, financial, or devotional agenda. If you want followers of the sort you want, then you have to be above suspicion when it comes to lust.

It’s empathy that levees and diverts supervisory lust. I meet young women who are both worried and perhaps a little relieved by the idea that they can make their way in psychology on their looks, with the crushing disappointment (whenever it turns out to be true) that Irene Cara’s character displays in Fame when she thinks her singing voice has earned her a major opportunity and she is told to take off her shirt. And even if a student wanted to be seen sexually, I can’t believe it would be good for her. For this reason, I don’t have an opinion about supervisory romance between people who are fundamentally equals and only happen to find themselves in a supervision together. Like so much else, it’s the function of the romance that matters, not its topography. But even then, the charismatic supervisor will find himself with a discredited performance that might not be salvageable.