Psychology

"The American Medical Association and the Red Cross both condemn force-feeding as a form of torture. And yet, the U.S. government and the United Nations have both force-fed hunger-striking prisoners. The real problem? Most people probably don’t realize how complicated force-feeding is, and how much can go wrong."

"APA has a long history of prohibiting torture. Since 1985, APA has issued numerous policies condemning torture, which have been reaffirmed and refined over the years. APA’s policies draw upon international human rights instruments and have expressly adopted the definitions of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. APA’s policy prohibits psychologists from participating in national security interrogations at detention settings operating in violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law. Jessen was never a member of APA. Mitchell resigned his APA membership in 2006."

"Torture, encouraged from above, became a fact of life [in occupied Iraq]. Perhaps some good liberal apologist for Blair will soon explain how democratic torture is much nicer than authoritarian torture."

"Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): “I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them."

"It's close to midnight and something evil's lurking In the dark Under the moonlight you see a sight that almost stops Your heart. You try to scream, but terror takes the sound before You make it You start to freeze as horror looks you right between The eyes You're paralyzed 'Cause this is thriller, thriller night And no one's gonna save you from the beast about to Strike You know it's thriller, thriller night You're fighting for your life inside a killer Thriller tonight."

"And God said unto Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there: and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother. Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments: And let us arise, and go up to Bethel; and I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which I went. And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand, and all their earrings which were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem. And they journeyed: and the terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob."

"I have been made victorious with terror."

"We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve because they ascribe unto Allah partners, for which no warrant hath been revealed. Their habitation is the Fire, and hapless the abode of the wrong-doers"

"Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly."

"He [Steven Tipton] pointed out that the youth of the early 1960s rejected the traditional ethics of American society and tried drugs, sex, communes, sit-ins and be-ins, but finding them unrewarding turned to religion, in one or other of the three main forms. The first of these he described as 'born again' charismatic Christianity, which he examined in detail in his case study of the Living World Fellowship. Secondly, he examined the way of enlightenment in his study of the 'Pacific Zen Centre'. Finally his study of EST (Erhard Systems Training) provides an insight into the work of the human potential movement which aims at self realisation."

"It brought me a new kind of freedom. I was no longer plagued by nerves … I was buoyant, eager to do my programmes and very sure of myself. Even more important was the fact that I was no longer lonely."

"Est was known for its intensive workshops that promote communication skills and self-empowerment. The purpose of est was to transform one's ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself."

"In 1985, est was discontinued and replaced by a program called The Forum, which is very similar to est."

"So, having set up my credentials as a bona-fide cynic, I’ll simply tell you that after having taken the est training, and having spent the last months immersed personally and professionally in the subject, I think that est has been one of the truly powerful experiences of my life."

"...two friends of mine went through est, and I observed in both of them obvious, immediate alterations. As opposed to the fast-lived high that overtakes one after an encounter-group weekend or a week at a salon or a Zen retreat, these changes seemed to persist and expand as time went on."

"More direct evidence comes from a careful study of Large Group Awareness Training programs, variously known as Erhard Seminars Training (est), Lifespring, or simply the Forum. The basic procedure of these courses parallels the group training workshops … but the emphasis shifts from group effectiveness to personal development. By talking through life challenges, aspirations, fears, and the like with fellow participants and professional counselors/teachers, individuals hope to change how they view themselves, their family and friends, and their prospects for a fulfilling life."

"Est was a wonderfully empowering experience for me. It took a lot of struggle and conflict out of my day to day decision-making and helped me imbue my life with more focus and intention. I learned that there was a difference between committing to try to live a certain way and actually living the way you intend."

"The purpose of est was to help people shift their contextual state of mind from attempting to feel satisfaction in their lives to actually being able to experience that satisfaction. Werner's seminars strove to free people from their pasts and allow them to live fully, in the present moment to moment, (just like excellent actors try to do in their work)."

""The American obsession with Transformation isn’t new. It is about as old as the nation…But it was Werner Erhard who created the first modern transformation when he founded est seminars in 1971. It’s a tribute to the power of his central concept…that more than 20 years after he sold his ideas to a group of employees who went on to create Landmark that Landmark is still the natural first stop in any transformation tour.”"

""A critical part of ‘the training,’ as practitioners refer to it, is freeing oneself from the past, accomplished by ‘experiencing’ recurrent patterns and problems rather than repeating them, where ‘experience again has a technical significance. To fully experience the pointless repetition of old, burdensome behaviors is to ‘experience them out’.”"

"I am a sort of revolutionary. I have a strange ambition, though. I don't want any statues. I don't want any ordinary monuments. What I want is for the world to work. That's the monument I want. There's egomania for you! The organizing principle of est is: 'Get the world to do what it is doing.' I want to create a context in which governments, education, families are nurturing. I want to enable, to empower, the institutions of man.[emphasis italics in original]"

"My plans could be said to be to make est as public as possible. My notion on how to do that is through the educational system. So I would like to give est up to the environment."

"The purpose of est is to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you have been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself."

"Some people think est came into being because of my past. Actually, est came into being because I completed my past … Having confronted it, taken responsibility for it, communicated, and corrected it, it is now completed for me."

"I knew that I couldn't create the space for other people to participate as long as my ego was in the way. It was after I solved that problem that I started est. The way I solved the problem was by realizing, 'How dare you not have an ego! How dare you! That's the ultimate ego!' The ultimate position of ego is to try not to have an ego. So, where my ego is, is right here, and I handle it by taking responsibility for it rather than by being the effect of it. Instead of being my ego, I have an ego."

"In est, the organization's purpose is to serve people, to create an opportunity for people to experience transformation, enlightenment, satisfaction and well-being in their lives."

"“Over the years there have been negative stories, rumors, accusations of cultish behavior, disaffected employees and so on. The usual stuff we have come to expect. But there are also far more people in the world, by a long shot, who are among the million or so participants that attended Erhard’s training who were thrilled by the results they received. People had enormous and powerful changes occur for them in a very short time—it was a two-weekend course—and no naysayer could talk them out of the very real value they experienced in their lives as a result of participating in est, whether it was dramatic transformations in their relationships with their families, with their work and personal vision, or most important, with the recognition of who they truly were in the core of their beings."

"Erhard Seminars Training ('est') was not founded until 1971, but as time progressed it gained one of the more devoted followings of the human potential groups (Tipton, 1982) Blending a brash, pragmatic self-help ideology with a mixture of psychic experience, self-awareness techniques and social concern, it 'trained' some 20,000 people during the first three years of its existence."

"The seminar and organization have undergone numerous transformations and name changes through the years. Est was discontinued and replaced with The Forum, and in 1991, Werner Erhard and Associates (WE&A) was dissolved. In its place, Landmark Education was incorporated, with Erhard's brother, Harry Rosenberg, serving as CEO and overseeing the current seminar, which is called the Landmark Forum."

"“In many ways the training was the most important cultural event after the human potential movement itself seemed exhausted…”"

"Life works on a set of rules and you don’t have to believe them—another est motif. Just look at them. Get them. “Gravity doesn’t give a damn whether you believe in it or not.”"

"In the specialist culture of our bureaucratic-industrial age, the reliance on experts to interpret and evaluate inner life is in itself the most malignant and invasive reach of division of labor."

"Psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man."

"The mysteries revealed by the psychoanalysts have been equally agreeable to those in rebellion against the behaviorists, who seemed to be occupied with nothing more spiritual than pulling habits out of rats."

"The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen."

"Everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to “the human soul” at large."

"Economists have never allowed their analysis to be influenced by psychologists of their time, but have always framed for themselves such assumptions about psychical processes as they have thought it desirable to make."

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important."

"It is a principle of modern psychology that the feelings most apt to influence behavior are those that we try hardest to suppress. They work like malicious secret agents in the shadowed corners of the psyche. The basic strategy of every school of psychology is therefore to recover the repressed, to shine the light of awareness upon all that is hidden so that its influence can be assessed and allowed for. This amounts to saying that honesty—a clear declaration of one's tastes, preferences, vested interests, and emotional involvement—may be more important than objecitivity, if by objectivity one means affecting a blank and neutral state. In the latter sense objectivity may be a pretense that hides profound distortions."

"Western psychologists accuse religion of repressing the vital energy of man and rendering his life quite miserable as a result of the sense of guilt which especially obsesses the religious people and makes them imagine that all their actions are sinful and can only be expiated through abstention from enjoying the pleasures of life. Those psychologists add that Europe lived in the darkness of ignorance as long as it adhered to its religion but once it freed itself from the fetters of religion, its emotions were liberated and accordingly it achieved wonders in the field of production."

"Create the habit of study into your everyday life."

"The absence of good habits can be just as destructive as a bad habit."

"We create our tomorrows by what we dream today."

"We're not made for working, we're made for creating."

"A clinical psychologist quietly questions his patient and passively observes his behavior during many preliminary consultations. He then collects his notes and observations, concentrates his thought upon the entire case, and makes an analysis of the patient's mental difficulties and maladjustments of personality. The psychologist then begins to persuade the patient to change his course of action in accordance with professional advice. In the end, the psychologist removes the patient's emotional difficulties and effects a more normal and efficient organization of his personality, thereby improving his life and increasing his happiness. In the behavior of the psychologist during the treatment of his patient, we see expressions of the four elementary emotions in their proper order:(1) compliance; (2) dominance; (3) inducement; (4) submission. The psychologist begins by complying completely with the patient's existing state of personality and emotion (a method strongly advocated by Alfred Adler). The psychologist accepts the patient just as he is, and merely observes and records his condition. This behavior constitutes intellectual compliance. Next, he analyzes and reconstructs the entire personality picture. He attempts to understand his patient's personality and to master its hidden difficulties and maladjustments. Here, he dominates intellectually by over coming the difficulties and resistance which blocked the complete conprehension of the patient's personality. He then persuades his patient to behave in a new way, prescribed by the psychologist — a process which is clearly inducement. Finally, the psychologist, by means of inducement, re moves the patient's personality difficulties and serves the patient as he most wants to be served. This ultimate action expresses the submission, which is the psychologist's final purpose in undertaking the case."

"I'm anti too much psychology. I never miss a chance to take a snipe at it. If anything in this world is a narrow and structured way of looking at things, kind of a sheet thrown in front of your eyes that tells you how to look at things, it's psychology. I've had psychology teachers tell students who've written very good stories that their characters would never have behaved as they did in the story. They're practically murderers of history; and besides, literature preceded psychology. (1978)"

"The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul."

"We cannot describe how the mind is made without having good ways to describe complicated processes. Before computers, no languages were good for that. Piaget tried algebra and Freud tried diagrams; other psychologists used Markov Chains and matrices, but none came to much. Behaviorists, quite properly, had ceased to speak at all. Linguists flocked to formal syntax, and made progress for a time but reached a limit: transformational grammar shows the contents of the registers (so to speak), but has no way to describe what controls them. This makes it hard to say how surface speech relates to underlying designation and intent–a baby-and-bath-water situation. I prefer ideas from AI research because there we tend to seek procedural description first, which seems more appropriate for mental matters."

"The old distinctions among emotion, reason, and aesthetics are like the earth, air, and fire of an ancient alchemy. We will need much better concepts than these for a working psychic chemistry."

"Theories in "soft" areas of psychology (e.g., clinical, counseling, social, personality, school, and community) lack the cumulative character of scientific knowledge because they tend neither to be refuted nor corroborated, but instead merely fade away as people lose interest. Even though intrinsic subject matter difficulties (20 are listed) contribute to this, the excessive reliance on significance testing is partly responsible (Ronald A. Fisher). Karl Popper's approach, with modifications, would be prophylactic. Since the null hypothesis is quasi-always false, tables summarizing research in terms of patterns of "significant differences" are little more than complex, causally uninterpretable outcomes of statistical power functions. Multiple paths to estimating numerical point values ("consistency tests") are better, even if approximate with rough tolerances; and lacking this, ranges, orderings, 2nd-order differences, curve peaks and valleys, and function forms should be used. Such methods are usual in developed sciences that seldom report statistical significance. Consistency tests of a conjectural taxometric model yielded 94% success with no false negatives."