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Full Version: The revenge of Freud: Rival CBT exposed as a placebo, etc?
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016...al-therapy

EXCERPT: Cheap and effective, CBT became the dominant form of therapy, consigning Freud to psychology’s dingy basement. But new studies have cast doubt on its supremacy – and shown dramatic results for psychoanalysis. Is it time to get back on the couch?

[...] Freud (this story goes) has been debunked. Young boys don’t lust after their mothers, or fear their fathers will castrate them; adolescent girls don’t envy their brothers’ penises. No brain scan has ever located the ego, super-ego or id. The practice of charging clients steep fees to ponder their childhoods for years – while characterising any objections to this process as “resistance”, demanding further psychoanalysis – looks to many like a scam. “Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say” than Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Todd Dufresne declared a few years back, summing up the consensus and echoing the Nobel prize-winning scientist Peter Medawar, who in 1975 called psychoanalysis “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century”. [...]

A jumble of therapies emerged in Freud’s wake, as therapists struggled to put their endeavours on a sounder empirical footing. But from all these approaches [...] it’s generally agreed that one emerged triumphant. Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, is a down-to-earth technique focused not on the past but the present; not on mysterious inner drives, but on adjusting the unhelpful thought patterns that cause negative emotions.

[...] CBT has always had its critics, primarily on the left, because its cheapness – and its focus on getting people quickly back to productive work – makes it suspiciously attractive to cost-cutting politicians. But even those opposed to it on ideological grounds have rarely questioned that CBT does the job. Since it first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, so many studies have stacked up in its favour [...]

[...] Yet rumblings of dissent from the vanquished psychoanalytic old guard have never quite gone away. [...] CBT embodies a very specific view of painful emotions: that they’re primarily something to be eliminated, or failing that, made tolerable. A condition such as depression, then, is a bit like a cancerous tumour: sure, it might be useful to figure out where it came from – but it’s far more important to get rid of it. CBT doesn’t exactly claim that happiness is easy, but it does imply that it’s relatively simple: your distress is caused by your irrational beliefs, and it’s within your power to seize hold of those beliefs and change them. Psychoanalysts contend that things are much more complicated. For one thing, psychological pain needs first not to be eliminated, but understood. [...]

But the analysts’ arguments fell on deaf ears so long as experiment after experiment seemed to confirm the superiority of CBT. Which helps explain the shocked response to a study, published last May, that seemed to show CBT getting less and less effective, as a treatment for depression, over time. Examining scores of earlier experimental trials, two researchers from Norway concluded that its effect size – a technical measure of its usefulness – had fallen by half since 1977. [...] Had CBT somehow benefited from a kind of placebo effect all along, effective only so long as people believed it was a miracle cure?...
Treatment by drugs or talk therapy isn't helpful to some mentally different people because their circumstances are what they realize have caused their problems.  A lot of people would like to go back in time and change nature and nurture (total circumstances), maybe even go further back and prevent their conception in the first place, or even further back to prevent genes from developing at the beginning stages of life in the universe. (That reminds me of Dawkins and the selfish gene.)
(Feb 5, 2016 06:26 PM)elte Wrote: [ -> ]Treatment by drugs or talk therapy isn't helpful to some mentally different people because their circumstances are what they realize have caused their problems.  A lot of people would like to go back in time and change nature and nurture (total circumstances), maybe even go further back and prevent their conception in the first place, or even further back to prevent genes from developing at the beginning stages of life in the universe. (That reminds me of Dawkins and the selfish gene.)


If a person is trapped in bad people relationships, extreme poverty or undesirable job, a horrible neighborhood, burdened with disabilities in those environmental conditions... I can't imagine pills and analysis helping with their depression, either, other than maybe providing an intoxicating delusion which itself might have dangerous consequences. It's their circumstances causing the discomfort, and in some countries (or the deep past of caste and class systems) there's no escape / change available even if the personal will is present.