The Betrayal of Intuitive Skills.

Janov's Reflections   (Click to access!)

Psychology and Ideology.  By Peter Prontzos (5/6) 

My comments:

The Betrayal of Intuitive Skills. 

Arts major contribution to humanity is the Primal Principals based on Evolution in Reverse. This principle will be a successful method if we can feel, relive the wordless pain (which at one time - before or shortly after birth - was unbearable) that evolution, using a variety of physiological and psychological filters, repressed. We may eventually become independent of the filter in the form of neurosis, drugs, phobias, anxity etc. and no longer be driven/ propelled by the unconscious pain..

To dig and find information in the classical psychology leads almost always  to dead ends because it is dealing with cognitive adaptation to the surroundings and not to our unique, individual needs. For my personal part, Art's unhesitating stance, in favor of evolution, has led him to his, although numerically limited, treatment successes, which in turn has given him an unwavering opinion toward the cognitive corps of therapists, who often led by their own pain “help”/push their patients to repress their pain even deeper. The evolutionary survival force is so strong that, also in its extension, the psychological literature, academic educators and the media watchers broadly denies Art's innovation / development work which, by its genius and by being excellently documented, is available to anyone.

After your first three articles, I had continued high expectations of the analysis that explains our policy choices and responses that are an important part of our social world and everyday life. Not least, I was encouraged by your reference to Kahneman, the psychologist who became a Nobel laureate in economics. His fascinating analysis of our lazy intuitive way to draw conclusions, I had hoped would be your leitmotif in the explanations, given where the articles are being presented, would dam up to a major accessibility of Art's principles. Unfortunately,  many of your confident examples confirm Kahn's investigations.

When you say “that Kahneman notes that people tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory”. These people are, however, not the ones that scare me (they might change opinion tomorrow) at the same extent as the professional specialists. According to Kahneman: “ The clinical psychologist, the stock picker, and the pundit do have intuitive skills in some of their tasks, but they have not learned to identify the situations and the tasks in which intuition will betray them. The unrecognized limits of professional skill help explain why experts are often overconfident.”) 

Behind most of your conclusions live evolution and unlike the creation story it is, for our survival in the long run, more rational. So to understand many of your conclusions, dealing with public attitudes that are important for human interaction, so we also need to understand evolution. It is about an exceptional strong selection pressure exerted by pathogens and parasites. Lajos Rózsa: "The human brain is particular vulnerable to infections, thus cleverness is an ideal character to signal heritable genetic resistance against infections. In it's historic perspective, human preference for intelligent mates is to increase the offspring against pathogens.

Among other phenomena, this hypothesis can explain why humans enjoy wasting most of their intellectual capabilities for totally useless purposes, why prehistoric humans developed brains that made them potentially far more intelligent than required by their physical environment, and why we experience a continuous increase of human intelligence even in modern societies.

We should give up claims in the classroom that studying algebra or poetry or whatever will help pupils becoming more successful citizens, workers, businessmen or politicians. They already know that it will not. On the other hand, however, keeping in mind that individual cleverness is extremely beneficial for the society as a whole; we should still urge people to study. And it is easy to do so; just tell pupils that cleverness is sexy.”

Whether we have a broad range of cultures and that the behavior differs in the virtually endless, it is the same evolutionary conditions that have developed our basically rather similar social patterns. This confirms, inter alia, Kahneman in his testing and research in different cultures, and in radically different contexts. Art's has in the Primal Therpy had patients from many different countries and cultures and I have, until now, not heard that "Evolution in Reverse" has more than one interpretation.

Jan Johnsson