The New Statesmen takes a look at Harvard psychology professor Jerome Kagan’s new book, Surprise, Uncertainty and Mental Structures, in which the professor makes the argument that psychiatry and psychology have failed. According to Dr. Kagan:

[…] Talking cures, as in psychotherapy, or having people fill out questionnaires, as psychologists so often do, simply do not get at the internal schemata that drive and colour so much of our behaviour. In fact, words sometimes get in the way, as seems to have happened with the adults who were asked to describe the photographs of faces.

We have one word for ‘fear’ but even in quite primitive animals fear is not simply equivalent with hormonal balance or brain state. Give two male lobsters, facing each other, identical injections of serotonin (one of the substances in Prozac). Their behaviour will differ if, in the past, one crustacean has been defeated in a fight by the other. If anti-depressants cannot cope with the complexities of lobster life, they are unlikely to cope with human beings.

Kagan’s aim is “to rethink psychology and psychiatry from the bottom up” — to which end, “the first order of business should be to hang Dr. Phil from the nearest available tree.”

(Okay, so I made that last bit up…)

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