>> I took my first class in psychology from George W. Goethals at Harvard Extension in 1984<<
Small world. While George was an undergrad at Harvard, I sold him my used '61 VW. Some years later, he was on the faculty of Williams College where I met him again at dinner over a friend/colleague's house. I wondered whether the car continued to run (it didn't), and he felt guilty that after we agreed on a price, he was pressured by his friends to give me a lower offer. We both laughed and had another drink.
However, Sam, don't lament not being in the field. Read some of the current journals. Virtually every theory of Psychology has failed, and consequently the empirical field, IMO, has become trivial and tedious and the theoretical has become bizarre. I know that sounds harsh, but after retiring, I just asked grad students for the most exciting new ideas, and all they came up with were old silly ones. I used to love the field. Frankly, I'm afraid of getting on my high horse about this and pontificating even more.
Zonder -- the field of schizophreniai has changed dramatically since I was in it. At that time, 1966, I watched Eddy Sachar, a damn good researcher, get tossed out of the Dept. of Psychiatry for presenting data suggesting that schizophrenia had a biological basis. The Psychiatry Dept. was rigidly Freudian and grossly wrong. I also thought that there was a biological basis, and in fact much later, Ted Lidsky and I (mainly Ted) published an article about the basal ganglia and schizophrenia. However, one morning I woke up and realized that I had no idea what schizophrenia was, except that it was a human construct to give a Greek name to lunacy. I could no longer read about, let alone do research in, what I considered a wide range of illnesses to the brain. The data have indicated that "lunacy" is caused by allegies, vitamin deficiencies, viruses, -- I have a list of 34 etiological agents--and, genetic predispositions. This is related to our previous argument about the relationship between symptoms and disease.
Back to Israel, Zonder, you have yet to reply to my post asking who Israel could negotiate with. I certainly don't support the settlements, but I have seen positve approaches by Israel to be met with dismissive responses.
Also, I am delighted to get into a discussion about god. I think atheists have been in the closet too damn long. This has allowed many politicians to compete who is holier than whom. Yuch! Worse yet, is the, "God is on our side." positions of both the terrorists and Bush. Double yuch!
fred |
