Cultural Evolution and Cultural Lag

 

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This is a continuation from my previous post of 2/24/06. I am continuing to discuss unusual ideas incorporated into my model for the psychotherapy treatment of repetitive self-destructive or self-defeating behavior, which I called Unified Therapy in my first book for therapists back in 1988. I mentioned that something called cultural lag is very important.

But first, a little back story.

When I was a resident psychiatrist in the mid-1970’s, psychotherapy by M.D.'s was dominated by psychoanalysts. Behavior therapy was talked about, and cognitive therapy was just beginning to take hold. Many of the ideas of the analysts, such as intrapsychic conflict and defense mechanisms seemed to me quite valid. 

Of course, schools of thought in psychology aren't single theories, but collections of related theories. And even within psychoanalysis, there were a whole bunch of very different models for treatment -  and not just the three famous ones from Freud, Jung, and Adler. All the different theories behind the models were often in some aspects contradictory to the some of the other ideas in the various schools. As I found out later, there were scores of other, different psychotherapy models for treating the very same conditions!

Now of course there can be several different ways to skin the proverbial cat, but this seemed rather unscientific.

My training supervisors were almost all analysts. When I asked questions about the above, my supervisor pressured me to get psychoanalysis myself to find out why I was "resistant" to the ideas (All members of the psychoanalytic institutes received therapy themselves, supposedly so their own hang-ups would not get in the way if them helping their patients). When I asked if I should see a Freudian or a Jungian, I was told, literally, “It doesn’t matter.” What?? If a theory were valid and contradicted another one, it certainly should matter. That was bizarre. 

I was probably naïve, but that sounded very unscientific to my  mind. That turned me off to becoming a therapist myself, and for a while I decided I would just do biological psychiatry and only treat the psychiatric syndromes that were amenable to medication.

Fortunately for me, my curiosity got the better of me and I started getting interested in doing therapy again when a friend of mine lent me a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn said that any young science is replete with conflicting models, but gradually one gained ascendancy as more and more data came in. This was more problematic in psychology than in most other fields, because experimenters can’t read minds, and folks lie a lot.

In my own narcissistic way, I decided that I wanted to try to unify the main theories into a coherent whole, and I started writing soon thereafter. There was a Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, which I joined, but they didn’t want to devise an overarching theory because, they assumed, it would just turn out to be one more school. So they contented themselves with modifying techniques from one school and incorporating them into the interventions of another school.

I decided that I would find time to read original works by all the prominent theoreticians.

I found the family systems idea of disturbed family homeostasis (discussed in the previous post) particularly interesting, and wondered if disturbed homeostasis was somehow related to an individual within a family developing an intrapsychic conflict - the central concept of psychoanalysis. I eventually started to see the connection. When family homeostasis was disturbed, it led to an intrapsychic conflict developing that was covertly shared by the entire family. Of course, the next questions were how and why a family’s homeostasis became disturbed, and why couldn’t a family just get together and talk about changing the rules.

In the last post I mentioned the concept of cultural evolution: that the balance between the needs of individuals and their kin group is evolving, so people are becoming freer to follow their own predilections in how they behaved, and in what they thought. The rules of the game for what was acceptable in love, work, philosophy, and play were rapidly changing. But individual families had trouble keeping up with all the changes. The homeostatic rules in many families started to come into question, disturbing the entire system. No one would talk about their ambivalence. This is called cultural lag by sociologists.

I described how and the many reasons why, due to events in family members’ histories over at least three generations, particular rules created ambivalence about themselves. I won’t go into that in this post, but I go into great deal in both my published books for therapists and the self-help book I wrote.