I call MYTHOLYSIS efforts to dissolve myths, dogmas and ideologies. These form automatically on the one hand, but are also created arbitrarily on the other. While myths are the proto-scientific attempts to explain the world, dogmas and ideologies actively prevent the development of science. Dogmas are also the basis for pseudo-sciences such as psychology. This imitates the methods of natural sciences and is also organized academically, and is therefore no longer proto-science. But psychology is based on dogma and ignorance. Dogmas are the basis of ideologies (as exclusive promises of salvation) and are based on IGNORISM. Dogma simply hides most of reality, offering supposedly simple explanations for complex problems. This is what makes them so interesting and attractive.
Previous mytholyses:
Separation of body and mind
The separation of body and spirit was established as a dogma by the Western European religious mono-culture shaped by Catholicism, characterized by intolerance, missionary zeal and dogmatism, which is still effective today. Among other things, in the division into humanities and natural sciences.
This dogma considers the difference between man and animal, formerly both physical and psychological – now only psychological, not gradual, but absolute. So not as in the Chinese saying “The whole animal is in the human being, but not the whole human being in the animal”, but as completely different.
This dogma stands in the way of scientific development, including psychology, to this day. Overcoming the dogmatic separation of spirit and nature is just as necessary as the rediscovery of authors such as GJ Romanes, LC Morgan, HG Lewes, Th. Lessing … see also the REdition Schmidt.
Publications:
Framework for a scientific psychology
Bodiless, we-less and culture-less I
It is the threefold dogma of a solipsistic ego independent of body, social environment and the cultural development of this environment that has hitherto stood in the way of an understanding of the human psyche.
These three dogmas lead to a condition comparable to a box locked with three different locks.
It is true that a number of researchers have opened one or the other, sometimes two locks at the same time, i.e. the social conditionality of the ego, its dependence on the cultural development of the environment, etc.
But the opening of all three locks at the same time, i.e. the elimination of all three dogmas, and thus the “opening of the box”, has not yet succeeded.
The criticism of mainstream psychology, its methods and methodology, as repeatedly put forward by Jaan Valsiner, Aaro Toomela and others, is correct, but has not yet led to the dissolution of existing dogmas. The cultural psychology represented by the above-named, no matter how effective some of these findings may be, only opens one of the three locks and therefore remains trapped in the box of Catholic dogmas.
In this way, the next dogmas described here were able to hold up, and at the same time essential insights such as the existence of “psychonomic species” remained limited.
Publications:
Framework for a scientific psychology
The SELF and its BRAIN
“The Self and Its Brain” is the title of the well-known and influential book by Popper and Eccles. And at the same time the expression of the dogma of the separation of body and spirit, of the bodyless I. However, in the light of ethology and evolutionary theory, our consciousness is the result of an evolutionary development, and we are not as unique and different from animals as we like to think.
The reverse order, on the other hand, is correct. The brain has an ego or, in the case of personality disorders, several egos.
However, the majority of the “work” of surviving is done by our brain, as a highly complex and parallel-connected organ.
Our ego can be seen as an evolutionarily developed additional “organ” for interaction with the environment. Just like eyes, ears, hands…
In addition, our consciousness, through which we define our ego, only works serially and is therefore overwhelmed with complex tasks.
Publications:
Framework for a scientific psychology
DOGmatism. New Perspectives on Humans, Dogs and Culture
The CRAAM-Dogma
It is the dogma of the conscious, rational, and autonomously acting man, which also goes back to Catholicism, that forms our frame of meaning. This dogma is refuted above all by the findings of social psychology
Publication:
Das BRAHM-Dogma und seine Widerlegung
The logical dualism
Logical dualism is based on two-valued logic, according to which there can only be one or the other. Such conditions exist of course, such as during pregnancy. As the saying goes, you can’t get a little pregnant.
But there are also areas where two terms do not express unconnected opposites, but the end points of a continuum, as Aaron Antonovsky showed with the health continuum.
Logical dualism leads to many fallacies and other dogmas, such as that qualitative and quantitative research are mutually exclusive and not complementary.
Publication:
Framework for a scientific psychology
Research as “wanting to know”
The dogma that activities within research always serve the “wanting to know”. Probably the most interesting form of the “psychonomic types” are the “communities of ignorance” within the sciences. Their activity is the implementation of what Jaan Valsiner calls “pseudo-empirical” and is assigned to the field from [can know + don’t want to know] in the matrix.
Activities in which everything is allowed as long as it does not produce any useful results.
Just like in the field of autism research for half a century, with tens of thousands of “researchers” who have published well over a million meaningless “scientific articles” in this time.
If one leaves this psychonomic species, or does not even become a member of it, then the solution to the “problem” of autism suddenly becomes very simple.
Publications:
Framework for a scientific psychology
Autismus – wenn Händewaschen hilft
Autismus – und vorgetäuschte Hilfe
Autism – “Blaming the Parents” Research between Dogma and Taboo
The Munchausen syndrome by proxy as a group phenomenon
Autism
In the 1970s, the dogma of autism as an incurable, genetically determined disease was launched by Bernard Rimland and his followers. The possibility of a positive influence on the course of development was denied.
For the establishment of the dogma, psychogenic theories and their proponents, especially Bruno Bettelheim, were discredited, the fridge mother myth invented, and “Blaming the Parents” started. And all this has gone unnoticed and uncorrected by the WHO (ICD) and APA (DSM) to this day.
Publications:
Autism and the Refrigerator Mother Myth. A Rehabilitation of Bruno Bettelheim
Autism – “Blaming the Parents”. Research between Dogma and Taboo
The Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy as a Group Phenomenon
Cynology
Due to the dogmatic separation of body and mind, of man and nature, there was wild speculation for decades as to how humans and wolves found each other around 30,000 years ago.
If one eliminates this dogmatic separation, then it becomes obvious that the interaction between humans and wolves/dogs is a cross-species cooperation. In nature, such cooperations are more the rule than the exception.
Publication:
DOGmatism. New Perspectives on Humans, Dogs and Culture
Institutionalized abuse
How blind psychology is due to the existing dogmas and thus frames of meaning, blind due to the lack of a developed clinical social psychology, shows not only in the “understanding” of autism and the mistreatment of autistic people based on it during the last five decades.
The blindness is also reflected in the fact that institutionalized abuse, such as that of indigenous children in Canada, the Odenwald School in Germany … was only noticed after decades, if at all – by the public. But the related questions were never raised by psychology at all:
1.) How can it be that institutions that are committed to the well-being of their protégés collectively abuse these protégés? What is the underlying psychopathology?
2.) And what are the reasons why these mistreatments are not noticed in their time, but only after decades – if at all?
I have shown institutionalized abuse using the example of dogs in German animal shelters, because these abuses are
1.) currently,
2.) definitely, and
3.) obvious.
The mistreatment consists – despite contradictory regulations both in the German Animal Welfare Act and in the Rules for Animal Shelters (by the “Deutscher Tierschutzbund e.V.”) – from i.a.
1.) long-term keeping in cages,
2.) no professional and immediate elimination of behavioral problems, as well
3.) advertising of dogs despite existing behavioral problems.
Kant had formulated the imperative that people should never be viewed and treated ONLY as a means, but always as an end to themselves.
The same applies, at least in my opinion, to animals.
While in factory farming, characterized by greed, animals are ONLY seen as a means, in animal protection they are often ONLY seen as an end.
Both positions are wrong, lead to abuse, and are expressions of “antagonistic symbiotic narcissism“.
Publications:
Symbiotischer Narzissmus als Gruppenphänomen
The Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy as a Group Phenomenon
Zur Psychopathologie institutionalisierter Misshandlungen
Truth
Probably the most difficult dogma to overcome is that of TRUTH.
It is often overlooked that the path from the Greek origin of the concept of truth to us was not uninterrupted. Between the loss of Greek philosophy in Western Europe and its return lay several centuries, which were shaped purely by Catholicism. And this built on a God who is in possession of the truth, on representatives of God who also thought they were in possession of this truth.
When Greek philosophy was rediscovered in the Middle Ages, it happened as a “maid of theology”.
Thus one can read in Thomas Aquinas “Whatever is found to be in contradiction with theology in the other sciences must be rejected as false.” [quoted from Hirschberger, 1949]
Truth is used in so many ways that the Wikipedia article on it is very long. A central point, however, is probably the concept of truth in logic, which in turn is the basis for scientific-theoretical foundations. According to this, a logical statement is true that is free of contradiction in itself.
But Vaihinger shows that this freedom from contradiction is in no way necessary in order to arrive at useful results. Thus, Vaihinger distinguishes between “genuine fictions”, which not only contradict reality but are also contradictory in themselves, and “semi-fictions”, which only contradict reality. Both types of fiction can produce useful, effective, results.
Any analytical decomposition is at least a semi-fiction (see e.g. GH Lewes).
And although there is a broad consensus in both the natural sciences and psychology (see e.g. Watzlawick) that there is no truth, this term and the ideas associated with it continue to haunt. Or there is a confusion of terms, as in the book title by Paul Watzlawick “How real is real?” Reality is real, otherwise it wouldn’t be reality. But it’s just not true. So the title should actually be “How true is reality?”
And just as elephants and bats, as bionomic species, live in different realities, in different frames of meaning and frames of practice, so do psychonomic species. Different scientific schools are to be understood as psychonomic species. With different frames of meaning and frames of practice. Which answers the questions raised by TS Kuhn and at the same time explains why, according to Max Planck, the proponents of an old theory that contradicts the new one are not convinced, but die out.
From a psychological point of view, the oath formula “… the truth and nothing but the truth” has become untenable. At most, it would be possible to swear that one is not lying knowingly. But the result still hasas a rule little or nothing to do with truth.
Therefore I introduce the concept of WIRKHEIT (effectness), as opposed to German WAHRHEIT (truth).
Effectness is never absolute, but always stands in a more-less relationship. For example, one theory may have greater or lesser effectness than another.
Scientific fictions thus claim effectness, while dogmas claim an absolute, sole truth.
Publications:
Vernunft und Freiheit bei Thomas von Aquin
Framework for a scientific psychology
Moral
Morality is an invention of Western Catholicism. Morality is ALWAYS double standards. Morality serves to impose one’s own ideas on others without necessarily having to follow them oneself. “Preach water and drink wine”. Morality focuses on the outside, on the other.
Virtue, in the form of the four cardinal virtues “prudence, justice, bravery, moderation“, on the other hand, is directed towards the inside, directed towards oneself. For example, one cannot, unfortunately, force prudence on others, but at most implement it on oneself. The same applies to the other three cardinal virtues.
Morality serves the dogma that one’s own “moral” ideas are the only true ones. And that one has the right to impose these ideas on others.
Morality is part and basis of the ideology that following (one’s) moral rules is the only and right way to perfection and happiness.
Publications:
Zur Psychopathologie institutionalisierter Misshandlungen
