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Updated 08/13/2010
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This article examines a troubling aspect of contemporary clinical psychology — it examines how parents control their children by pretending that psychology is more evidence-based and authoritative than it is. The ultimate victims are the children, who may enter adult life believing that authority, even faux authority, ranks higher than scientific evidence. In today's world, such a belief represents a terrible handicap.
In my prior article "Is Psychology a Science?", I showed that ethical considerations and the sheer complexity of human behavior prevent theoretical psychology from performing the kinds of experiments that would place clinical psychology on a firm evidentiary footing, and that as a result clinical psychology must get along without a scientific grounding in testable, falsifiable theoretical principles. I would like to begin by restating that argument through a comparison of physics, mainstream medicine, and clinical psychology.
Science
Before we compare these fields, let me make a brief statement about the nature of science. Science differs from most human endeavors in that evidence has the highest standing — authority has no standing at all. In science there are only theories, no laws or unchallengeable facts, and any theory, however well-established, can be falsified by new evidence. If an idea should become so well-accepted that it is no longer looked on as a theory, at that moment it leaves the domain of science.
In brief, if a theory can be falsified by experimental evidence, it is scientific. If it cannot be tested in practical experiments and potentially falsified, it is not scientific. This point cannot be overemphasized, and it uncovers the primary defect in modern clinical psychology.
Physics
Physics is a branch of science so completely and successfully governed by theory and evidence that practitioners of less rigorous disciplines are said to experience "physics envy." There are several reasons for the scientific standing of physics, but the primary one is that its principles are comparatively simple and easily tested. Some readers may object that Einstein's Theory of Relativity is not at all simple, and quantum physics is much more complex. This is true, but the complexity of these subjects pales when compared to the workings of the human mind.
Physics possesses a well-tested theoretical core that can predict physical events to a staggering degree of precision, typically ten or more decimal places. And, because so much of modern technology hinges on an understanding of physics, physical theories are constantly being retested and modified when they are discovered not to reflect reality.
Also, there is no ethical dimension to physics experiments. If you want to find out at what point a rod of steel will break, you simply bend it until it breaks. There are no steel rights groups to object to how badly the steel is being treated. And the steel cannot lie to you. You don't have to ask the steel at which point it will break, instead you bend it and ignore its squeaks and groans. So when a bridge is built on the basis of laboratory tests, the steel in the bridge is very likely to behave in the same way — all according to a very clear physical theory, a theory confirmed by experiments that could have falsified the theory but didn't.
Medicine
Mainstream medicine can't be conducted like physics because people have rights, and the quality of experimental evidence stands in opposition to the rights of the experimental subjects. If scientific evidence were the only priority, we would treat human subjects like animals and get much better evidence on which to judge the effectiveness of various medical procedures and substances. Because we cannot do this, medicine cannot ever rise to the scientific standing of physics.
But there are ways to improve the evidence. As it turns out, we can conduct animal experiments to draw some conclusions about human physiology, for example pigs have cardiovascular systems very much like ours and there seems to be a reasonable basis for extrapolating pig experiments to humans.
In the practice of modern medicine emotions run high, patient beliefs play a part, many things go wrong, consequently many theories in medicine have had to be discarded over the years, and the level of certainty in medicine is not very high. Therefore doctors are obliged to get something called "informed consent" from patients before subjecting them to procedures that are uncertain or that have side effects.
Also, when a patient enters a doctor's office, he has the right to know the nature of the procedures themselves, which might be research, diagnosis, therapy or a mixture of all three. It is here that the issue of informed consent is most important.
In the old-style relationship between a doctor and a patient, the doctor was God and you did what he said (and the doctors were all men). In modern times, because of the effect of media reporting and a higher degree of comprehension, patients understand what kinds of things can go wrong and what the consequences are. The best-educated patients ask frank questions and make their own decisions, with the understanding that the doctor is often no better informed than they are.
Psychology
An aside. The ordering of these subjects is not accidental. Physics is the litmus test of scientific methods and content. Mainstream medicine is less scientific than physics, and psychology is less scientific than medicine. The only thing less scientific than psychology is religion, where belief rules and evidence has no place.
If we want to test a theory in medicine, we might locate an animal that can serve as a human proxy, like a pig in a cardiovascular study. But in psychology this option doesn't exist for any but the simplest human behaviors. We are free to conduct experiments with rats or pigeons, two experimental animals very commonly seen in psychology laboratories, but we cannot realistically extrapolate pigeon mental behavior to human mental behavior, and we cannot ethically design rigorous experiments using human subjects.
Let me expand on this point, because according to my correspondence with psychologists and psychology students, the issue of experimental design appears to be a confusing topic. Let's say a client enters a program of counseling and, after several months, reports that he feels "better". What conclusions can we draw from this? Are we justified in taking this as evidence that the therapy is effective? Yes, but only if we abandon any pretense of scientific evaluation. Here are some questions a scientist might ask about the outcome:
These are reasonable questions, they are rarely asked in clinical psychology, and they can only be answered by designing a more scientific study, one consisting of:
This is how science works to minimize the confounding effects inherent in a study of human behavior, but it should be obvious that this experimental protocol is hopelessly unrealistic in the context of clinical psychology — there would be too many ways for the control and experimental groups to discover which they were, and there are those nasty ethical issues lurking in the background, where someone really needs therapy but gets a placebo (or really needs a placebo but gets therapy), which would push the entire enterprise out of the laboratory and into a courtroom, where the therapists and researchers would be sued to within an inch of their lives.
It is for these and other reasons that such strictly designed scientific experiments are never conducted in human psychology. And it is for that reason that theoretical psychology cannot produce a reliable core of scientific, falsifiable theory. And it is for that reason that clinical psychology is not governed by scientific findings in the same way that physics and medicine are. This is why clinical psychology consists of a series of conjectures and beliefs, rather than a series of scientific experiments and results.
Let's clarify this point with an example. The practice of theoretical physics is called "engineering". If an engineer builds an airplane and the plane falls to pieces while flying, it will turn out that one or more physical theories was ignored in the design of the airplane. This is because engineering is governed by the scientific content of theoretical physics. To put it simply, a failure in the practice of physics can be trivially traced to a failure to heed the theory of physics.
When theoretical psychology is put into practice, it is called clinical psychology, but the connection with physics (and science) ends right there. If a client commences therapy and then falls to pieces while talking, the clinical psychologist, the "engineer," cannot refer to theoretical psychology for an explanation, because theoretical psychology doesn't contain a coherent, testable, falsifiable theory of human behavior. As a result of the theoretical vacuum at the top of human psychology, clinical psychologists can and do say virtually anything, without any realistic prospect of refutation, and clients who can't think for themselves are at the mercy of therapists.
Am I exaggerating the present state of clinical psychology? No, not at all. Consider these examples:
John Mack and the Alien Abductees
Professor John Mack was a psychiatrist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, at the top of his profession, when he decided to accept at face value the reports of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. Mack's position at the Harvard Medical School and his standing in the world of psychology greatly increased the number of people willing to count themselves among the alien-abducted. And it was not possible to evaluate abductee claims objectively or argue against Mack's position using scientific evidence, because there is no psychological theory that addresses this kind of mental disturbance. Mack was free to say or do anything he cared to, and he could not be called to account by reference to a nonexistent psychological theory that might refute his beliefs.
Ian Stevenson and Past Lives Therapy
While charman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Ian Stevenson decided to study reincarnation by interviewing children about their past lives. Not surprisingly and with the right kind of encouragement, the children exhibited fantastic recall of their prior visits to planet Earth. Encouraged by these results Stevenson went on the found the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, a department that now stands alongside physics, chemistry and biology on this university's roster of serious subjects.
Not surprisingly, scientists have expressed little interests in this department of the university, except for a rumored inquiry from the IRS, who are alleged to have expressed an interest in past-lives income tax audits.
Candace Newmaker
Candace Newmaker was a 10-year-old girl whose mother submitted her to a practice known as "rebirthing therapy". Like so many psychological fads, rebirthing therapy gained traction among parents by word of mouth, glowing testimonials, the encouragement of clinical psychologists, everything but scientific evidence. As time passed, the therapy took on a more aggressive form — the child was wrapped in sheets and cushions as a sort of faux womb from which she was expected to emerge completely changed. Well, Candace was certainly changed — she was dead. She had suffocated in the make-believe womb.
Rebecca Riley
When Rebecca Riley was two years old, she was placed under the care of a psychiatrist and diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder. On the psychiatrist's recommendation, Rebecca was placed on a potent cocktail of drugs meant to calm her down. Over time her parents and her psychiatrist, noting the salutary effect the drugs were having on the child's behavior and reasoning that more is better, gradually increased the dosage. Finally, when Rebecca was four, the drugs finally had the desired effect — she became supernaturally calm. She was dead.
These examples come from a long list of similar stories — therapists who will say anything, parents who will accept anything, children who have no rights. These are stories where science plays no part.
Authority and Responsibility
Parents who consider submitting their children to the care of psychologists should read this section very carefully.
Many people believe that psychologists are sort of like doctors (and psychiatrists really are doctors, at least in the U.S.), and therefore speak with the authority of a doctor. But, because of the absence of science in psychology, psychologists are not accountable for their actions in the same way that doctors are, instead parents are held to account for the therapeutic procedures visited upon their children. In the two cases cited above in which children died while under the care of psychologists or psychiatrists, the parents were brought up on criminal charges. This is society's unmistakable signal that:
If all the above reasoning seems too esoteric, if a reader finds the logic too difficult to follow, then pay attention to how science distinguishes medicine and psychology. In medicine, if something goes wrong, the doctor can be sued in civil court or charged in a criminal court with wrongdoing. This is because medicine is strongly governed by scientific evidence, and errors tend to result from willfully ignoring the science. In psychology, if something goes wrong, parents are typically held to account for accepting the psychologist's opinions. This is because clinical psychology is not governed by scientific evidence, instead it is nearly all a matter of fad and opinion.
Fringe Diagnoses
A "fringe diagnosis" is one that may be based in reality but that can be plausibly applied to nearly anyone. Asperger's (described below), ADHD and many other conditions may represent real subjective states, but they also represent a playground for unethical clinical psychologists, a pretense to get people into the mental health care system.
Over time psychologists have greatly increased the number of conditions officially recognized as mental illnesses, by including them in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (hereafter DSM), the psychologist's professional "Bible". The present DSM identifies an absurd number of conditions as "mental illnesses", including:
This example list means exactly what it says. According to current psychological practice, if you have trouble spelling, if you cannot add a column of figures, if you cannot compose a coherent sentence, if you don't like your older brother, you are mentally ill and you need professional help.
When one hears that a two-year-old girl was given very serious, multiple diagnoses as in the Rebecca Riley story recounted above, one may wonder whether such diagnoses can meaningfully be applied to a child that young. The answer is no — such a diagnosis is meaningless even in the prevailing relaxed atmosphere of clinical psychology. But it's important to understand why this happens. It happens because a misbehaving child might result from parental incompetence, but a psychological diagnosis confers the status of a disease, a "mental illness", which frees parents from any responsibility for their child's behavior. This is the parental motive behind the present fad of acquiring fringe psychological diagnoses for very young children.
The problem with fringe diagnoses is that, while it frees parents from any personal responsibility for their child's behavior, it also frees the child from any responsibility for his own. It is difficult to overestimate the emotional effect of being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, or ADHD, or any of the other currently popular fringe diagnoses. To a child who is not mature enough to understand the social standing of clinical psychology, such a diagnosis might easily be understood as:
In reality, all these children will eventually have to make their own way in the adult world, and their prospect for individual success is in direct proportion to their willingness to ignore the beliefs and statements of psychologists. This is why such diagnoses are almost always applied to children, and by the time these children become adults, they either figure out that they must sink or swim like everyone else, or they are on their way to becoming permanent, voluntary psychological invalids.
To summarize the above points, because of the superficial connection between psychology and science, because psychologists have no authority and cannot compel behavior, we arrive at the bedrock principle of contemporary clinical psychology: clients pay psychologists, and psychologists tell clients what they want to hear. If a psychologist contradicts a client, the client goes shopping for a different psychologist who will agree with him. And as the John Mack/alien-abductee story proves, you can find psychologists willing to say anything.
Tragically, most of the victims of this practice are children, who have no way to discover that a psychologist is neither a doctor nor an authority.
Asperger Syndrome
Over the past ten years a new psychological condition has become popular and has created an epidemic of U.S. diagnoses, mostly of children. Asperger syndrome (commonly referred to as "Asperger's") is thought to be related to autism, but this is conjecture for the usual reason — psychologists don't know what Asperger's is or even if it is distinct from other conditions. Asperger's also meets the definition of a fringe diagnosis — present diagnostic tests can and do mistakenly identify bright people as suffering from Asperger's, which can lead to an unnecessary stigma and burden and pointless therapeutic treatment for children who, apart from being intelligent, are quite normal.
Also, because a number of famous, successful people have been given the Asperger's label (Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Gates and others), this diagnosis has become trendy and fashionable — there's no other way to put it. Some parents don't mind at all that this diagnosis is applied to their children, and some proactively seek it out. The parents get all the personal advantages stated above, and they place their children in the company of some very successful people. Because of these forces, the Yale Child Development Center has posted this warning:
"Clearly, the work on Asperger syndrome, in regard to scientific research as well as in regard to service provision, is only beginning. Parents are urged to use a great deal of caution and to adopt a critical approach toward information given to them. [emphasis supplied]."
The opinion leaders in the field of clinical psychology have directed this advice to parents, not therapists, for a reason that should be obvious — as explained above, there is no realistic way to control the behavior of therapists. For a therapist, a diagnosis is bread on his table, and any bright youngster can be given the Asperger's diagnosis. Many parents don't understand that psychology isn't a science and that psychologists aren't doctors — sadly, these people become hostages of their own ignorance.
Conclusion
Since the first appearance of this article and its predecessor "Is Psychology a Science?", many conscientious psychologists have begun to take a similar position, but more with a sense of foreboding than anticipation. In 2005, Dr. Ronald L. Levant, president of the American Psychological Association, penned a daring initiative meant to nudge clinical psychology toward an evidence-based model and away from its present reliance on anecdote and belief. But I think Dr. Levant may have misjudged the present state of clinical practice — on hearing his proposal, rank and file psychologists reacted with a mixture of panic and fury. Here is a quote from Dr. Levant's later defense:
Evidence-based practice in psychology (APA, 2005): "Some APA members have asked me why I have chosen to sponsor an APA Presidential Initiative on Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) in Psychology, expressing fears that the results might be used against psychologists by managed-care companies and malpractice lawyers."
The rank and file are right, of course. Any effort to move clinical psychology toward an evidence-based model would expose what until now has been a well-kept secret — clinical psychology is not remotely evidence-based, relying instead on anecdotes, dubious extrapolations from animal research, poor-quality retrospective studies and simple belief. To publicly air these facts would trigger a number of legal and practical consequences that psychologists would be wise to avoid. And so far, they have — after a brief uproar in 2005, the APA proposal has been shelved.
In his most revealing sentence, Dr. Levant says, "... psychology needs to define EBP in psychology or it will be defined for us." This acknowledges something that Levant emphasizes in his article — EBP is a proposal, a wish, not a reality. Scientific psychology lies in the future — at present, we only have the acronym.
For those who treat it with an appropriate degree of critical thought and skepticism, clinical psychology is no more risky than astrology. But for those who either will not or cannot think for themselves, or who treat psychology as though it is a science, serious problems are inevitable.
Above I gave examples where parents, with the active participation of psychology and psychiatry, killed their children outright. That is obviously a rare occurrence — it's more common for parents to enlist psychology to destroy their children in ways that don't leave external scars. Obviously a principled psychologist could say, "You're infecting your children with your own dysfunctions, and I won't have any part of this!" Or he could say to the children, "The problem is your parents — the cure is to get away from them as soon as possible." But in real life this almost never happens — because parents pay the bills, a principled psychologist would soon be out of business. It's important to understand that psychology is a business, not a science, and to understand how it works, one need only follow the money.
What follows is a rare, first-person account that looks inside a profoundly dysfunctional family. According to standard practice in the social sciences, every effort has been made to conceal the identities of the participants — all names and most events are fiction, but the themes are true to life. The story shows how clinical psychology, contrary to outward appearances, can make a bad situation worse.
Meet My Son
In an earlier career I was an aerospace engineer, and some of my electronic designs are in service aboard the NASA Space Shuttle. When the Shuttle flies, I am sometimes called as a consultant and I spend time at a southern U.S. aerospace center. During one of those visits I was contacted by a woman I will call Joan (all names in this section are fictional) who found my name on the Web. In her first e-mail she asked me out on a date, but I discovered she was married and turned her down. In later messages she changed her tune and asked if I would meet her son and be his mentor.
By suggesting a date she had gotten off on the wrong foot with me, and I found her rather pushy, so I replied politely to her e-mails but nothing else, hoping she would take the hint. Joan reacted by e-mailing me regularly, repeating her request that I get together with her and meet her son. After seven months, on realizing I had permanently put her off, Joan brought her son to a place she knew I would be and forced a meeting. Wow, I thought, this woman won't take no for an answer.
Joan's son Jim turned out to be exceptionally bright, although initially rather withdrawn and insecure for reasons I didn't understand. Once he realized I understood the topics he was interested in, he opened up and came off as very bright and interesting. I was quickly hooked.
The Sick-Child Strategy
In retrospect I should have thought more deeply about the situation, and I know about myself that I pay too little attention to social issues. I failed to ask myself how such a bright, sociable kid could have no mentors or personal friends, to the degree that his mother would pursue a complete stranger for seven months. In hindsight this issue is easy to see, but I just didn't think about it at the time.
Jim and I became friends, and I began to work on his low self-esteem and assessment of his personal potential. Over the next few months his outlook changed and he began to act like a bright, normal kid. That's when the problems began.
But the problem wasn't Jim, the problem was his mother. With each forward step in Jim's personal development, Joan would object, sometime quietly, sometimes loudly. Finally she revealed that she had gotten an Asperger's diagnosis for Jim and she believed he was seriously mentally ill. Joan began doing all she could to prevent what I regarded as a natural course of events in which Jim would learn that he was a normal person with the right to a normal future, a circle of friends, and a place in the world consistent with his substantial gifts — someone other than a psychological invalid. Joan was having none of that — for some personal reason she insisted that her son was mentally handicapped. Wow, I thought, this woman won't take yes for an answer.
During these sometimes heated discussions, Joan would refer to her son's "medical plan." Every time she said this, I bit my tongue, because in reality Jim had not received a medical diagnosis was not receiving medical treatment, for the reason that clinical psychology is not a medical field. Psychologists are not doctors, a psychologist's opinion is not a medical diagnosis, and psychology is not steered by science and evidence. It became clear that Joan needed to identify her children as "sick," so she adopted a vocabulary consistent with her delusion, but within a field so far removed from medicine that Joan could direct the process and force the outcome she wanted.
Psychology as Religion
I began to realize this was a more complicated situation than I had imagined, but I foolishly expected my positive behavior and values would smooth out the bumps in the road. In other words, I completely underestimated Joan's pathology and strange behavior toward her children.
In hindsight I see that Joan was (among other things) a malignant narcissist, with a trait common in narcissists that they seek out some kind of external authority to support their decisions, in order to avoid personal accountability. For Joan, that "authority" was clinical psychology. Clinical psychology is a perfect choice for someone intent on avoiding personal responsibility — as explained in the previous section, one can find a psychologist willing to agree with anything one might choose to believe.
Intellectually shallow and desperate to attach herself to an unimpeachable source of truth, Joan came to believe psychologists possessed conventional social authority and could provide meaningful answers to important questions. Also, over time she discovered she could avoid any personal accountability for her children's emotional state by getting psychological diagnoses for them at the earliest possible age. If Joan had lived a hundred years ago, she would have gotten the same results from religion, but psychology is a more acceptable and fashionable substitute in modern times — clinical psychology seems designed for people too smart for religion but not smart enough for science.
Apart from her narcissism, Joan had a more important reason to seek out unimpeachable authorities — she wasn't equipped to think for herself. A combination of genetic and educational factors prevented her from discovering that adults evaluate evidence, make personal choices, and then accept responsibility for their choices.
For those who think I'm exaggerating Joan's shallowness and attachment to psychology, consider this: when a discussion became heated, Joan would pick up the telephone, call a therapist — any therapist — and get a ruling. She sought wisdom from a group well-known in academia as unambitious C students, and for self-serving reasons none of them replied, "You're a grownup, Joan, sort this out for yourself!"
And just as with religious True Believers, if a therapist should ever disagree with Joan — like one prominent psychologist who strongly recommended that Jim be allowed into the mainstream of life — that person became a heretic overnight. Joan had a perfect system.
The Terrorist
About this time I witnessed another part of Joan's sick-child strategy. Joan heard a terrible news story that involved a child about the same age as one of hers. She promptly described the event to the child, but in a lurid way, as though her child was the victim. She did this in a way calculated to produce terror, and terror was the result — I watched this child's sunny disposition evaporate in minutes. Over time I saw repetitions of this pattern — it was not an isolated incident.
I realized several things at once. First, Joan wasn't simply a narcissist, there was something much deeper and more disturbing going on. Second, I realized she had probably done the same thing to Jim when he was younger, which explained his mental state when I first met him (I discovered later he had been suicidally depressed before my arrival on the scene).
In an e-mail, I confronted Joan with what she was doing — I accused her of terrorizing her children. Joan airily replied that parents have always terrorized their children, in any case the child in question had just been put in therapy, so "everything will be all right."
At that point, I got it. I don't mean I understood it in a formal sense (that came later), but I got it. Joan exhibited a weird behavior in which she would terrorize her children, systematically rob them of their normal youthful optimism and equilibrium, then submit them for psychological treatment. In Joan's strange parallel universe, pushing her children into therapy was as natural as teaching them to read, and at about the same age. I tried to imagine her children lying on a couch, analyzing a childhood they hadn't experienced yet.
The Fall
About that time John (the father) planned a family hike that involved a climb, and I was invited along. Because the children had little outdoor experience I decided to visit the climb site in advance. The site turned out to be a nearly vertical rock face, so steep that it couldn't be ascended without technical climbing skills and a rope. It was clearly dangerous for youngsters who hadn't yet ascended a ladder. Oh, well, I thought, the parents don't understand the risks and when they do they'll choose a more appropriate activity. I took some pictures, presented them to the parents and explained that this was no family outing.
But in retrospect I realize I had underestimated the effect my friendship with Jim was having on the parents. I had turned Jim's life around so that he saw himself in a much more positive, optimistic light, and the parents had taken this change as a personal affront to their parenting skills. So when I presented my pictures of the rock face and explained the danger to their children, they simply ignored me. They were parents, grownups, they could decide these issues, I was an outsider, my opinion was not important, the hike was going to happen.
I had never been in such a situation, before or since. I realized the real psychological problems lay not with the children but with the parents, and they were in complete denial. They were a genuine threat to the safety of their children in both a physical and a psychological sense, and I was a perfect fool for getting into the situation.
That night I tried to decide what to do. My first impulse was to give up and cut off all contact with the family and my friend Jim. That seemed the best solution, and because of the authority society gives parents, they could make me leave anyway if I openly disagreed with them. So that was it — they would have to sort things out for themselves. On that note I fell asleep.
The next morning I awoke just before dawn and realized there was a real danger that one of the children would get into trouble during the climb and the parents would not possess the skills to save him. I have a lot of outdoor experience, I've done a lot of climbing, and I know how to perform a rescue. So I changed my mind and went along on the climb. I didn't tell the parents what I expected to happen, I just repeated my warning that it wasn't a family outing and left it at that.
Everyone ascended the cliff without incident (the ascent is the least risky part of a technical climb) and got a chance to look across a famous Civil War battlefield. As the return began I passed up the other climbers, descended first, and positioned myself to catch anyone falling. Jim began his descent, but because he had no outdoor experience he decided to show off by letting go of the safety line. He began sliding down the nearly vertical rock face and quickly lost control of his descent. Pivoting on the safety line, I swung out to Jim's position and grabbed him as he sailed past, arresting a fall that might have killed him.
Denial
In this situation a normal mother might have said, "Well, I was wrong about the dangers of this climb, and I should have listened to you. Thanks for rescuing my son." Instead, unable to accept responsibility for endangering her children, Joan went mute, spent months mulling over the events surrounding the rescue, and finally began to describe it as "inappropriate touching." No, dear reader, I am not making this up — my having rescued Jim was actually a case of inappropriate touching, a phrase whose undercurrents adults understand perfectly, but one whose meaning Jim couldn't be expected to grasp.
The rescue episode dramatically exposed Joan's pathology and compulsion to cast events in the most negative and self-serving way. If I had refused to go on the hike, that would mean I wasn't a true friend. If Jim had beeen injured during the fall, Joan would finally have the "sick child" she so desperately wanted. If Jim had been killed during the fall, that would prove how unfair life is and vindicate Joan's bleak outlook. But my having rescued Jim posed a problem — it wasn't easy to fit into Joan's view of life (everything is horrible, sick, and the fault of others). It required months of effort, but Joan managed it — the rescue was inappropriate touching.
In a state of shock, I began to see how Joan processed reality, and I realized I had completely underestimated the risk she posed to herself, to her children, and to me. Even though I didn't sprint for the door as I should have, Joan's twisted thinking foretold an eventual end to my friendship with Jim, and the clock was ticking. Wow, I thought, this woman won't take anything for an answer.
Reason and Evidence
Now that I had committed the offense of rescuing Joan's son, the handwriting was on the wall and time was running out. Aware of this, I decided to use my remaining visits educating Jim in rational, evidence-based thinking. This wasn't difficult — Jim had a natural high aptitude for this activity, and we made substantial progress.
Just one example. About this time I wrote a Calculus tutorial and posted it on my Web site. Jim read it, announced he hadn't understood it, then proceeded to correctly answer a number of questions I posed about the properties of functions and their derivatives. This was completely typical of Jim — intellectual skills beyond his years, mixed with a charming degree of humility. And I must add that Jim's outlook was the opposite of his mother's, who possessed no intellectual depth and no humility about her views, most of which she had gotten from psychologists and other sources of fixed, trivial ideas.
Obviously I kept this kind of observation to myself, focusing instead on presenting Jim with a different picture of reality, one in which people figure things out using reason and evidence.
Hell Hath No Fury
Before continuing, I need to explain something about narcissists — they are self-absorbed to a degree that an ordinary person simply cannot imagine. If a narcissist was a high-tech military radar, there would only ever be one blip on the display — other people have no chance of registering. Famously simple-minded, ruthless and obtuse, narcissists manipulate people in their environment for a single, infantile objective — universal recognition of themselves as undeserved gifts to the world. Critical to this perpetual delusion is the fact that narcissists haven't the slightest idea how they appear to others.
In retrospect, it's clear that Joan had originally intended to trade up, replace her unsatisfactory husband, and introducing me to her son was a pretense, not the real point. As for myself, I ignored Joan's hidden agenda and befriended her son in earnest. Also, because my favorite part of a woman lies between her ears, I was the worst possible candidate for Joan and her plan, but in a self-referential irony she wasn't equipped to figure this out.
The turning point arrived the day Joan discovered her husband was having an affair. Now furious and intent on revenge, Joan chose a moment while sitting next to her husband to announce she loved me. My non-response, the only sane reaction to her overture, caused Joan to promptly redirect her narcissistic fury toward me, and assured a quick end to my friendship with her son — all that remained was for Joan to arrange my departure in a way that concealed her true motive.
After a bit of scheming, Joan resurrected her "inappropriate touching" theme from the day of the rescue, and she began to claim all physical contact between Jim and I was inappropriate, with elaborations I will leave to my readers' imaginations. Since the day of the rescue I had been expecting something like this, so once I saw the emerging outline of Joan's plot and its dangers, I decided to break off all personal contact with the family. I diplomatically explained to Jim that I had important philosophical differences with his parents, and they could not be resolved. This was a way to end our friendship without producing more heat than light.
The M-word
Then two things happened. One, Jim figured out what Joan was up to, he knew very well that nothing inappropriate had taken place between us, and he began to argue against Joan's having ended our friendship. Two, Joan, now beginning to panic and unwilling to reveal she had personal reasons for ending our friendship, responded by turning up the rhetorical thermostat. She eventually took a position that only an inexperienced child would fail to recognize as nonsense — that a child sitting on the lap of an adult, in and of itself, constitutes molestation. In an astonishing and schizoid post, Joan took the position that I was a beneficial influence on her son and should resume visiting, but a few hundred words later she managed to equate lap-sitting and molestation, as though this were an externally imposed rule about which she could do nothing.
On seeing the opinion Joan was unbalanced enough to put in writing, I realized I had departed at the right moment and wouldn't be visiting again. Some time later Jim realized I was really not coming back and he didn't understand why, so he phoned me and argued for a resumption of our friendship.
Please Come Back
I had earlier avoided any controversial issues by saying his parents and I had important philosophical differences, but, being a very smart kid, Jim saw through that. He took the position that, since there was nothing inappropriate in our friendship, it didn't matter what claims Joan made because they didn't correspond to the facts.
I revealed some things Jim couldn't be expected to know at his age. I explained that, regardless of the facts, any position Joan took mattered a great deal, because she was the mother of minor children and because of something women sometimes do — they make a false claim of vile behaviors society rightly rejects, cause a great deal of trouble for everyone around them, then when it is discovered that they are either crazy or lying, they virtually always escape any consequences for their behavior.
Jim became emotional and said that was quite impossible — there was no way Joan would lie about our friendship, therefore I should resume it. I then spoke to Jim just as though he were an adult — I explained that by equating lap-sitting and molestation, Joan had laid the foundation for a false but dangerous future accusation. I then predicted that, no matter what he or I did, Joan might try to justify herself with a claim of inappropriate, perhaps even criminal behavior, but by the time the authorities realized she was unhinged, the damage would be done.
I resisted telling Jim that Joan's motive for ending our friendship was, not what was happening between he and I, but what wasn't happening between she and I, and the legendary fury narcissistic women exhibit on discovering they aren't the center of your world. I was confident he would figure this out in time.
I apologized to Jim for not having the nerve to continue our friendship and said goodbye. Within minutes Joan had heard about my conversation with her son and, in a panic that her true motive might be exposed, wrote in high dudgeon to object to my absurd prediction and to demand no more contact with her son. She then proceeded to do exactly what I predicted.
The First Hearing
As I had foreseen, a few weeks later Joan, having lost control of both the situation and herself, penned a civil court petition composed of outright lies and a hearing was scheduled. During the hearing I explained that Joan's statements were absolutely false, I had every e-mail Joan had written me, the e-mail record flatly falsified her claims, and I made the point with a single carefully chosen quote from the archive. Upon realizing I had kept her e-mails and knowing what they contained, Joan fell silent, thus turning my claims into stipulations (issues on which both sides agree). The meaning of that silence was not lost on the experienced judge, who ruled that no consideration would be given to her claims, ordered a brief spell of no contact and gaveled the hearing to a close.
I realize I am making this outcome sound inevitable, but as nearly every informed adult knows, false claims like this can lead to terrible injustice, even death. There are any number of accounts of people jailed on the word of a frustrated, irrational woman, only to be freed years later after some test reveals that the original witness was lying. And, depending on the nature of the false claim, the accused stands a good chance to be killed by other convicts, normal self-respecting serial murderers and such, who are deeply offended by the presence of a child molester.
After someone is killed, or released when a woman's lie is uncovered, is the original accuser prosecuted for lying? No, almost never. This is why a small minority of women do this again and again — it's safe and effective. Besides, men are animals and deserve anything they get. Isn't that how it works?
Law enforcement officials have discovered that few victims of sex crimes are even willing to file a report, because they don't expect to be believed. The reason? People like Joan, who lack intelligence, common sense or a moral compass, and who have no hesitation about lying under oath, even in circumstances where written evidence proves they are lying. A small minority of women make baseless sexual accusations, and all women pay the price.
In retrospect, I realize the greatest danger was that this civil hearing would be assigned to a judge as stupid as Joan is. Although this sometimes happens, for all our sakes it's not probable, and in this case the intelligent judge let the outcome be determined by evidence, not fantasy, and Joan was exposed as a liar.
Serial False Accuser
After the hearing I thought about the fact that Joan didn't have the slightest hesitation about lying and didn't seem terribly upset when she was contradicted by her own prior words. It became clear that she didn't expect to be punished for lying or being caught in lies, under oath in a court of law — it was as though she had the benefit of prior experience. At that point I performed a background check and discovered Joan had falsely accused at least one other man in much the same way. A subsequent, more thorough investigation revealed that every person who had extended contact with her son and who disagreed with Joan's choices, was later falsely accused of molestation in court. I thought that would have been useful to know during the hearing, not that Joan had any chance to prevail.
On reviewing Joan's background, on discovering she was a serial false accuser, I began to assemble the whole from its parts. It was classic malignant narcissism, but with some bizarre twists — essentially, if you disappointed her expectations, you had a good chance to be accused as a child molester. If you met her expectations, a few weeks or months later she would change her tastes, the process would repeat, until inevitably you would disappoint her, and she would set out to destroy you. I realized she had been ramping up the rhetoric for months, starting with the "inappropriate touching" rock climb rescue and leading up to her description of lap-sitting as molestation. She had a glassy-eyed way of making these pronouncements that had to be seen to be believed, and she was incredibly dangerous. I realized I had unwisely focused my attention, not on her, but on her victims, until I became one of her victims.
Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy
After the hearing I recited Joan's personal history to an old friend, a mental health professional. My friend almost immediately recognized the classic symptoms of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy (hereafter MSP). In MSP the perpetrator, almost always a mother of minor children, induces physical or psychological symptoms in her children and then submits them for care, all in order to attract attention to herself. According to an FBI report, MSP is extremely dangerous — approximately 9 percent of the children die at the hands of the perpetrator. And apropos this narrative, MSP perpetrators regularly accuse third parties of child abuse as a way to deflect attention from themselves.
So was Joan an MSP perpetrator? I am not qualified to say. Those who are qualified, and who are familiar with this case, regard it as likely. But to confound the issue, MSP is a behavior, not a psychological diagnosis, for the reason that MSP perpetrators know their actions are dangerous and criminal, so they won't coöperate with mental health professionals to produce formal diagnostic criteria. Because it is not a diagnosis, one can only watch for the symptoms, and only therapists are likely to be in a position to take action to protect the children. To complicate matters further, therapists are prevented by the therapist-client privilege from reporting anything but an immediate danger.
At this point, some of my readers may wonder why I didn't just go to Child Protective Services and report my observations — isn't that a civic duty under the circumstances? Well, yes, I agree — reporting such things, now a legal requirement for teachers, is an implied responsibility for others, and I fulfilled it. As it turned out, Child Protective Services was familiar with Joan and her troubles. They reopened her case file and increased their monitoring, but took no further action. What could they do, realistically? For the reasons set out above, before a child dies, MSP can only be conjecture. After a child dies, MSP is a given. I certainly saw Jim's parents expose him to extreme danger, but on that occasion I was present and I kept him from falling.
The Second Hearing
In the first hearing and based on her past experiences, Joan assumed she could safely lie under oath, accuse me of something vile and despicable, but her son would never find out — if he did, the discovery would destroy their relationship. But Joan greatly underestimated Jim's evolving mental abilities, curiosity and personal ethics. In the aftermath of the first hearing, Jim did a little research of his own (court records are public documents) and discovered Joan had done exactly what I predicted she would do — she lied in a court of law, and was shown to be lying. Following his discovery, Jim's personal world collapsed and he returned to the depressed state that preceded our friendship. To put this another way, Jim fell much farther than the day of the rock climb, but this time I wasn't able to reach out to him.
To Joan, this outcome was shocking and outrageous — women who make vile false accusations expect their victims to retreat in silence, because (as shown in the infamous Duke University case) even a false accusation can cause tremendous damage. Through their silence Joan's prior victims gave her what she needed, which only encouraged her to choose another victim. But she chose her next target (that would be me) very badly — there is a small risk that a victim won't coöperate with the accuser's sociopathic game plan, will say the woman is lying and challenge her to substantiate her claims. Joan couldn't possibly do that, instead she fell silent, a reaction whose significance was not lost on the presiding judge.
Later, after mulling over the disaster she had produced and consistent with her status as a malignant narcissist, Joan got another civil court hearing with the intent to hold me responsible for her actions and shut me up for good measure. The educated reader may wonder how Joan could get a hearing under these circumstances, with the grievance that her victim won't accept someone else's responsibilities and then politely shut up about matters of public record. Well, it turns out a mother of minor children can always get a hearing, especially if she is willing to lie, something Joan was more than ready to do.
In the second hearing, Joan falsely claimed I had made a contact in violation of the judge's prior order (a lie crafted solely to acquire the hearing), tried to hold me responsible for her son's depression, and demanded that I not communicate my findings "in any way, in any location, with any person." I explained that Joan's claims were uniformly false and her demand of silence was absurd and unconstitutional. I went on to say I had discovered Joan had a history of making false accusations under oath, she was severely dysfunctional, and her description of her intellectually superior son as "developmentally delayed" was spectacularly false.
As in the first hearing Joan abruptly fell silent, and again, the judge realized what that meant (in a formal legal sense it signified acceptance of all my claims). The judge complimented me on my presentation and moved to close a very brief hearing, at which point Joan, facing another courtroom defeat, took an abrupt turn off the reality roadmap and demanded that I be punished even though I had done nothing wrong. The judge briefly looked startled, regained his composure, said "no" and closed the hearing. This was perhaps the shortest hearing in the history of civil law.
Silence!
As to her bizarre demand of silence, Joan belongs to a dark, predatory subclass of women, a small minority who lie under oath about the vilest things, then rely on the silence of their victims to shield them from the legal consequences. Until recently authorities believed the rate of false reporting of sex crimes to be about 2% of all reports. But the introduction of DNA testing — of science — into the process has proven that the rate is much, much higher: according to an FBI study, between 20 and 40 percent of sexual accusations are false and many innocent men have been released from prison. There are accounts of women who have falsely accused dozens of men and avoided any personal consequences for the simple reason that their victims, innocent but humiliated, didn't want to publicize their experience. Women like Joan thrive on darkness and secrecy, and they almost always succeed in intimidating their victims into silence. I wrote this article for a number of reasons — one is to publicize the shocking state of clinical psychology and its maltreatment of children, another is to put people like Joan on notice that society's tolerant attitude toward false reports is changing and those who lie under oath will be held to account for their crimes.
Joan's demand of silence also revealed a pathological level of narcissism and megalomania — it represented someone seriously expecting to get a court order to deprive someone of the most basic of civil rights, that of free speech. To a narcissist, there is only one legitimate viewpoint, and he or she is the source — all other voices deserve to be silenced. Once Joan expresssed her demand, there was really no reason for me to explain that she was severely dysfunctional — that had become self-evident. As for myself, I was more than happy for Joan to exercise her right of self-expression, because each new utterance only served to undermine her position and expose her profound discomfort with common democratic values.
Evading Responsibility
When I described Joan as severely dysfunctional, she didn't offer a defense (thus turning the claim into a fact), and on reflection I think I know why. First, when a woman makes the kinds of claims Joan did, it's nice to have a fall-back position once people realize she is lying, and being mental is an excellent way to avoid responsibility. It worked for the accuser in the Duke University case, a woman who managed to destroy a bunch of lives, then was discovered to be lying but escaped punishment on the ground that she is mental. So Joan might have been willing to accept my description of her as severely dysfunctional, simply to avoid responsibility for the felony crime of lying under oath.
Second, when I described Joan as severely dysfunctional, she could have retorted, "No, that's not true," but to pursue this defense she would have had to waive her therapist-client privilege, at which point I would have subpoenaed Joan's therapist, put her under oath, and the therapist would have been required to acknowledge discussing the possibility that Joan suffered from MSP, something revealed by a privileged source. Because MSP is so dangerous, this revelation would have forced the state's hand and Joan might have lost custody of her children. Joan may not have understood these possibilities at a conscious level, but she certainly realized it was time to stop lying or suffer the consequences — that was certainly within her intellectual abilities.
The Mother From Hell
Joan was a classic toxic parent — a simple-minded, narcissistic social parasite, ethically disabled, profoundly dysfunctional, angry at nature for making her stupid, intent on punishing others for her own defects, and more than willing to use her children as pawns in furtherance of her twisted personal goals. How she produced such an intelligent boy is a matter for evolutionary biologists to sort out.
To the degree that Joan's strategy could be explained, it was an all-too-common wish to keep her children from growing up. Kids are much more satisfying when they're helpless and adoring than when they need mature counsel from a functioning adult. How could Joan be expected to guide children into the adult world when she wasn't one herself?
Here is how a recent FBI report describes MSP perpetrators:
"The majority of people associated with [MSP] are women. Often, investigators, along with friends, family, and neighbors, view these women as very caring and loving parents who try to do everything they can for children afflicted with devastating illnesses. Offenders usually exhibit knowledge of diseases and medical procedures beyond what most parents may know ... The satisfaction sought from misleading caregivers at the expense of their children is thought to be the sole reason for committing the abuse ... [MSP] perpetrators convincingly fabricate and lie even when confronted with contrary information."
This description perfectly summarizes Joan's behavior. Given these facts, the family situation was just as one might imagine. By the time I departed, the majority of family members had voiced suicidal sentiments, and all were in therapy. Jim moved from having an adult friend to having a therapist, and the therapist was acceptable in a way I could never be — Joan paid him to agree with her.
Joan got a more sympathetic reception from clinical psychology than from the courts. But it requires a kind of willful stupidity to fail to see that clinical psychology, as it is presently constituted and with respect to the treatment of children, is an engine designed in support of an absurd falsehood — that children should turn out like their parents, and therapies exist that can produce this result. Neither of these assertions is true — if children were meant to be copies of their parents, childbearing would serve no purpose and would not exist, and therefore psychology, to the degree that it tries to reshape children to satisfy parents, comes into a fundamental conflict with nature. In this conflict as with most, nature gets her way.
On the bright side, once they emancipate themselves, Joan's children will discover the adult world isn't the horror recounted by their mother. Dysfunctional parents invariably describe the outside world in self-serving ways, which leaves their children fearing something worse than the experience of being raised by incompetents. This means they may be pleasantly surprised by the comparative fairness and freedom of adult life — with emphasis on "comparative."
Symmetry
I've gotten a few reader comments about the brutal tone I take in the second part of this article. Here's the explanation. As Joan commenced lying under oath, I realized she had given herself permission to say absolutely anything, without regard to consequences to herself or anyone else. She very clearly didn't realize that, under the Symmetry Principle, she had just given me permission to say absolutely anything. I certainly wasn't going to lie under oath — I leave that behavior to those too stupid or mental to foresee the consequences — but Joan had just given me license to create a blunt account that I would never consider writing under other circumstances. So I wrote it, and here it is, all names and some events fictionalized to conceal identities, otherwise true to life, and exactly as fair and compassionate as Joan is herself. One can only hope Joan will draw a trivial moral lesson from this, but if she falls off the wagon again, a long list of victims is poised to testify against her.
As we mature, normal people learn a vital lesson — any rights we insist on for ourselves, we also grant to everyone else. If you have the right to abandon the norms of civilized behavior, then so do I — we both have that right, or neither of us do. This symmetry is a key part of the social contract that binds us together. But narcissists never grasp this idea, and the resulting character defect cripples them for life. In the first hearing, Joan exercised her right to say whatever she pleased, and was quickly judged to be lying. In the second hearing, she tried to deny me the same right to free speech she had abused in the first hearing. Now tangled in her own web and oblivious to the irony, Joan essentially said, "Can't you make this man shut up?"
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" — Charles Darwin.
Reality Testing
After much thought, I have finally come to understand how Joan believed she could march into a court of law, make claims she knew to be false, and present no evidence — that is how clinical psychology works. In the most basic sense, you pay a therapist, and the therapist agrees with anything you care to say. You keep paying, the therapist keeps agreeing, and the issue of evidence never comes up. If you believe you are a victim of unseen evil forces, the therapist listens patiently. If you believe you have been abducted by aliens, some therapist is ready to take you seriously — for a fee. But the legal system works on different principles, and when it came time for Joan to substantiate her claims, she stood dumbstruck at the unfairness of it all, and the judge drew an obvious conclusion.
People like Joan become truly dangerous only if their victims don't understand the need to defend themselves. All I needed to do was show up and say "absolutely false," but to fail to speak up would have been a tacit admission of guilt, a legal principle that Joan didn't understand when it was her turn to speak up (in civil court, the parties are on an equal footing — both must be prepared to defend their actions). The reason Joan didn't understand the role of self-defense is because therapists don't require it — they only require money.
Joan revealed her ignorance of this issue several months before when I began a sentence with, "In my own defense ...". On hearing this phrase Joan lost her temper and argued that people willing to defend themselves only prove they're guilty. Because I didn't want to jeopardize my friendship with her son, I didn't risk explaining reality to her, but it occurred to me that she would silently self-destruct in a courtroom — which she did, twice.
My point? Because of how it is structured, clinical psychology sometimes ends up enabling or encouraging bizarre and sometimes dangerous mental conditions. Clinical psychology is not a proper branch of medicine, law or science, and a therapist's sole loyalty is to his source of income. This means a person suffering from a mental illness may well get worse under treatment, assuming she keeps paying the bills (this is particularly true for MSP perpetrators, who are notorious manipulators).
In summary, courts of law, as unfair as they sometimes are, represent reality, and clinical psychology represents a fantasy world. Joan spent most of her waking hours in psychology's fantasy world or one of her own making — she was willing to visit reality, but she never understood its customs and requirements, primarily truthfulness, consistency and the central role of evidence.
Circular Reasoning
It's well-established that the Asperger's diagnosis is frequently and wrongly applied to bright and gifted children, who quite naturally have problems getting along with their average classmates. According to many seasoned mental health professionals, because of dubious diagnostic criteria and the absence of treatments for Asperger's, the best course may be to push such children into the mainstream, where they learn how to get along with their peers and the world at large. But misguided, overcontrolling parents like Joan sometimes isolate their children in dead-end "special education" programs. In this case, Joan created a vicious circle centered on an Asperger's diagnosis, inside which Jim was trapped. The circle worked like this:
As it turns out and very conveniently, narrow interests and social awkwardness happen to be diagnostic indicators for Asperger's. But it's vital for parents to understand that these symptoms are not predicted by a scientific theory of Asperger's (there isn't one), instead they are observed in clinical practice and over time have become circumstantially associated with Asperger's. Such symptoms therefore may represent another example of circular reasoning — given the many examples where parents believe their son has Asperger's and the child is socially inept and focused on a few activities, psychologists have begun to associate these behaviors with Asperger's based solely on circumstances. (They're also signs of intelligence, but intelligence isn't listed as a mental illness — at least, not yet.)
Readers may reasonably argue that such circles don't prove anything by themselves and the only way to find out what's really going on is to break the circle. My point in this section is that by befriending Jim I broke Joan's circular trap, Jim escaped and began to develop in a normal way (something ruefully acknowledged by the parents), but when Joan realized she was losing control of the situation, she panicked and tried to stuff the genie back into the bottle. (And if I was a truly wise person, the first time I saw Joan justify her actions with circular reasoning, I should have walked out the door.)
In many and perhaps most cases, segregating children in the described way can only make the situation worse, and special education programs have a dismal record for conferring benefit. In this specific case, Joan was dealing with her own mental problems, not those of her son, but all parents should be very cautious and skeptical in applying these kinds of "remedies".
Forces of Nature
I think I played only a small part in shaping Jim's appreciation for reason and evidence, and I certainly had a much smaller effect than Joan did. Indeed, under normal circumstances an intelligent boy might have wondered what all the fuss was about — isn't it obvious that reason and evidence must be the foundation of an adult's perceptions? But to Jim, exposed daily to Joan's frequent collisions with reality, periodic invocations of dark evil forces and steadfast refusal to accept personal responsibility for anything, truthfulness and dispassionate reasoning must have seemed an astonishing breakthrough and a gift from nature (as it surely is).
A lifelong hostage of her own emotions, Joan represented the largest freestanding collection of unexamined beliefs I had ever seen, and in a caricature of everyday narcissism she refused to hear views that differed from her own. In this way she delivered an ironic gift to her perceptive, intellectually superior son, who might otherwise have spent years assuming that dispassionate examination of evidence represented any self-respecting adult's default mental process. When Jim and I first met, he recognized a kindred spirit, as did I, but over time, as Joan realized I had no use for her grab-bag of New Age beliefs and attachment to pseudoscience, and in particular as she watched her son acquire self-respect, she became annoyed, then angry, then furious, and in a very public narcissistic tantrum she then erased any further value I may have represented to her son. In this way Joan was perfect — her self-destructive nuclear meltdown was exactly what Jim needed to see at that stage of his intellectual development.
In the best outcome, Jim will sort out his relationship with his mother in a way that allows him to make a unique and positive contribution to the world, in other words, by honoring and cultivating his mental abilities while extending a kind of guarded charity toward his mother's fundamental dishonesty and hostile attitude toward the world of ideas. In the worst outcome, out of a misguided sense of loyalty Jim might adopt Joan's values — values that would destroy his own future as surely as they've destroyed Joan's. I think I know which path Jim will take.
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