Career in Psychology.

[Ripfox]

You are completely entitled to your opinion whatever you believe. I myself speak from personal experience and the experiances of others (patients) so you can't really tell me it is crap. Psyc is just another indoctrination of how things should be done according to western medicine and totally excludes other practices. When patients go to shrinks for years and get no results but the go to a hyonotherapist and get a result is the patients outcome a load of BS?

I think people who really WANT help believe what they want to believe, whatever it may be they have gotten themselves into to work through their problems...be it hypnotherapy, seeing a psychologist or diving head first into some freezing lake. If you don't believe it it won't happen.

Tada...my .2

[Bubba64]

I think people who really WANT help believe what they want to believe, whatever it may be they have gotten themselves into to work through their problems...be it hypnotherapy, seeing a psychologist or diving head first into some freezing lake. If you don't believe it it won't happen.

Tada...my .2

I use this quote as a representation of some of the course material we studied in a counseling course. In a counseling situation you have to be aware of the cultural influence in regards to a single persons perceptions of Psychology or whatever your practicing. Some cultures are more spiritual, I will leave out any specificities here so as not to offend anyone. To some cultures Psychology is not even considered. So this is where ethics is a huge deal you have to be able to treat somebody within their own perceptions or refer them to somebody that can. So the idea that a large educational history doesn't help or is a disqualifying factor is actually wrong. First of all you have to have a license to practice and the testing is rigorous and very difficult to pass. Like an MD you can't just call yourself a practicing therapist without the accreditation. If your able to reach a level of understand of the human condition to realize that you really know very little, and that every interaction you have with others is based on projections of your own realities towards each other and at best you realize that what you think or say is perceived differently by others no matter how clearly you think you have explained it or they say they understand; your on your way to being an effective helper.

[Ripfox]

I use this quote as a representation of some of the course material we studied in a counseling course. In a counseling situation you have to be aware of the cultural influence in regards to a single persons perceptions of Psychology or whatever your practicing. Some cultures are more spiritual, I will leave out any specificities here so as not to offend anyone. To some cultures Psychology is not even considered. So this is where ethics is a huge deal you have to be able to treat somebody within their own perceptions or refer them to somebody that can. So the idea that a large educational history doesn't help or is a disqualifying factor is actually wrong. First of all you have to have a license to practice and the testing is rigorous and very difficult to pass. Like an MD you can't just call yourself a practicing therapist without the accreditation. If your able to reach a level of understand of the human condition to realize that you really know very little, and that every interaction you have with others is based on projections of your own realities towards each other and at best you realize that what you think or say is perceived differently by others no matter how clearly you think you have explained it or they say they understand; your on your way to being an effective helper.

As long as you believe that, it is true.

[Patrick-Ruff]

just for the record, I do know a psychologist that has impressed upon me, a true perspective of the whole idea of psychology, and uses it wisely. I was merely wondering about what feilds so I will have a better idea of what my choices are.

[chucky chuckaluck]

i may be wrong, but i feel fairly strongly that hypnotherapy and regression therapy is pure fiction. i'm not a big fan of psychology either, except that it does seem to help some people. if it helps people, then fine. it's probably interesting work, but i'm sure it also can get annoying and frustrating as well.

anthropologist: so, what's the easiest profession to catch?

cannibal: psychologists, for sure.

anthropologists: so, i guess you must eat a lot of psychologists?

cannibal: oh, hell no!

anthropologist: (stunned) why is that?

cannibal: well sure, they're the easiest to catch, but they're also the hardest to clean.

[Bubba64]

just for the record, I do know a psychologist that has impressed upon me, a true perspective of the whole idea of psychology, and uses it wisely. I was merely wondering about what fields so I will have a better idea of what my choices are.

Because of the vast amount of opportunities as far as employment either as self employed or by organizations, clinics, hospitals. business, etc here is a link to a cursory description.
http://www.psychwww.com/careers/index.htm
I hear though that industrial psychology is the hottest field for actually finding work.
Personally I am looking toward Clinical Psychology as my Goal.

[Zarckon]

There have been some very thoughtful posts from many sides of the spectrum here. Kind of an interesting discussion has been generated though it has been straying a bit from the original question.

There has been a bit of a discussion regarding hypnotherapy in general and hypnotic regression in particular. I have been trained in Ericksonian hypnotherapy (that's Milton Erickson for those unfamiliar with the area). I rarely use formal hypnosis in therapy (just doesn't fit the type of practice that I've developed). There is actually a large scientific literature on hypnosis and it's effectiveness. Erickson did a lot of peer reviewed stuff in the 30s and 40s (yes, that's old. He pretty much pioneered the research in the U.S. But, there is a lot of more modern research if a person takes the time to check it out).

Bander and Grinder who developed NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming), studied Erickson, Satire, Haley, and others. While NLP is more of a cult thing at this point, their theoretical work is very interesting and depends heavily on patterns of interactions that they found useful from hypnotherapy.

Brief therapy as practised by In Soo Berg and her associates is a combination of Ericksonian hypnotherapy techniques and systems theory.

For all of these there are peer reviewed scientific research studies.

Regression therapy has always struck me as something that is way out there. But, I haven't taken the time to do a literature search to see what if any scientific studies have been done. I do have some experience with regression having facilitated it with friends. I find the experiences very compelling, but there are a number of alternative explanations for the experiences. It does take a very "good" hypnotic subject to do a regression, not just something anyone can do. This leads to a number of alternative conjectures that we have no real way of choosing between at this point of knowledge.

Someone brought up Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) praising it as scientifically based. I've had CBT training as well. From my perspective it's very limited. That's precisely why it's studied. It's easy to do "pure" research with it. But, when you do "pure" research you have to choose "pure" subjects as well. That is people who only have the "problem" that you're studying. So, the only people that the research directly applies to are people who only have that "problem". But, the real world is much more messy than that. Research like that actually applies to only a very small portion of the real world.

I'd like to point to Scott Miller's research again. He and his group have been doing some very clever research for at least the last twenty years on outcomes in therapy. They have shown that all therapies work, but that the brand of therapy only has about 15% influence on the outcome of therapy. That the major factor in a positive outcome (60%) is relationship with the therapist. It's more important to like and or trust your therapist than whether he, she, or it is a Freudian, hypnotherapist, systems theorist, rogerian, gestaltist, cbt practitioner, or what have you.

Science is a great method for finding out if what we believe is true in some objective sense or not. But, it's not as simple as it's scientific or it's crap. For one thing if you think about it everything we believe at the moment started out as an "alternative" hypothesis at some point. And some of what we believe today that is supported by our scientific theories now, will be proven to be "crap" at some point in the future. Some of our "alternatives" will turn out to be "true" and some won't. I think it's important to remember that there are simply more things out there to be studied than there is time and people to study them, so some things that are "alternative" that are "true" will not be studied for some time. We can't say whether something is either "true" or "crap" until it's been studied.

Finally I think it's important to remember that there are some questions that science per se can't answer. Science has at times denied the mind entirely. Or reduces the mind to an epiphenomenon of the electrical and chemical processes of the brain. I think Ken Wilber addresses this in some particularly clever ways and introduces some interesting methods for studying the "validity" of some of the more subjective aspects of human existence and experience.

[Chessmaster]

Zarcon, you make some interesting points.

Although I always understood alternative in a different sense. You say

But, it's not as simple as it's scientific or it's crap. For one thing if you think about it everything we believe at the moment started out as an "alternative" hypothesis at some point

I take "alternative" to be a methodological claim i.e. alternative therapies etc don't tend to use operate by the same methodologies of science, and scientific critique. Of course, within science itself there are "alternative hypotheses" - otherwise there would be nothing to test! - but that is different from "alternative methodologies". So I think that there is a real difference between science and crap (i.e. pseudo-science). (Peer review would be a good start!) Not that science is perfect, nor that the boundaries between science and non-science is always clear cut. But it is the most successful method of investigating the world. And it works pretty damn well as I am sure you will agree.

As for

Finally I think it's important to remember that there are some questions that science per se can't answer.

Is that an epistemological claim or a metaphysical one? I can agree with the former, but as the mad dog materialist that I am I think that everything is, in principle, describable by science and hence disagree with the latter.

[mips]

Is that an epistemological claim or a metaphysical one? I can agree with the former, but as the mad dog materialist that I am I think that everything is, in principle, describable by science and hence disagree with the latter.

And there lies the problem. You cannot describe everything with science, science does not have all the answers.

[Patrick-Ruff]

hmm, some interesting posts up there. thanks for the advice people and for paying attention to this thread. I'm going to continue to check back as it seems people still have something to say.