In the 19th century, there was a serious attempt to establish psychology or more precisely psychiatry as a branch of medicine.
Doctors observed the behaviors of patients, and then when they died, they tried to correlate the observable behaviors with lesions or abnormalities or structural changes in the brains of the patients during autopsy.
So this was the modus operandi.
At the time, the most vocal proponent of this attitude was Charcot in the Salpeter hotel, a hospital, I'm sorry, in Paris.
But Sigmund Freud was also a proponent of this.
Sigmund Freud was actually a neuroanatomist. His expertise was slicing the brain and then looking at the slices in slides under the microscope.
His publications dealt mostly with this. He had a few publications about cocaine, so he was a junkie who glamorized and glorified his drug, but otherwise his expertise was the brain.
The brain was the main topic of study, including in laboratories such as Wundt's laboratory.
So there was an attempt to correlate behaviors with anatomy. Anatomical changes, anatomical abnormalities, anatomical processes, anatomical pathways, especially the nervous, what was known as the nervous system.
The transformation started with Sigmund Freud.
Having essentially, I wouldn't say failed, but having not succeeded as he thought he should, having not attained distinction as a neuroanatomist and a neurologist or a doctor, medical doctor, Freud reverted to psychoanalysis.
He invented psychoanalysis because he failed in his other attempted careers, or failed by his own standards, his own grandiose megalomaniacal standards.
Psychoanalysis shifted the emphasis from phenomenology, the description of phenomena.
For example, description of behaviors, descriptions of lesions in the brain, descriptions of nervous system conduction and activity, etc. Observations, scientific, objective, neutral, indisputable observations, phenomenology.
So Freud transitioned from phenomenology to essentialism.
Freud was the first to try to describe what is happening inside the mind.
He didn't care in psychoanalysis. Initially, he tried to establish psychoanalysis as a branch of physics, using words like energy and so forth.
But gradually, he drifted into philosophical, or even I would say metaphysical terrain, ground.
And he started to talk about what's happening inside the mind, which was of course 100% speculative and very difficult to substantiate empirically in studies and testing.
To this very day we have a major replication crisis in psychology. The majority of studies and experiments cannot be replicated.
One of the main reasons psychology is not and never will be a science.
But coming back to Freud, he transitioned all of us with the might and power of his genius brain. He transitioned all of us into a period of asking why.
Rather than asking what, asking why?
Motivations, emotions, cognitions, id, ego, superego, and other speculative, metaphorical basically, literary models of the mind. These proliferated, object relations schools were the same.
These attempts at discovering the essence, the gist, the crux, the inalienable parts that drive the mechanism of the mind, these attempts continued well into the 1960s and 1970s, with a brief break known as behaviorism.
Behaviorism focused on behavior and treated the mind as a black box.
And so we have failed in this quest. We failed to decipher the mind. We don't even know what is the mind.
There's no agreed upon definition of consciousness. The unconscious is speculative.
It's a model and it's correlated with reality in certain respects, but in other respects it's not subject to or there's a big difficulty to subject it to experimentation.
And so today we are at a crisis or an inflection point where psychology resembles more and more a statistical discipline, where experiments and studies are carried out on populations rather than individuals.
And because human beings are malleable, mutable, changeable, unpredictable, the raw material of psychology is badly disposed to replication.
So it's not a science.
Having failed in our attempt to enter the mind andto explore the furniture in this space, we, I think, should revert to behaviorism, back to behaviorism.
And of course, the first place to start is in the various psychopathologies.
I think we should define mental health and mental illness along five axes.
Axis number one, social functioning.
People should be classified as socially functional or socially dysfunctional.
Now, I will not go into the details of each and every one of the axes.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, even social workers can define well what is socially functional and what is socially dysfunctional. It's a vast, vast literature on each and every one of the axes that I'm about to propose.
And I'm not going to review this literature right now, although I have reviewed a lot of the literature in well over 1,500 videos on this channel.
The second axis is inhibition.
So the first axis is social functioning or functioning more precisely.
The second axis is inhibition.
I suggest that on the healthy side, the person is socially inhibited.
So a healthy person, according to the first axis, is socially functional, and according to the second axis is socially inhibited.
A mentally ill person, a disordered person, a less healthy person, is socially dysfunctional and socially disinhibited.
Could be aggressive, could be even violent, could be nonconformist, defiant, reckless and so on so forth, but disinhibited.
So second axis is the axis of inhibition.
And the first two axes are social axes.
They involve interactions with other people. They involve fitting into the social environment, leveraging it to obtain favorable outcomes, working in the environment and on the environment. The concept of self-efficacy.
These are the first two social axes.
The next axis is not social, it's professional.
Professionally functional people and professionally dysfunctional people.
Kernberg, for example, has studied this issue.
The ability to function in one's professional life, to have a career, to go to work, to be stable is a strong indicator of mental health because it involves multiple processes, for example, impulse control, delayed gratification, and so, so forth. It involves maturity.
To function professionally, one needs to be mature.
To the opposite is professional dysfunction.
And professional dysfunction, again, has been defined in the literature and so and so forth.
And it's a very powerful indicator of mental disorganization, of a personality that doesn't have it all together, of a kaleidoscopic shifting internal space, which doesn't give rise to anything disciplined, anything structured and anything ordered.
So, social functioning, social dysfunctioning, social inhibition, social disinhibition, professional functioning, professional dysfunctioning.
Next, the fourth axis is interpersonal.
While the first two were social, the third was professional, the fourth is interpersonal.
And again, interpersonal functioning and interpersonal dysfunction.
Interpersonal dysfunction would involve insecure attachment styles, fear of intimacy, lack of empathy, and so on so forth.
Interpersonal functioning would mean the ability to maintain stable, long-term, object relations with individuals, with other individuals, and so on, so forth, the ability to perceive the other as a separate external being or entity or object and to act accordingly.
In dysfunctional interpersonal relationships there's an inability to perceive the other, there's instrumentalization and objectification and dehumanization of the other, and so on so forth.
Again, there's a huge literature on this, and I'm not going to go into it right now, but that is my fourth proposed axis.
The fifth and last proposed axis is regulation, dysregulation.
The ability to internally regulate moods, affects, emotions, and even cognitions, kind of internal locus of control.
And on the unhealthy side, on the mentally ill side, the inability to regulate all these internal processes.
This is known as dysregulation. It's a form of self-directed aggression, if you wish.
Regulation, dysregulation, again, there's a lot of this channel even, there's a lot about these topics.
Now, the problem is that in phenomenology the problem is misidentification.
We can observe things and we give them labels but sometimes we are wrong. Think about love for example, we sometimes mislabel dependency or codependency as love. That's an example of mislabeling. Another example. Depression may be mistaken for inhibition, especially in covert cases.
We can observe a depressed person and say, wow, this person is in control. This person is inhibited. This person is socially advanced and socially functioning.
But actually, this person is avoidant. This person is anxious. This person is depressed.
So there is a problem of labeling, properly identify specific parameters within the five axes that I've proposed.
But on the other hand, we have tools and instruments and psychological tests and experience practitioners and clinicians.
And I think ultimately such an approach to mental health and mental illness is much more mentally healthy.
Because we're not speculating about what's happening inside other people's minds. We don't have access to other people's minds. We have to rely on self-reporting and we have to rely on the observation of behaviors.
Since these are the only two data sets, observable behavior and self-reporting, we need to construct a rigorous psychology around these two.
And so my five axes take into account self-reporting, but even more so, observable phenomena.
My five axes are phenomenological, behaviorist if you wish, but definitely phenomenological.
Socially functional, on the healthy side, socially dysfunctional, on the unhealthy side, socially inhibited, on the healthy side, socially disinhibited or aggressive, on the unhealthy side, professionally functional versus professionally dysfunctional, interpersonally functional versus interpersonally dysfunctional, regulated versus dysregulated.
And the need to be vigilant when we label, diagnose and identify observable behaviors because many, many internal processes masquerade and appear to be the same when they are observed.
And so we need a lot of expertise in fine-tuning when we observe people.
But this is true for all sciences. When we observe the sun, or when we observe elementary particles, we need to be attuned.
Because there are artifacts everywhere in medical imaging, in physical experiments, and the artifacts everywhere.
The world is nuanced. Things bleed into each other.
This is not a reason to refuse to have dimensional or spectrum approach to human behavior. This is not a reason to refuse to try to establish an objective, neutral, observable, universal phenomenology of human psychology.
So, what else to say?
Good luck.