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Human actions are unstable units
Dear Psychology Professor,
I am seriously interested in multiplicity. I want to share with you a
couple of passages from my latest book TRUE VAMPIRES. The first part
quoted deals with fantasy and evil. The second part just barely
touches the surface of the psychological / medical science involved
in dissociative states.
A Fellow Author,
Sondra London
Dear Dr. Sondra,
This letter reached the wrong person: ain't no psychology professor at
this address. In fact, I became a novelist because I concluded that it
was so difficult to find out anything reliable about what makes human
beings tick.
So against my better judgment I read your two chapters anyway and have
to admit I was impressed and informed. However, in taking the role of
psychologist and examining the source of what makes killer's tick, you
are trying to find causes. And I have long ago given up on thinking we
can ever be sure what makes human beings do the things we do. I have
become a skeptic about the "science" of pyschology.
A Christian
fundamentalist may explain an evil action by seeing Satan as a causal
factor. A psychologist will see childhood abuse of some sort. I would
tend to see the psychologist's explanation as more useful. But the next
question the psychologist must answer is why do some abused children
become violent and why do others go on to live full and non-violent
lives. Thus I conclude a psychologist saying that the abuse caused a
person to later become violent, is undercut by the fact that in other
instances abuse was not followed by violence in later life.
I have read Freud and Jung and Maslow and Horney and found many
wonderful things in their books, but whenever they conclude that they
know precisely why some human did something I abandon ship. We can
know general tendencies and probabilities but never certainties. We can
know that the tide will come in at a certain hour but never predict
where a given grain of salt will end up. Human actions are grains of
salt, or unstable units in the atom: we can never predict their next move.
Thus spake the non-Professor.
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