[zwkrt]

There’s a reason that traditionally in America psychology is taught in a research oriented way. This has the upside of at least ideally causing psychologist and psychiatrist to have a curious attitude toward their patients. In a field that is dealing with something so complicated as people’s brains and their social interactions and their self perceptions and their bodily health, it’s pretty much a necessary condition to begin from a standpoint of assuming that you don’t understand everything. I think it also has the unfortunate downside of producing a lot of questionable research though.

The problem is that in a research paper you do have to have operational definitions, P values, etc. it’s not that these things are bad but they are not particularly well-suited to such an ambiguous problem as attempting to explore the human condition.

To bring the point back to Wittgenstein, we are forcing students to talk about “the unspeakable” in scientific terminology. Bringing in his viewpoint from the investigations, it feels to me like in the mental health field we need to be playing a different game than the scientific research game. Professionals on-the-ground are doing this, but how to bring that back into the academic sphere, I don’t know what the best solution is.