Practical Phrenology As Psychological Counselling In The 19th Century

"Practical" phrenology? What was there a clinical vs. applied phrenological war going on? Heh, heh. Ah, phrenology... dismissed as quakery not as long ago as you'd think.

My history of psychology course focuses on the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and so we get to see how parapscychology has run parallel to and plagued scientific psychology from this time. It's hard to believe that once-upon-a-time, people who called themselves psychologists were actively engaged in the pursuit of helping people contact dead relatives and helping them find suitable jobs and spouses based on skull bumps or facial features alone.

Scientific psychologists have had a really rough go of it, it seems. Getting people to take you seriously as a science is rather difficult when your colleagues are making a case that we can see your future by consulting some chicken bones.

One might think that society is wise to this snake oil solicited by the pop parapsychologists of today. But is that really true? If you think that the general public is too smart to be taken in by such blatent BS, you might want to consider:

Psychology Today - a popular magazine that reports on issues of general interest in psychology. You could say that this magazine is an ambassador for the science to the general population. It's articles are mostly superficial takes on a few recent or classic studies, thinned out with a lot of opinion pieces. It is written mostly by journalists as opposed to psychologists, but cites reputable sources. Check out the back section of the magazine however, to find countless ads for instant weight loss and, yup, PSYCHICS. Sigh... Foks, just because it has the same root word, doesn't mean it's a science.

Also consider, if you will, how many people you know who believe, and I mean genuinely BELIEVE in astrology, palm reading (not too far off from measuring one's skull), or some version of ghosts/angels.

I'm afraid I won't be forming a terribly cogent thought about all of this this week. I don'dt have any huge reveal for you all here. Just that I thought this was interesting. And as I spend my week delving into the socio-historical context of phrenology, I'm interested in considering its modern-day equivelents.

And, I'm mindful, though many of these "sciences" were proven utter hocus-pocus... there is one that wasn't: hypnosis. Something that has actually been proven effective as a magical answer to pain and other problems. Who knows? If we can genuinely split our pain channels so that a person can have an appendix removed with no anesthetic other than a talented hypnotherpist... well, who knows? Maybe there are clues to personality, fate and free will, compatibility, and even the spirit hidden in the folds of our skin, or between our toes. Maybe we are more likely to find them in the folds of the cortex? The only thing I know for sure is that we don't know enough to know yet.

Exciting times ahead.

It Begins...

I have recently seen a tremendously fun piece of musical theatre based on Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn. The musical was aptly named, "Evil Dead: The Musical," and it was bloody awesome. This made me want to go back and watch the orignial movies + the third in the trillogy, Army of Darkness.

I forgot just how awesome these films are. And I've been meditating on them a lot as I begin my first week of grad school.

I was at a sort of meet-and-greet workshop dealie at the university last week to meet all the key players in the department. It was run by our Psychology Graduate Student Association (PGSA), and I arrived just in time. Normally, I am quite social at these things but I was just in time to sit down and look up for the first speaker.

She was annorexic. I'm not talking like any kind of ooooh, she's a bit skinny kind of thing. I'm talking SCARY, like I was worried that she would fall over behind the podium. Like, she needed a belt for her extra-small spandex and I could see the outline of her skull, despite severally swollen glands. I was rivited. I knew, I mean I KNOW that all of us in the helping professions are drawn here becuase of our own demons. We're all trying to help ourselves and those of us who are successful go on to help others. I knew and know that I will encounter people who are not well in grad school. I guess I just didn't expect to see it right out the gate.

I felt awful, because I knew I was staring, and yet, I couldn't look away. I tried to just look like I was paying rapt attention. I hope that's how it seemed. But honestly, I can't even remember the woman's name let alone anything she talked about. Thank heavens for the handouts.

I starting looking around the room as other key players were introduced. I started to notice that this woman's was not the only obviously emaciated body in the room. There were several people there who looked like they were too frail to be anywhere but in bed, preferably hooked up to an IV drip. I got a little panicky.

I've always been pretty open about my eating disorder (thankfully in remission for some time now) - heck, I've spoken out about EDs on television several times and have made no bones about mentioning my own struggles. I figure that if I can recover, anyone can, and I want to offer that hope to anyone who might have been watching. But I started to get a bit twitchy in this room... realizing that I would be working with some people who are obviously in crisis and wondering how that would affect the work, and moreso, how it would affect me. For example, would I relapse? Be tempted to? Be sucked into the bizzare competition to make oneself the least healthy martyr in the department? The most strict and perfect student?

So much of eating disorders is caught up in perfectionism... no wonder they are in the psych department in numbers.

As I watched this woman introduce speaker after speaker, I got the image of a skeleton stuck in my head. In particular, in Evil Dead 2, when Linda's dismembered corpse comes together again and begins dancing. When Ash cuts her head off and she gets the chainsaw stuck in her spine trying to attack him. I saw that image superimposed over the speaker and saw myself fighting her.

Yeah, enjoy that one, Dr. Freud. You don't have to hit me over the head with a chainsaw.

Dismemberment.

In Evil Dead (both versions), Ash's hand becomes possessed by Candarian (sp?) deamons and he has to cut it off to save himself from it. In the musical, this is particularly campy and delightful as the stage blood sprays out of his wrist and directly into his mouth as he sings. And the actor does a brilliantly choreographed routine of his hand attacking him that the Marx Bros would be proud of.

He cuts it off. A part of him that was integral in his life so that he can survive. And indeed, his brain manages to rewire itself not just so that it survives the pain and loss, but so that it accomodates to the reworked appendage. Eventually, Ash manages to make the chainsaw an extension of his stump... as much a part of his arm as a fiddle is to Ashley MacIssac. And he kicks the asses of every Candarian deamon within arm's length. Heh...

And so it begins. I'm entering the old abandoned cabin in the woods, so to speak. I'm opening up the Necronomicon Ex Mortis and seeing what deamons will come forward looking for MY soul. But I'm not willing to give up more than a hand. One thing I have that Ash didn't, that maybe the PGSA rep didn't, is advanced notice. I've fought deamons before, and I know what they look like. They will be here, no doubt, and I hope I will be ready for them... to study them instead of being the subject of THEIR weird experiment.

"It's time to finally take a stand,
Fight with my stump, and my good hand.
Stop talking trash and kick some deamon ass..."