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Updated 07/05/2008
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This article examines a troubling aspect of contemporary clinical psychology — it examines how parents control their children by pretending that psychology is more evidence-based and authoritative than it is. The ultimate victims are, of course, the children, who may enter adult life believing that authority, even faux authority, ranks higher than scientific evidence. In today's world, such a belief represents a terrible handicap.
In my prior article "Is Psychology a Science?", I showed that ethical considerations and the sheer complexity of human behavior prevent theoretical psychology from performing the kinds of experiments that would place clinical psychology on a firm evidentiary footing, and that as a result clinical psychology must get along without a scientific grounding in testable, falsifiable theoretical principles. I would like to begin by restating that argument through a comparison of physics, mainstream medicine, and clinical psychology.
Science
Before we compare these fields, let me make a brief statement about the nature of science. Science differs from most human endeavors in that evidence has the highest standing — authority has no standing at all. In science there are only theories, no laws or unchallengeable facts, and any theory, however well-established, can be falsified by new evidence. If an idea should become so well-accepted that it is no longer looked on as a theory, at that moment it leaves the domain of science.
In brief, if a theory can be falsified by experimental evidence, it is scientific. If it cannot be tested in practical experiments and potentially falsified, it is not scientific. This point cannot be overemphasized, and it uncovers the primary defect in modern clinical psychology.
Physics
Physics is a branch of science so completely and successfully governed by theory and evidence that practitioners of less rigorous disciplines are said to experience "physics envy." There are several reasons for the scientific standing of physics, but the primary one is that its principles are comparatively simple and easily tested. Some readers may object that Einstein's Theory of Relativity is not at all simple, and quantum physics is much more complex. This is true, but the complexity of these subjects pales when compared to the workings of the human mind.
Physics possesses a well-tested theoretical core that can predict physical events to a staggering degree of precision, typically ten or more decimal places. And, because so much of modern technology hinges on an understanding of physics, physical theories are constantly being retested and modified when they are discovered not to reflect reality.
Also, there is no ethical dimension to physics experiments. If you want to find out at what point a rod of steel will break, you simply bend it until it breaks. There are no steel rights groups to object to how badly the steel is being treated. And the steel cannot lie to you. You don't have to ask the steel at which point it will break, instead you bend it and ignore its squeaks and groans. So when a bridge is built on the basis of laboratory tests, the steel in the bridge is very likely to behave in the same way — all according to a very clear physical theory, a theory confirmed by experiments that could have falsified the theory but didn't.
Medicine
Mainstream medicine can't be conducted like physics because people have rights, and the quality of experimental evidence stands in opposition to the rights of the experimental subjects. If scientific evidence were the only priority, we would treat human subjects like animals and get much better evidence on which to judge the effectiveness of various medical procedures and substances. Because we cannot do this, medicine cannot ever rise to the scientific standing of physics.
But there are ways to improve the evidence. As it turns out, we can conduct animal experiments to draw some conclusions about human physiology, for example pigs have cardiovascular systems very much like ours and there seems to be a reasonable basis for extrapolating pig experiments to humans.
In the practice of modern medicine emotions run high, patient beliefs play a part, many things go wrong, consequently many theories in medicine have had to be discarded over the years, and the level of certainty in medicine is not very high. Therefore doctors are obliged to get something called "informed consent" from patients before subjecting them to procedures that are uncertain or that have side effects.
Also, when a patient enters a doctor's office, he has the right to know the nature of the procedures themselves, which might be research, diagnosis, therapy or a mixture of all three. It is here that the issue of informed consent is most important.
In the old-style relationship between a doctor and a patient, the doctor was God and you did what he said (and the doctors were all men). In modern times, because of the effect of media reporting and a higher degree of comprehension, patients understand what kinds of things can go wrong and what the consequences are. The best-educated patients ask frank questions and make their own decisions, with the understanding that the doctor is often no better informed than they are.
Psychology
An aside. The ordering of these subjects is not accidental. Physics is the litmus test of scientific methods and content. Mainstream medicine is less scientific than physics, and psychology is less scientific than medicine. The only thing less scientific than psychology is religion, where belief rules and evidence has no place.
If we want to test a theory in medicine, we might locate an animal that can serve as a human proxy, like a pig in a cardiovascular study. But in psychology this option doesn't exist for any but the simplest human behaviors. We are free to conduct experiments with rats or pigeons, two experimental animals very commonly seen in psychology laboratories, but we cannot realistically extrapolate pigeon mental behavior to human mental behavior, and we cannot ethically design rigorous experiments using human subjects.
Let me expand on this point, because according to my correspondence with psychologists and psychology students, the issue of experimental design appears to be a confusing topic. Let's say a client enters a program of counseling and, after several months, reports that he feels "much better". What conclusions can we draw from this? Are we justified in taking this as evidence that the therapy is effective? Yes, but only if we abandon any pretense of scientific evaluation. Here are some questions a scientist might ask about the outcome:
These are reasonable questions, they are rarely asked in clinical psychology, and they can only be answered by designing a more scientific study, one consisting of:
This is how science works to minimize the confounding effects inherent in a study of human behavior, but it should be obvious that this experimental protocol is hopelessly unrealistic in the context of clinical psychology — there would be too many ways for the control and experimental groups to discover which they were, and there are those nasty ethical issues lurking in the background, where someone really needs therapy but gets a placebo (or really needs a placebo but gets therapy), which would push the entire enterprise out of the laboratory and into a courtroom, where the therapists and researchers would be sued to within an inch of their lives.
It is for these and other reasons that such strictly designed scientific experiments are never conducted in human psychology. And it is for that reason that theoretical psychology cannot produce a reliable core of scientific, falsifiable theory. And it is for that reason that clinical psychology is not governed by scientific findings in the same way that physics and medicine are. This is why clinical psychology consists of a series of conjectures and beliefs, rather than a series of scientific experiments and results.
Let's clarify this point with an example. The practice of theoretical physics is called "engineering". If an engineer builds an airplane and the plane falls to pieces while flying, it will turn out that one or more physical theories was ignored in the design of the airplane. This is because engineering is governed by the scientific content of theoretical physics. To put it simply, a failure in the practice of physics can be trivially traced to a failure to heed the theory of physics.
When theoretical psychology is put into practice, it is called clinical psychology, but the connection with physics (and science) ends right there. If a client commences therapy and then falls to pieces while talking, the clinical psychologist, the "engineer," cannot refer to theoretical psychology for an explanation, because theoretical psychology doesn't contain a coherent, testable, falsifiable theory of human behavior. As a result of the theoretical vacuum at the top of human psychology, clinical psychologists can and do say virtually anything, without any realistic prospect of refutation, and clients who can't think for themselves are at the mercy of therapists.
Am I exaggerating the present state of clinical psychology? No, not at all. Consider these examples:
John Mack and the Alien Abductees
Professor John Mack was a psychiatrist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, at the top of his profession, when he decided to accept at face value the reports of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. Mack's position at the Harvard Medical School and his standing in the world of psychology greatly increased the number of people willing to count themselves among the alien-abducted. And it was not possible to evaluate abductee claims objectively or argue against Mack's position using scientific evidence, because there is no psychological theory that addresses this kind of mental disturbance. Mack was free to say or do anything he cared to, and he could not be called to account by reference to a nonexistent psychological theory that might refute his beliefs.
Candace Newmaker
Candace Newmaker was a 10-year-old girl whose mother submitted her to a practice known as "rebirthing therapy". Like so many psychological fads, rebirthing therapy gained traction among parents by word of mouth, glowing testimonials, the encouragement of clinical psychologists, everything but scientific evidence. As time passed, the therapy took on a more aggressive form — the child was wrapped in sheets and cushions as a sort of faux womb from which she was expected to emerge completely changed. Well, Candace was certainly changed — she was dead. She had suffocated in the make-believe womb.
Rebecca Riley
When Rebecca Riley was two years old, she was placed under the care of a psychiatrist and diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder. On the psychiatrist's recommendation, Rebecca was placed on a potent cocktail of drugs meant to calm her down. Over time her parents and her psychiatrist, noting the salutary effect the drugs were having on the child's behavior and reasoning that more is better, gradually increased the dosage. Finally, when Rebecca was four, the drugs finally had the desired effect — she became supernaturally calm. She was dead.
These examples come from a long list of similar stories — therapists who will say anything, parents who will accept anything, children who have no rights. These are stories where science plays no part.
Authority and Responsibility
Parents who consider submitting their children to the care of psychologists should read this section very carefully.
Many people believe that psychologists are sort of like doctors (and psychiatrists really are doctors, at least in the U.S.), and therefore speak with the authority of a doctor. But, because of the absence of science in psychology, psychologists are not accountable for their actions in the same way that doctors are, instead parents are held to account for the therapeutic procedures visited upon their children. In the two cases cited above in which children died while under the care of psychologists or psychiatrists, the parents were brought up on criminal charges. This is society's unmistakable signal that:
If all the above reasoning seems too esoteric, if a reader finds the logic too difficult to follow, then pay attention to how science distinguishes medicine and psychology. In medicine, if something goes wrong, the doctor can be sued in civil court or charged in a criminal court with wrongdoing. This is because medicine is strongly governed by scientific evidence, and errors tend to result from willfully ignoring the science. In psychology, if something goes wrong, parents are typically held to account for accepting the psychologist's opinions. This is because clinical psychology is not governed by scientific evidence, instead it is nearly all a matter of fad and opinion.
Fringe Diagnoses
A "fringe diagnosis" is one that may be based in reality but that can be plausibly applied to nearly anyone. Asperger's (described below), ADHD and many other conditions may represent real subjective states, but they also represent a playground for unethical clinical psychologists, a pretense to get people into the mental health care system.
Over time psychologists have greatly increased the number of conditions officially recognized as mental illnesses, by including them in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (hereafter DSM), the psychologist's professional "Bible". The present DSM identifies an absurd number of conditions as "mental illnesses", including:
This example list means exactly what it says. According to current psychological practice, if you have trouble spelling, if you cannot add a column of figures, if you cannot compose a coherent sentence, if you don't like your older brother, you are mentally ill and you need professional help.
When one hears that a two-year-old girl was given very serious, multiple diagnoses as in the Rebecca Riley story recounted above, one may wonder whether such diagnoses can meaningfully be applied to a child that young. Then answer is no — such a diagnosis is meaningless even in the prevailing relaxed atmosphere of clinical psychology. But it's important to understand why this happens. It happens because a misbehaving child might result from parental incompetence, but a psychological diagnosis confers the status of a disease, a "mental illness", which frees parents from any responsibility for their child's behavior. This is the parental motive behind the present fad of acquiring fringe psychological diagnoses for very young children.
The problem with fringe diagnoses is that, while it frees parents from any personal responsibility for their child's behavior, it also frees the child from any responsibility for his own. It is difficult to overestimate the emotional effect of being diagnosed with Asperger's, or ADHD, or any of the other currently popular fringe diagnoses. To a child who is not mature enough to understand the social standing of clinical psychology, such a diagnosis might easily be understood as:
In reality, all these children will eventually have to make their own way in the adult world, and their prospect for individual success is in direct proportion to their willingness to ignore the beliefs and statements of psychologists. This is why such diagnoses are almost always applied to children, and by the time these children become adults, they either figure out that they must sink or swim like everyone else, or they are on their way to becoming permanent, voluntary psychological invalids.
To summarize this section, because of the superficial connection between psychology and science, because psychologists have no authority and cannot compel behavior, we arrive at the bedrock principle of contemporary clinical psychology: clients pay psychologists, and psychologists tell clients what they want to hear. If a psychologist contradicts a client, the client goes shopping for a different psychologist who will agree with him. And as the John Mack/alien-abductee story proves, you can find psychologists willing to say anything.
Tragically, most of the victims of this practice are children, who have no way to discover that a psychologist is neither a doctor nor an authority.
Asperger Syndrome
Over the past ten years a new psychological condition has become popular and has created an epidemic of U.S. diagnoses, mostly of children. Asperger's is thought to be related to autism, but this is conjecture for the usual reason — psychologists don't know what Asperger's is or even if it is distinct from other conditions. Asperger's also meets the definition of a fringe diagnosis — present diagnostic tests can and do mistakenly identify bright people as suffering from Asperger's, which can lead to an unnecessary stigma and burden and pointless therapeutic treatment for children who, apart from being intelligent, are quite normal.
Also, because a number of famous, successful people have been given the Asperger's label (Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Gates and others), this diagnosis has become trendy and fashionable — there's no other way to put it. Some parents don't mind at all that this diagnosis is applied to their children, and some proactively seek it out. The parents get all the personal advantages stated above, and they place their children in the company of some very successful people. Because of these forces, the Yale Child Development Center posted this warning about Asperger's:
"Clearly, the work on Asperger syndrome, in regard to scientific research as well as in regard to service provision, is only beginning. Parents are urged to use a great deal of caution and to adopt a critical approach toward information given to them. [emphasis supplied]."
Unfortunately, most parents never hear these warnings, for many reasons including the fact that many psychologists don't see a posture of caution to be in their interest.
Update
The present sad state of clinical psychology can be measured by a recent failed effort to inject a little science into the field. In 2005, Dr. Ronald L. Levant, president of the American Psychological Association, penned a daring initiative meant to nudge psychology toward an evidence-based model and away from its present reliance on anecdote and belief. I think Dr. Levant may have misjudged the present state of clinical practice — on hearing his proposal, rank and file psychologists reacted with a mixture of panic and fury. Here is a quote from Dr. Levant's later defense:
Evidence-based practice in psychology (APA, 2005): "Some APA members have asked me why I have chosen to sponsor an APA Presidential Initiative on Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) in Psychology, expressing fears that the results might be used against psychologists by managed-care companies and malpractice lawyers."
The rank and file are right, of course. Any effort to move clinical psychology toward an evidence-based model would expose what until now has been a well-kept secret — clinical psychology is not remotely evidence-based, relying instead on anecdotes, dubious extrapolations from animal research, poor-quality retrospective studies and simple belief. To publicly air these facts would trigger a number of legal and practical consequences that psychologists would be wise to avoid. And so far, they have — after a brief uproar in 2005, the APA proposal has been shelved.
In his most revealing sentence, Dr. Levant says, "... psychology needs to define EBP in psychology or it will be defined for us." This acknowledges something that Levant emphasizes in his article — EBP is a proposal, a wish, not a reality. Scientific psychology lies in the future — at present, we only have the acronym.
What I personally find shocking about this state of affairs is how few people understand it, including some who desperately need to know it. Read on.
In accord with standard practice in the social sciences, this section is based on real events but has been rendered as fiction to conceal the identities of the participants. The themes reflect reality, but all names and identifying details are fiction.
Meet My Son
Several years ago I was in a position to witness the role played by clinical psychology in child-rearing. The experience was enlightening, but in hindsight I would have been better off passing it up. And, because of a persistent housewife, to avoid the experience I would almost have had to bar my door.
In an earlier career I was an aerospace engineer, and some of my electronic designs are still in service aboard the NASA Space Shuttle. When the Shuttle flies, I am sometimes called as a consultant and I spend time at a southern U.S. aerospace center. During one of those visits I was contacted by a woman I will call Joan (all names in this section are fictional) who found my name on the Web. In her first e-mail she simply asked me out on a date, but once I discovered she was married, I turned her down. In later messages she changed her tune and asked if I would meet her son and be his mentor.
By suggesting a date she had gotten off on the wrong foot with me, and I found her rather pushy, so I simply replied politely to her e-mails but nothing else. Joan reacted by e-mailing me regularly, repeating her request that I get together with her and meet her son. After seven months, realizing I had permanently put her off, she brought her son to a place she knew I would be and forced a meeting.
Because I am reasonably well-known in computer science circles, parents frequently contact me and describe their children in unrealistically glowing terms, hoping I will serve as a mentor. Over time I have lost interest in this activity — I've seen too many things go wrong, or if things go right the parents try to interfere. But I could hardly avoid this meeting — Joan had established where I would be on a particular occasion, arrived with her son in tow and presented him. Wow, I thought, this woman won't take no for an answer.
Joan's son Jim turned out to be exceptionally bright, although initially rather withdrawn and insecure for reasons I didn't understand. Once he realized I understood the topics he was interested in, he opened up and came off as very bright and interesting. I was quickly hooked.
Bright but Isolated
In retrospect I should have thought more deeply about the situation, and I know about myself that I pay too little attention to social issues. I failed to ask myself how such a bright, sociable kid could have no mentors or personal friends, to the degree that his mother would pursue a complete stranger for seven months. In hindsight this issue is easy to see, but I just didn't think about it at the time.
Jim and I became friends, and I began to work on his low self-esteem and assessment of his personal potential. Over the next few months his outlook changed and he began to act like a bright, normal kid. That's when the problems began.
But the problem wasn't Jim, the problem was his mother. With each forward step in Jim's personal development, Joan would object, sometime quietly, sometimes loudly. Finally she revealed that she had gotten an Asperger's diagnosis for Jim and she believed he was seriously mentally ill. Joan began doing all she could to prevent what I regarded as a natural course of events in which Jim would learn that he was a normal person with the right to a normal future, a circle of friends, and a place in the world consistent with his substantial gifts — someone other than a mental invalid. Joan was having none of that — for some personal reason she insisted that her son was a mental case. Wow, I thought, this woman won't take yes for an answer.
Psychology as Religion
I began to realize this was a more complicated situation than I had imagined, but I foolishly expected my positive behavior and values would smooth out the bumps in the road. In other words, I completely underestimated Joan's pathology and strange behavior toward her children.
In hindsight I see that Joan was (among other things) a clinical narcissist, with a trait common in narcissists that they seek out some kind of external authority to support their decisions, in order to avoid personal accountability. For Joan, that "authority" was clinical psychology. Clinical psychology is a perfect choice for someone intent on avoiding personal responsibility — as explained in the previous section, one can find a psychologist willing to agree with anything one might choose to believe.
Intellectually shallow and desperate to attach herself to an unimpeachable source of truth, Joan came to believe psychologists possessed conventional social authority and could provide meaningful answers to important questions. Also, over time she discovered she could avoid any personal accountability for her childrens' emotional state by getting psychological diagnoses for them at the earliest possible age. If Joan had lived a hundred years ago, she would have gotten the same results from religion, but psychology is a more acceptable and fashionable substitute in modern times.
Apart from her narcissism, Joan had a more important reason to seek out unimpeachable authorities — she wasn't equipped to think for herself. A combination of genetic and educational factors prevented her from discovering that adults evaluate evidence, make personal choices, and then accept responsibility for their choices.
Some of my educated readers may think I'm exaggerating Joan's shallowness and attachment to psychology, but no. Sometimes, when a discussion became heated, Joan would pick up the telephone, call a therapist — any therapist — and get a ruling. She sought wisdom from a group well-known in academia as unambitious C students, and for self-serving reasons none of them replied, "You're a grownup, Joan, sort this out for yourself!" In clinical psychology Joan found a perfect replacement for religion, without noticing it represented a distinction without a difference.
And just as with religious True Believers, if a therapist should ever disagree with Joan — like one prominent psychologist who strongly recommended that Jim be allowed into the mainstream of life — that person became a heretic overnight. Joan had a perfect system.
The Rescue
About that time John (the father) planned a family hike that involved a climb, and I was invited along. Because the children had little outdoor experience I decided to visit the climb site in advance. The site turned out to be a nearly vertical rock face, so steep that it couldn't be ascended without technical climbing skills and a rope. It was clearly dangerous for youngsters who spend most of their time indoors. Oh, well, I thought, the parents don't understand the risks and when they find out they'll choose a more appropriate activity. I took some pictures, presented them to the parents and explained that this was no family outing.
But in retrospect I realize I had underestimated the effect my friendship with Jim was having on the parents. I had turned Jim's life around so that he saw himself in a much more positive, optimistic light, and the parents had taken this change as a personal affront to their parenting skills. So when I presented my pictures of the rock face and explained the danger to their children, they simply ignored me. They were parents, grownups, they could decide these issues, I was an outsider, my opinion was not important, the hike was going to happen.
I had never been in such a situation, before or since. I realized the real psychological problems lay not with the children but with the parents, and they were in complete denial. They were a genuine threat to the safety of their children in both a physical and a psychological sense, and I was a perfect fool for getting into the situation.
That night I tried to decide what to do. My first impulse was to simply give up and cut off all contact with the family and my friend Jim. That seemed the best solution, and because of the authority society gives parents, they could make me leave anyway if I openly disagreed with them. So that was it — they would have to sort things out for themselves. On that note I fell asleep.
The next morning I awoke just before dawn and realized there was a real danger that one of the children would get into trouble during the climb and the parents would not possess the skills to save him. I have a lot of outdoor experience, I've done a lot of climbing, and I knew how to perform a rescue. So I changed my mind and went along on the climb. I didn't tell the parents what I expected to happen, I just repeated my warning that it wasn't a family outing and left it at that.
Everyone ascended the rock without incident (the ascent is the least risky part of a technical climb) and got a chance to look across a famous Civil War battlefield. As the return began I passed up the other climbers, descended first, and positioned myself to catch anyone falling.
Jim began his descent, but because he had no outdoor experience he decided to show off by letting go of the safety line. He began sliding down the nearly vertical rock face and quickly lost control of his descent. I used the line to swing out to his position and, grabbing him with my free hand, arrested a fall that might have killed him.
Denial
In this situation normal parents might have said, "Well, we were wrong about the dangers of this climb, and we should have listened to you. Thanks for rescuing our son." But this isn't what happened — Joan and John simply refused to acknowledge what had just taken place, then or ever. I took this as a sign that they were profoundly dysfunctional and that I should leave, but I also realized an abrupt, unexplained departure would destroy all the progress I had made with Jim. Wow, I thought, this woman won't take anything for an answer.
It was not lost on me that the situation was not going to get better and would probably get worse. I realized the parents, now deeply offended by my having rescued their son, would try to figure out a way to get rid of me, and the clock was ticking.
Reason and Evidence
I decided to use my remaining time educating Jim in rational, evidence-based thinking. This wasn't difficult — Jim had a natural high aptitude for this activity, and we made substantial progress.
Just one example. About this time I wrote a Calculus tutorial and posted it on my Web site. Jim read it, announced he hadn't understood it, then proceeded to correctly answer a number of questions I posed about the properties of functions and their derivatives. This was completely typical of Jim — intellectual skills beyond his years, mixed with a charming degree of humility. And I must add that Jim's outlook was the opposite of his mother's, who possessed no intellectual depth and no humility about her views, most of which she had gotten from psychologists and other sources of fixed, trivial ideas.
Obviously I kept this kind of observation to myself, focusing instead on presenting Jim with a different picture of reality, one in which people figure things out using reason and evidence.
The Terrorist
About this time I saw Joan do something to another of her children that I simply could not understand. Joan heard a terrible news story, an atrocity perpetrated by a group of people that she viscerally hated, so she came into the room and described the event to her child. Joan told the story as though her child was the victim, in a manner calculated to produce terror, and terror was the result. I watched this child's sunny disposition evaporate in minutes. Over time I saw this was a pattern, not an isolated incident.
I realized several things at once. First, Joan wasn't simply a narcissist, there was something much deeper and more disturbing going on. Second, I realized she had probably done the same thing to Jim when he was younger, which explained his mental state when I first met him (I discovered later that he had been suicidally depressed before my arrival on the scene).
In an e-mail, I confronted Joan with what she was doing — I accused her of terrorizing her children. She airily replied that parents have always terrorized their children, and in any case the child in question had just been put in therapy, so "everything will be all right."
At that point, I got it. I don't mean I understood it (that came later), but I got it. Joan exhibited a weird behavior in which she would repeatedly terrorize her children, rob them of their normal youthful optimism and equilibrium, then submit them for psychological treatment. In Joan's strange parallel universe, pushing her children into therapy was as natural as teaching them to read, and at about the same age. I tried to imagine her children lying on a couch, analyzing a childhood they hadn't experienced yet.
The Turning Point
Before continuing, I need to explain someting about narcissists — they are self-absorbed to a degree that an ordinary person simply cannot imagine. If a narcissist were a high-tech military radar, there would only ever be one blip on the display — other people have no chance of registering. Famously simple-minded, ruthless and obtuse, narcissists manipulate people in their environment for a single, infantile objective — universal recognition of themselves as undeserved gifts to the world. Critical to this perpetual delusion is the fact that narcissists haven't the slightest idea how they appear to others.
In retrospect, it's clear that Joan had originally intended to trade up, replace her unsatisfactory husband, and introducing me to her son was a pretense, not the real point. As for myself, I ignored Joan's hidden agenda and befriended her son in earnest. Also, because my favorite part of a woman lies between her ears, I was the worst possible candidate for Joan and her plan, but in a self-referential irony she wasn't equipped to figure this out.
The turning point arrived the day Joan discovered her husband was having an affair. Now furious and intent on revenge, Joan chose a moment while sitting next to her husband to announce she loved me. My non-response, the only sane reaction to her overture, guaranteed a quick end to my friendship with her son — all that remained was for Joan to arrange my departure in a way that concealed her true motive.
After a few days of plotting, Joan came up with a way to simultaneously terrorize Jim and remove me from the scene, with a single claim — very efficient. She began to claim that all physical contact between Jim and I was "inappropriate," with elaborations I will leave to my readers' imaginations. Joan managed to overlook the irony that I had only been able to save Jim's life by grabbing him, but she was too unbalanced for that kind of reasoning.
I had been expecting something like this, so once I saw the emerging outline of Joan's plot and its dangers, I decided to break off all personal contact with the family. I explained to Jim that I had important philosophical differences with his parents, they could not be resolved, too bad but that's the way it goes. A normal way to end such a relationship without producing more heat than light.
The M-word
Then two things happened. One, Jim figured out what Joan was up to, he knew very well that nothing inappropriate had taken place between us, and he began to argue against Joan's having ended our friendship. Two, Joan, now beginning to panic and unwilling to reveal she had personal reasons for ending our friendship, responded by turning up the rhetorical thermostat. She eventually took a position that only an inexperienced child would fail to recognize as nonsense — that a child sitting on the lap of an adult, in and of itself, constitutes molestation. I'm not making this up — in a long, tortured message, Joan took the position that I was a beneficial influence on her son, but a few hundred words later she managed to equate lap-sitting and molestation, as though this were an externally imposed rule about which she could do nothing.
On reading Joan's wacky new position and in particular her cavalier use of the M-word, I realized I had departed at the right moment and wouldn't be visiting again. Some time later Jim realized I was really not coming back and he didn't understand why, so he phoned me and argued for a resumption of our friendship.
Please Come Back
I had earlier avoided any controversial issues by saying his parents and I had important philosophical differences, but, being a very smart kid, Jim saw through that. He took the position that, since there was nothing inappropriate in our friendship, it didn't matter what claims Joan made because they didn't correspond to the facts.
I revealed some things Jim couldn't be expected to know at his age. I explained that, regardless of the facts, any position Joan took mattered a great deal, because she was the mother of minor children and because of something women sometimes do — they make a false claim of vile behaviors society rightly rejects, cause a great deal of trouble for everyone around them, then when it is discovered that they are either crazy or lying, they virtually always escape any consequences for their behavior.
Jim became emotional and said that was quite impossible — there was no way that Joan would lie about our friendship, and therefore I should resume it. I then spoke to Jim just as though he were an adult — I explained that I must not resume visiting because that would add weight to Joan's position and make her more dangerous. I then predicted that, no matter what he or I did, Joan might try to regain control of the situation by going before the authorities and making a claim of inappropriate, perhaps even criminal behavior, but the authorities would discover the basis for her beliefs, realize she was unbalanced and send her home.
I then told Jim I have an uncannily accurate track record for predictions (which is true), apologized for not having the nerve to continue our friendship, and said goodbye.
Joan heard about my conversation with her son and wrote in high dudgeon to object to my ridiculous prediction and to demand no more contact with her son. She then proceeded to do exactly what I predicted.
The First Hearing
As I had foreseen, a few weeks later Joan, now desperate to regain control, penned a civil court petition composed of outright lies and a hearing was scheduled. During the hearing I explained that Joan's statements were absolutely false, I had every e-mail Joan had written to me, the e-mail record flatly falsified her claims, and I made the point with a single carefully chosen quote from the archive. As soon as Joan heard that I had kept her e-mails, she fell silent, and by so doing turned my claims into stipulations (issues on which both sides agree). The meaning of that silence was not lost on the experienced judge, who ruled that no consideration would be given to her claims, ordered a brief spell of no contact and gaveled the hearing to a close.
I realize I am making this outcome sound inevitable, but as nearly every informed adult knows, false claims like this can lead to terrible injustice, even death. There are any number of accounts of people jailed on the word of a frustrated, irrational woman, only to be freed twenty years later after one or another kind of test reveals that the original witness was lying. And, depending on the nature of the false claim, the accused stands a good chance to be killed by other convicts, normal self-respecting serial murderers and such, who are deeply offended by the presence of a child molester.
After someone is killed, or released when a woman's lie is uncovered, is the original accuser prosecuted for lying? No, almost never. This is why women do this again and again — it's safe and effective. Besides, men are animals and deserve anything they get. Isn't that how it works?
Law enforcement officials have discovered that many victims of sex crimes refuse even to file a report, because they don't expect to be believed. The reason? People like Joan, who lack intelligence, common sense or a moral compass, and who have no hesitation about lying under oath, even in circumstances where written evidence proves they are lying. A shockingly high percentage of accusations made by women have no basis in reality, and all women pay the price.
I should emphasize this was a civil court hearing. That was a legal distinction lost on Joan, who didn't seem to realize only clueless opportunists try to make criminal charges in a civil courtroom. If a child sitting on the lap of an adult had really merited the M-word as in Joan's belief system, she was still in the wrong court, and the right court would have refused to prosecute on the basis of her uniquely personal view of lap-sitting.
Serial Accuser
After the hearing I thought about the fact that Joan didn't have the slightest hesitation about lying in court and didn't seem terribly upset when she was contradicted by her own prior words. It became clear that she didn't expect to be punished for lying or being caught in lies, under oath in a court of law. It was as though she had the benefit of prior experience. At that point I performed a background check and — surprise, surprise — Joan had falsely accused another man before, in very similar circumstances involving her son. I thought that would have been useful to know during the hearing, not that Joan had any chance to prevail.
I now think Joan hoped to drive me away and take personal credit for her son's new, optimistic outlook, but things didn't turn out as she had hoped. The problem was that Joan perpetually underestimated Jim's mental abilities, curiosity and personal ethics. Jim did a little research of his own (court records are public documents) and discovered Joan had done exactly what I predicted she would do — she lied in a court of law, and was shown to be lying. After his discovery, Jim's personal world collapsed and he returned to the severely depressed state that had preceded my friendship. To put this another way, Jim fell much farther than the day of the rock climb, but this time I wasn't there to protect him.
Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy
After the hearing I described Joan's behavior to an old friend, a mental health professional. My friend almost immediately recognized the classic symptoms of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy (hereafter MSP). In MSP the sufferer, almost always a mother of minor children, induces physical or psychological symptoms in her children and then submits them for care, all in order to attract attention to herself. According to an FBI report, MSP is extremely dangerous — between 9 and 31 percent of the children die at the hands of the perpetrator. And apropos this narrative, MSP sufferers regularly accuse third parties of child abuse as a way to deflect attention from themselves.
So was Joan suffering from MSP? I am not qualified to say. Those who are qualified, and who are familiar with this case, regard it as likely. But to confound the issue, MSP is a behavior, not a psychological diagnosis, for the reason that MSP perpetrators know their actions are dangerous and criminal, so they won't cooperate with mental health professionals to produce formal diagnostic criteria. Because it is not a diagnosis, one can only watch for the symptoms, and only therapists are likely to be in a position to take action to protect the children. To complicate matters further, therapists are prevented by the therapist-client privilege from reporting anything but an immediate danger.
At this point, some of my readers may wonder why I didn't just go to Child Protective Services and report my observations — isn't that a civic duty under the circumstances? Well, yes, I agree — reporting such things, now a legal requirement for teachers, is an implied responsibility for others, and I fulfilled it. In response, Child Protective Services reopened their case file on Joan and increased their monitoring, but took no further action. What could they do, realistically? For the reasons set out above, before a child dies, MSP is a conjecture. After a child dies, MSP is a given. I certainly saw Jim's parents expose him to extreme danger, but on that occasion I was present and I kept him from falling.
The Second Hearing
On discovering what problems she had created for herself, Joan did what any self-respecting narcissist would do — she wrote another petition and got another civil court hearing simply to try to keep me from reporting my observations. The educated reader may wonder how a person can get a hearing under these circumstances, with the sole intent to silence a witness. Well, it turns out a mother of minor children can always get a hearing, especially if she is willing to lie, which Joan was more than willing to do.
In the second hearing, Joan falsely claimed I had made a contact in violation of the judge's prior order, tried to hold me responsible for her son's depression, and demanded that I not communicate my observations "in any way, in any location, with any person." I explained that her claim was false, there was no contact, and her demand was absurd and extralegal. I went on to say I had discovered Joan had a history of making false accusations, she was severely dysfunctional, and her description of her intellectually superior son as "developmentally delayed" was spectacularly false.
As in the first hearing Joan abruptly fell silent, and again, the judge realized what that meant (it signified acceptance of my claims). He complimented me on my presentation and moved to close a very brief hearing, at which point Joan unexpectedly took a left turn off the reality roadmap and demanded that I be punished even though I had done nothing wrong (thus confirming my assessment of her mental state). The judge briefly looked startled, regained his composure, said "no" and closed the hearing. This was perhaps the shortest hearing in the history of civil law.
The Victim
After the second hearing, which was shorter than I had expected and had prepared for, I realized something. Joan had managed to posture as an injured party at every phase of this sick comedy — when I turned down her proposed date, when I declined to meet her son, when she showed up and presented him to me, when I turned Jim's life around, when I saved his life during the rock climb, when she made me leave, and after she made me leave. In each chapter of the story Joan got her way, then discovered she didn't want it that way, after which she tried to hold others responsible.
Evading Responsibility
Then I noticed something more interesting. During the hearing, when I described her as severely dysfunctional, Joan abruptly fell silent, an action that I didn't understand at the time, but I think I understand it now. First, when a woman makes the kinds of claims Joan did, it's nice to have a fall-back position once people realize she is lying, and being mental is an excellent way to avoid responsibility. It worked for the accuser in the Duke University case, a woman who managed to destroy a bunch of lives, then was discovered to be lying but escaped punishment on the ground that she is mental. So Joan might have been willing to accept my description of her as severely dysfunctional, simply to avoid responsibility for lying under oath.
Second, when I described Joan as severely dysfunctional, she could have retorted, "No, that's not true," but to pursue this defense she would have had to waive her therapist-client privilege, at which point I would have subpoenaed Joan's therapist, put her under oath, and the therapist would have been required to acknowledge discussing the possibility that Joan suffered from MSP, something I discovered from a privileged source. Because MSP is so dangerous, this revelation would have forced the state's hand and Joan might have lost custody of her children. Joan may not have understood these possibilities at a conscious level, but she certainly realized it was time to stop lying or suffer the consequences — that was certainly within her intellectual abilities.
Holden Caulfield
Holden Caulfield is a character in a well-regarded novel named "Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger. Caulfield is trapped in a world filled with frauds and drones, but takes comfort in an imaginary role for himself as a rescuer of children falling from a cliff. I remember being deeply moved by this novel when I was young, by its optimism in the face of confusion and uncertainty.
In the story above, as my friend lost his grip and fell, I momentarily became the catcher in the rye — I positioned myself where I would be most useful, braced myself and halted Jim's fall. This is the closest I've ever gotten to the Caulfield character in reality. But even though I was able to rescue my friend as he fell from a rock, I wasn't able to protect him from a much bigger emotional fall later on — his mother made sure of that. That might be the difference between a novel and reality.
Coda
To be blunt, Joan was a simple-minded, narcissistic social parasite, profoundly dysfunctional, angry at nature for making her stupid, intent on punishing others for her own defects, and intolerant of any notions she didn't understand by the age of six. How she produced such an intelligent boy is a matter for evolutionary biologists to sort out.
Given these facts, the family situation was just as one might imagine. By the time I departed, the majority of family members had voiced suicidal sentiments, and all were in therapy. Jim moved from having an adult friend to having a therapist, and the therapist was acceptable in a way I could never be — Joan paid him to agree with her.
It requires a kind of willful stupidity to fail to see that clinical psychology, as it is presently constituted and with respect to the treatment of children, is an engine designed in support of an absurd falsehood — that children should turn out like their parents, and therapies exist that can produce this result. Neither of these assertions is true — if children were meant to be copies of their parents, childbearing would serve no purpose and would not exist, and therefore psychology, to the degree that it tries to reshape children to satisfy parents, comes into a fundamental conflict with nature. In this conflict as with most, nature gets her way.
To educated adults, the above assertions represent self-evident truth, but to narcissists, in their twisted dreamlike association with reality, anything that doesn't resemble themselves constitutes failure of an imaginary order, which is why narcissists make such terrible parents. Joan's scheme will almost certainly fail, and her children will eventually say, with a mixture of pride and regret, "I'm sorry, I am not you, I am me."
On the bright side, once they emancipate themselves, Joan's children will discover the adult world isn't the horror recounted by their mother. Dysfunctional parents invariably describe the outside world in self-serving ways, which leaves their children fearing something worse than the experience of being raised by incompetents. This means they may be pleasantly surprised by the comparative fairness and freedom of adult life — with emphasis on "comparative."
Advice to the Young
I know there are many children in the same position as my young friend, who feel that their circumstances are unfair. All I can say is, hang in there — you will eventually be allowed to leave your parents' house and live as an adult. No matter what you hear, no matter what you see on TV or read on the Web, adult life is worth waiting for. You get to make your own decisions, you can choose your friends and your occupation. As an adult you have the chance to leave a positive mark on the world, a contribution by which you will be fondly remembered.
There are strict rules in adult life, but (unlike childhood) the rules are balanced by freedoms. And this is very important — until you live as an adult, experience an adult's freedom of choice, you cannot know who you really are, and you just might like yourself. Give yourself the chance to find out who you are. Don't destroy your opportunities in advance. Be careful. Be your own best friend. Don't make any choices that cannot be undone. And hang in there.
"The state is made for man, not man for the state ... I regard it as the chief duty of the state to protect the individual and give him the opportunity to develop into a creative personality." — Albert Einstein.
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