Part 2

One of the people whom I most wanted to hear was Rutgers' Paula Tallal, speaking on "Language Learning: Integrating Research, Technology, Remediation, and Prevention." Tallal discussed how she and her colleagues discovered that some children whose levels of speaking and listening to spoken language was significantly below their age, were delayed in learning language because their brains weren't processing some sounds quickly enough. This meant that some children, for example, virtually couldn't hear the difference between a "b" and a "d." Tallal and her colleagues then developed computerized methods of training these children to hear those sounds, based on research that had been done with monkeys. First, the sounds the child isn't able to hear correctly must be identified. Then, a computer program slows those sounds down enough for the child's brain to process them. Once the child can begin to hear them, the speed at which the computer delivers the sounds to the child is gradually increased until it reaches normal language speed. Children who are appropriate for this form of training show marked increases in language levels during training. Follow-up studies show that the gains in language appear to continue after training. Tallal and her colleagues have formed a company, Scientific Learning Corporation to provide their remarkable treatment method.

On Saturday night, I watched "Dramatic Fool" Drew Richardson perform his one-man play, "The Psychology of Clumsiness," at the Ninth Annual Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins Theatre Festival, on the north side. "The brain grew like a house, one room on top of another," said Drew the Fool, dressed in long red underwear and a tie, wearing a food strainer for a hat. He demonstrated by putting a monkey doll on top of a frog doll, a rather neat visual metaphor for how the middle ("mammalian") brain sits atop and around the central ("reptilian") core. Four miles north of the downtown hotels, a packed crowd in the small gallery got another kind of psychology lesson.

On Sunday morning, I was eager to hear The University of Western Ontario's Doreen Kimura discuss one of my favorite topics: "Biological Factors Mediating Sex Differences in Cognitive Pattern" (that is, how men's and women's brains are different, and how those differences might affect our behavior), but her plane was stuck in Ontario and she couldn't make it. I decided to hear the Addiction Research and Treatment Corporation's Lawrence Brown, Jr., discuss "Treating Substance Abuse Problems in Professional Athletes," and was rewarded with a fascinating glimpse into the world of high-stakes professional sports, where stars and would-be stars vie for huge personal and financial rewards, with a catastrophic fall from the pinnacle of success the consequence of failure.

The University of Iowa's Robert Block, a newly appointed Fellow of the A.P.A., talked about the "Cognitive Effects of Marijuana and Other Drugs." Mostly focusing on marijuana, Block discussed problems in the design of past research which has shown both that pot smoking does, and does not, cause problems in learning. He described in detail his study of pot smokers in Iowa, where he had carefully matched pot smokers with a control group of nonsmokers. Block's results showed that people using pot heavily did show significant decreases in mathematics and verbal expression abilities, although lighter users didn't. Block is about to begin studies of how marijuana affects the brain, using imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positron Emission Tomography. Surprisingly, very little of this basic work has been done, he said, despite the fact that the technology has been available for some time.

Washington University's (of St. Louis) Henry Roediger III gave a Master Lecture on "Illusions of Memory: Remembering Events That Never Happened." Using slides, he showed how the eye is tricked by apparent context clues--perspective, etc.--into actually seeing things that aren't there, or seeing things that are there, wrongly. Then he gave us a list of words to remember, and some 40% of the audience--including me--"remembered" that he had said a word that he actually hadn't.

As hypoglycemia threatened to overcome me, I walked over to Michigan Ave. for another quick lunch at an outdoor table, watching the endlessly fascinating human stream flow by in the on-again, off-again drizzle. Then it was back to the Palmer House Hilton for a "Symposium on Therapist Creativity in Experiential and Constructivist Therapies." Therapists should be creative and improvise, a panel of presenters said, not just do psychotherapy from a "therapy manual." One of the presenters discussed a study in which a number of experienced therapists were all trained in a method of short-term therapy, then told to apply it with clients and evaluated on how they did. The results showed that the therapists who used the method just as they'd been taught it had poorer outcomes than the ones who used it as a jumping-off point from which to form effective treatment relationships with their clients.

I experienced a feeling of deja vu. Years ago, the research of Carl Rogers and others showed that methods of training in psychotherapy do not produce reliable results. Some people have a knack for doing psychotherapy which puts them way ahead of others with similar training. Some therapists just "click" better with some clients. What therapists actually do in therapy is more a matter of personality than training, as psychiatrist Irwin Yalom's study of group therapists showed (check the archive for my review of Yalom's novel in the article "Three Stories of Healing and Injury in Psychotherapy").

In 1979 I was in San Antonio, at a conference on the Scientific Study of Religion where I'd presented a paper, when I saw Dr. Bergin, an international expert on psychotherapy outcome, whose book on that topic I'd studied in graduate school. Politely declining my offer to buy him a drink, he kindly answered my question about the latest findings in psychotherapy outcome research. "The most important variable is patient functioning prior to illness," he said, "and therapist personality comes next. Then there's a relationship effect between therapist and client." The kind of training that the therapist received might make a difference, he said, but it was "very hard see it" in the data.

This point has been made again and again over the years, but it never seems to stick, and the resistance of psychology to its own research findings in this field is itself a fit subject for study. The essence of psychotherapy is a relationship between people which cannot be preprogrammed or really "managed," in the sense of controlled. Some therapists are better than others at using themselves to make such relationships. Again, some therapists work better with some clients than others. Experience does seem to make a difference, but this is not a guarantee, nor does experience alone assure effectiveness, since therapists of similar experience can be quite different in how they actually work with patients.

Back in my office, I listened to the folk group Sons of the Never Wrong, sing about the difference between "which sounded better and which sounded truer" (in "Consequence of Speech," the title song of their new CD), and I thought about the dilemma of talking about psychotherapy. It sounds better to say that training is the key to being an effective therapist. But its truer to say that some combination of experience and personality counts far more than training, that what the therapist brings to and does with training is far more important than the training itself, and that even then everything depends on who the patient is and whether the therapist can develop an effective treatment relationship with her. One sounds better, but the other sounds truer.

Finally, I heard Lynn S. Liben, President of the Division of Developmental Psychology (which studies how children grow), from Pennsylvania State University, present her survey of the history of Developmental Psychology, entitled: "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants...Or Collapsing on the Backs of Straw Men?" Rarely have I heard such stern comments presented with such grace. Liben quoted a psychologist who wrote, "The history of child study is a history of rediscovery...the same themes appear, are elaborated for awhile, then fade." She talked about the development of "warring groups within psychology," whose attitude was, "You're one of us or one of them." "It is true in academia as in politics that one often gets attention by attacking the establishment," she said, adding, "our history is a history of setting up straw men and shooting them down." Calling for more cohesion in research and theory-building, she said, "There is a canon in developmental psychology, just as there is a canon in English Literature." She recommended standardizing graduate training based on this "canon."

Driving into Chicago that morning, listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "Sunday Morning" on WBEZ , I'd heard a segment about Kathleen Norris, a poet who'd lived in a Benedictine monastery. The Benedictines date from the sixth century, Norris said, when the Church was a single entity, before it split into Eastern Orthodox, Roman, and Protestant segments. While with the Benedictines, she felt reconnected to her roots as a Christian. Hearing Dr. Liben's call for a "canon" of developmental psychology, I was reminded of Norris' yearning for a return to the quintessential Church. Yet I wondered if this were really possible, or whether such breaking up, fragmenting, ego and political struggles, discovering, forgetting and rediscovering basic truths, weren't part of the fabric of human society, even among psychologists. Now that's a subject for psychological study!