Psychology's Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back

by Jerome Kagan

A leading psychologist takes a hard look at his profession today and argues for important changes in practices and attitudes

This book is the product of years of thought and a profound concern for the state of contemporary psychology. Jerome Kagan, a theorist and leading researcher, examines popular practices and assumptions held by many psychologists. He uncovers a variety of problems that, troublingly, are largely ignored by investigators and clinicians. Yet solutions are available, Kagan maintains, and his reasoned suggestions point the way to a better understanding of the mind and mental illness. Kagan identifies four problems in contemporary psychology: the indifference to the setting in which observations are gathered, including the age, class, and cultural background of participants and the procedure that provides the evidence (he questions, for example, the assumption that similar verbal reports of well-being reflect similar psychological states); the habit of basing inferences on single measures rather than patterns of measures (even though every action, reply, or biological response can result from more than one set of conditions); the defining of mental illnesses by symptoms independent of their origin; and the treatment of mental disorders with drugs and forms of psychotherapy that are nonspecific to the diagnosed illness. The author's candid discussion will inspire the debate that is needed in a discipline seeking to fulfill its promises.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Cultural, Anthropology, Science

417 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Jerome Kagan was an American psychologist, who was the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, as well as, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
Kagan has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are predictive of certain other behavior patterns in adolescence. He did extensive work on temperament and gave insight on emotion.
In 2001, he was listed in the Review of General Psychology among the one hundred most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. After being evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, Kagan was twenty-second on the list, just above Carl Jung.

Reviews

[S · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mind has been blown away by the honesty of Jerome Kagan. Being a psychology student and encountering it in every facet of life, it was only natural that I wanted to know more about the field. Truth be told, everywhere I turned, I received information based on bias views. Either it was the professionals who portrayed a rosy picture of the field or those who detested the field and therefore, demolished its credentials at every opportunity they received.
In this book, there is a balance. This book takes you on a journey; the advent of psychology, how the pieces fitted together like a puzzle and later when it all went haywire. Every opinion, every suggestion and every observation voiced by the author is backed up by current research. This is what I liked the most: the evidence he provided and the conclusions he drew from them made sense. He raised questions which, I've pondered over on rainy nights (and in NZ there are many such nights!). He criticises not the field, but the professionals; he addresses greed amongst colleagues. Publishing five papers in a year to increase credibility amongst your colleagues versus dedicating your life to find better ways to define, treat and cure mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. This book has provided me with great knowledge and insight into the field of psychology. Kagan has successfully verified my expectations of the field and vice versa. His key message: the field of psychology may have deterred from its path but its not too late, its never too late.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a lay person, I really enjoyed this book. I wasn't sure if I would like it when I began reading it but I found it interesting enough that I read it all the way to the end. The author identifies a trait that I believe is endemic in our modern world. That (in my own words) is to attempt to trace the cause of an outcome to a single contributing factor. For example, we believe that the Spanish Inquisition was caused by ignorant religious fanaticism and intolerance. Anyone who has studied the lead up to the inquisition understands that there were a variety of factors that led to the inquisition (e.g., Ferdinand and Isabella attempting to preserve and enhance their Spanish Kingdom, growing opposition between civil and royal authorities, racial prejudice against Jews, local resentments against the holy Roman Empire, etc., etc.) all having very little to do with religion. Our modern tendency is to construct our own world view based upon popular "myths" and ideas that have very little to do with reality. This book is an excellent reminder of that.

[Tirath · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is under-appreciated and that is sad. I have never made as many notes while reading a book - it is full of concepts or ideas which can alter one's way of looking at the people around them. The book is actually about how the field of psychology needs to be revamped, but in that process it opens up one's mind to the variety that is life and how we always interpret behaviour.

[Thomas Edmund · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up second hand with some interest - I'd never heard of the book or the author, however the topic seemed pretty relevant (for myself at least).

Initially I was worried it was going to be some scare-mongering, or shallow critique, as Kagan opens with mention of many psychology studies being conducted on psychology students (not an invalid critique but probably not a book's worth) - however this was just an introductory concern, the later chapters do quite a deep dive into various concerns of the subject.

Kagan makes excellent points such as how non-linear interactions between factors that influence our psychology can be. For example he mentions how school bullying, not only looks different but has different outcomes in different social classes (not to stereotype but an example is what you get bullied for differs between the very poor and the very rich).

The book is very dry as others have mentioned, and the style tends to somehow both be myopic and meander at once - while the information is useful and interesting, reading this book creates a sense of being in an avalanche of critique with only minimal structure. And I did have to laugh - after 4 chapters on critiquing psychology Kagan promises to offer some suggestions the "way back" stated in the title, but really before you know it the final chapter deep dives into critiques too.

As its kind of higher level (not to be pretentious, more just positioning this correctly) I'm not sure this book would be of much interest beyond researchers and academics, however chapters like the treatise on mental illness explains a lot of the limitations of diagnosis at present in a way that is pretty accessible.

In short - I enjoyed the book and learnt a lot, however I wouldn't sell this as an easy read to accessible pop-psychology book!

[Brittney · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was nothing more than very popular psychology experiment that has ever been conducted strung together in paragraphs without any transition or logic between them. There was a distinct lack of a thesis, and it was disappointingly unorganized.

[Juan Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eye-opener for every person interested in psychology.