"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
"Offbreed" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
It's an
interesting field, but it sounds like a lot of guesswork, so far.

Unless psychology has changed drastically in recent years, it always has
been mostly guesswork. They did not make falsible studies.

Back in 1968, a CulAnthro professor told me about a study by someone in
the CulAnthro field (IIRC) comparing the effectiveness of witch doctors
and "modern psychology", with an untreated control group. The witch
doctors did some good, the "modern psychologists" did harm. I've been on
the look out for that study for some time, haven't found it on the net.

Haha! I'd like to see that one, too.


So, priests of assorted types are able to do some good, along with the
obvious harm they sometimes do.

Well, pysch and the social sciences are built upon inferential models,
which
is all you can do when you don't know what the exact causative mechanisms
are. Even medicine has elements of such modeling, as I've learned over the
past year and a half. And witch-doctoring is all about inferential models,
most of which are nonsense but some of which are very useful and
effective.

Well, witch doctoring (and all shamanism) is based on intimate, close
knowledge
of the individuals, people, and culture, and using ALL those factors in
effecting
a cure.

Hardly something a stranger can accomplish in a handful of one-hour clocked
sessions...

Dan

--


"History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the
Party is always right."

"... by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is
the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that
speeches, statistics and records of every kind must be constantly brought up
to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases
right. It is also that no change of doctrine or in political alignment can
ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a
confession of weakness."

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

- George Orwell, "1984"