Case Study Junkie

I just finished The Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck. I think it is my first psychotherapy book. I took Psychology in college and I had a mythology class too, but this is the first time I have read something by someone who almost seemed to be professional. I want to say that he was completely professional, but I would need to read another psychotherapy book. Or at least 2 others by different authors before I could come back and say that this sounds genuine.

I do like this book, but I have a concern that it is "pop psych". That was a term a psychology friend of mine used the other day. So much of the book appeals to the general Christian public that I was concerned he was pandering a bit. And, maybe the reason the book is so popular is because of this notion. Much of it seemed familiar. I would definitely recommend it to people to read.

Peck goes into some cool ideas, like the fact that life is difficult and that people often shy away from difficult things. He explains love and what is and is not love. He goes into talking about how all people have religion, though they may not attend or think they are religious.

I think I am a "case study junkie". Whenever Peck would introduce someone as a patient, suddenly I would get really interested. I guess that is one thing I love in life, being able to assign someone a particular problem and then going through the process of having it be discovered, worked on, resolved, or not. I am almost like the kid who calls people names and suddenly a girl bows her head in shame because I accidentally got it right for once. There I am making the girl feel bad for having a problem so easily recognizable...

I think case studies are kind of like chick flicks. In this book, there was an attractive girl who grew up in a strict, Catholic background, who married early and suddenly had these panic attacks after she realized her gay husband did not want to have sex with her anymore. I realize that I am oversimplifying an oversimplification, but it works. It fits together in this neat bundle and there is this total chick flick reward. And we cannot argue, because we have not sat there through session after session of mundane problems.

When I was younger I used to do character analysis of the people around me. As I have gotten older, I realized that people are much more complicated than just what an analysis could cover. Usually my analysis only covered a half page. But it was all I knew about the person, so I could not really go into more detail. I had a lot of fun with that. It appears that these case studies are an extension of that. However, the ones mentioned in the book are more like the CSI version of people. The case study where the villain always admits it in the end. They are just too powerless against the forensics.

I think that is my major issue with the book and possibly any psychology book I read in the future. The kind of stuff that appeals to me directly are the unpredictable things, the real things. Like, a man has a habit of going to church each Tuesday and the doctor discovers that he is off 2 days in his thinking, but cannot adjust. The deviation is that he does not check his mail on Sunday. So even though there is this compulsion on so many levels and the case falls into this two day off problem, there is still a glitch in him which knows that the day is Sunday. Something like this would be used in a CSI episode to show that he is a fraud. The psychotherapy author would not include it in the book, because it does not fit with what he is trying to say. But here I am saying it is still there and we cannot explain it, but it is kind of cool, because it has no real place.

And perhaps people would expect me, if I was the author, to have an explanation for the mail thing, but I wouldn't, or wouldn't want to. The deviation is demonstrated. The people notice it and we are left to conclude nothing, except that it is there.