Psychology

Around this time last year, I gave my aspirations of majoring in psychology one last shot. By March it was clear that my final stand hadn’t worked, so I switched over to English. This semester I’m taking Abnormal Psychology, Educational Psychology, Neuro-Literary Studies, and a creative writing class with a specific focus on writing psychologically plausible characters. In other words, it feels like I’ve come right back to where I started, and I’m not sure I like it.

Whenever someone asked me why I switched majors, I said that it was because psychology was too scientific for me (which usually gets me laughs from my physics and computer science major friends). And, at the time, I really thought that psychology’s emphasis on empirical observation over lived experience was all there was to it. It probably didn’t help that my first reading for my Research Methods class had a line that read something like “Psychologists view language as a purely practical tool, to be used for conveying information in the most efficient way possible, without detour or extraneous details,” which didn’t sit well with an aspiring creative writer. 

But if psychology was just too far removed from human experience, then why was I drawn to it in the first place? I didn’t even think to ask this question until I found the answer on my first day of my Abnormal Psychology class. My professor gave an anecdote about how disappointed he was with his first psychology class, simply because he came in expecting to learn how to fix his own psychological problems. Psychology never offered him the clear-cut answers he was expecting, so he figured he simply hadn’t taken a sufficiently advanced class. He kept on taking classes until he had found something he hadn’t been looking for, but something deeply meaningful in its own right.

Looking back on it, it would have been a really good idea to raise my hand and ask him what exactly he’d found. It would be especially helpful to know because his experience mirrored mine so closely. In high school psychology, I came to class expecting that I’d learn how to get myself to stop avoiding the number thirteen, how to do well in school without getting stressed, how to be happy and healthy and never lonely. It didn’t work, but I accumulated enough novel tidbits to convince myself that the field had merit and continued studying it into college. As I took more and more classes, it became clearer that psychologists couldn’t really fix the mind. They could understand a lot of it, sure, but they seemed more concerned with finding out which regions of the brain lit up when someone looked at a picture of a banana than how to actually solve any problem. 

An article that I read today for Neuro-Literary Studies, “Evolutionary Theories of Art” by Brian Boyd, reminded me that it’s not just the lack of answers in psychology that disappointed me, but the answers that the field actually did provide. Boyd comes to the article assuming that everything in human society must come down to one of our essential biological functions, reproduction or survival until reproductive age, and therefore every seemingly superfluous activity, from art to literature to religion, is an anomaly to be explained away. So whatever joy you get from reading a great novel or praying to God just comes down to some preprogrammed response that we could get just as easily by sticking a syringe full of the right chemicals into your grey matter. To a psychologist, the brain is just a machine with no higher function than living long enough to get laid. I don’t believe that, but I can’t deny that it makes some kind of sense. I doubt that there is anyone alive who would admit that it makes sense, if they understood the research surrounding it, or who would deny that it makes them a little bit sad, if they were being honest.

I guess what I’ve been looking for, in psychology and English and religious studies and education and just about every other class I’ve taken, is the meaning of life. As countless great thinkers, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and Calvin and Hobbes would point out, that’s not a question, it’s barely even a concept, so it can’t really have an answer. And, aside from a few poor souls toiling in the philosophy department, no one in academia really seems all that concerned with the meaning of life to begin with. Maybe it’s a good sign, then, that I’ve never really been much of a fan of true philosophy. I’m happy enough watching fictional characters, of my own creation or someone else’s, explore these dilemmas for themselves, with an accent flavor of psychology and education and religious studies here and there. And, if that makes me happy, then it’s good enough.