Is Pointsman based on Dr. William Sargant?

[Monte Davis]

I agree, with the caveat that "mechanistic" has a very loosey-goosey sense
here. As I cautioned earlier w/r/t Pavlov->Pointsman: there's an enormous
gap between the "fire/not fire" duality of single cortical cells, or the
observation that one cell's activity can inhibit its near neighbors... and
global, whole-organism phenomena ("belief system," "stress," "breakdown"
etc.)

Pointsman has nothing but handwaving phrases like "the idea of the
opposite" to fill that gap. Just because he wears a lab coat and has a
budget line doesn't make him less of a fantasist than Blicero...


On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 4:44 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._R._Rivers#The_Great_War
>>
>
> Very interesting. Again, Robert Graves turns up (along with Siegfried
> Sassoon).
>
> As opposed to Rivers, Sargant detested psychotherapy. The full title of
> his autobiography is "The unquiet mind: the autobiography of a physician in
> psychological medicine." A physician. One article cited by Wiki is
> "Psychiatric treatment in general teaching hospitals: A plea for a
> mechanistic approach."
>
> Wiki also provides:
>
> "Sargant connected Pavlov's findings to the ways people learned and
> internalised belief systems. Conditioned behaviour patterns could be
> changed by stimulated stresses beyond a dog's capacity for response, in
> essence causing a breakdown. This could also be caused by intense signals,
> longer than normal waiting periods, rotating positive and negative signals
> and changing a dog’s physical condition, as through illness. Depending on
> the dog's initial personality, this could possibly cause a new belief
> system to be held tenaciously. Sargant also connected Pavlov’s findings to
> the mechanisms of brain-washing in religion and politics."
>
> Internalise belief systems, i.e. put the control inside...
>
> All of this helps to answer an earlier question of mine:
> Pointsman's/Sargant's abreaction is not Jung's abreaction.
>
> The verb linked to "abreaction" or "Abreaktion" has, by the way, entered
> German everyday language: "abreagieren" means "to let off steam".
>
> We may, perhaps, see a renaissance of the mechanistic approach in
> so-called evidence-based medicine or education -- although there is of
> course nothing wrong with evidence per se...
>
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2013/mar/26/teachers-research-evidence-based-education
>
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