Somehow I have a feeling that if Mheel were alive he would disagree with your interpretation of his referenced paper. From the portion you quoted (I'll still read the whole paper and thanks for sharing), how does his "hereditary variables of polygenic kind that represent not pathological entities such as Huntington's disease or schizophrenia but what may be called "normal individual difference variables" of temperament" translate to your own: "idea that there is an inner genetic structure of some kind that causes the phenotype we observe"?
It seems like you stretch his claim to a ridiculous extreme just to make it easier for you to argue against his rather sophisticated qualifications.
Also if the locus of normal individual differences within group isn't in the gene, where else would it be? In similar environments people are still different and how do you explain the known fact that two individuals in the same environment or situation may radically experience it differently?
Then why do you feel the need to equate the causal power of gene and environment in individual outcomes just because "there's no way to tell those two things apart"? Have you honestly seen someone with borderline IQ or intellectual deficiency becoming smart by dint of good parenting or hard work? Aren't the cognitive elements that make up IQ (such as information processing speed, memory, etc) in fact genetic?
As a practicing clinical psychologist, I feel like I'll benefit more immensely from the so-called outdated or unsophisticated Mheel's insights about the role of heritability in non psychotic disturbances than your promising but ultimately vague rebuttal. His is more consistent with my own conclusions from clinical observation coupled with theoretical speculations.
What do you mean by "heritable" in the twin sense, but not a reflection of anything essential? What is heritable in the twin sense? And do you still think that genetics has no use in psychotherapy (okay, maybe not in treatment, but not in theory?)?
Thanks for this entry! I was lucky enough to be a grad student at the Dustbowl of Empiricism in the late 80's and got to hear Meehl lecture in an unregistered seminar open to anybody to attend. I was not smart enough then to totally track everything he talked about but I was struck by how easily he could slip between statements extolling the need for objective tests of personality and performance (he thought physicists were the smartest of all people because of how they scored on the Millers Analogy Test) and anecdotes about patients from his psychoanalytic practice that relied on metaphors and unconscious drives. I remember him discussing one particular depressive patient, stating that this man wore a brown suit all the time, "shit-colored clothes" that matched how he viewed the world through "shit-covered glasses."
Somehow I have a feeling that if Mheel were alive he would disagree with your interpretation of his referenced paper. From the portion you quoted (I'll still read the whole paper and thanks for sharing), how does his "hereditary variables of polygenic kind that represent not pathological entities such as Huntington's disease or schizophrenia but what may be called "normal individual difference variables" of temperament" translate to your own: "idea that there is an inner genetic structure of some kind that causes the phenotype we observe"?
It seems like you stretch his claim to a ridiculous extreme just to make it easier for you to argue against his rather sophisticated qualifications.
Also if the locus of normal individual differences within group isn't in the gene, where else would it be? In similar environments people are still different and how do you explain the known fact that two individuals in the same environment or situation may radically experience it differently?
Then why do you feel the need to equate the causal power of gene and environment in individual outcomes just because "there's no way to tell those two things apart"? Have you honestly seen someone with borderline IQ or intellectual deficiency becoming smart by dint of good parenting or hard work? Aren't the cognitive elements that make up IQ (such as information processing speed, memory, etc) in fact genetic?
As a practicing clinical psychologist, I feel like I'll benefit more immensely from the so-called outdated or unsophisticated Mheel's insights about the role of heritability in non psychotic disturbances than your promising but ultimately vague rebuttal. His is more consistent with my own conclusions from clinical observation coupled with theoretical speculations.
What do you mean by "heritable" in the twin sense, but not a reflection of anything essential? What is heritable in the twin sense? And do you still think that genetics has no use in psychotherapy (okay, maybe not in treatment, but not in theory?)?
Thanks for this entry! I was lucky enough to be a grad student at the Dustbowl of Empiricism in the late 80's and got to hear Meehl lecture in an unregistered seminar open to anybody to attend. I was not smart enough then to totally track everything he talked about but I was struck by how easily he could slip between statements extolling the need for objective tests of personality and performance (he thought physicists were the smartest of all people because of how they scored on the Millers Analogy Test) and anecdotes about patients from his psychoanalytic practice that relied on metaphors and unconscious drives. I remember him discussing one particular depressive patient, stating that this man wore a brown suit all the time, "shit-colored clothes" that matched how he viewed the world through "shit-covered glasses."