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."
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."
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?)?