Dependency: The Behavioral Model
Is schizophrenia the result of conflicts over mother, or is it an inherited malady? Are phobias learned, or are they merely innate fears rekindled by environmental trauma? Is mental retardation acquired, or is it inherited from one's parents? Questions of this type bring to the forefront one of the major debates in psychology: the nature-nurture issue.
Is our behavior determined by heredity or by our environment?
The seventeenth century French philosopher, Rene Descartes (1596-1650),
founded a movement called rationalism. Its adherents believed that
many of the basic ideas that human beings hold-the ideas ofself, of God, of
space, of time, of causality-are inborn. This was called the doctrine ofinnate
ideas. In contrast, the British empiricists believed that all knowledge
comes from the senses, that all that we know and all that we are result from
our experiences. John Locke (1632-1704), one of the founders of empiricism,
claimed that at birth the mind of the child is a tabula rasa, a blank
slate, on which experience "writes." A child's development is determined by
what gets "written."
If a certain child had had a wholly different set of experiences, he would be a wholly different person. But how does this child learn
about the world? The empiricists answer "through associations." Associations
between ideas are the mental glue holding the future to the present.
David Hume (1711-1776), the most influential of the empiricists, claimed
that the connections we make between ideas reduce to two simple principles:
Resemblance and Contiguity
Through resemblance, the idea of a portrait
of any individual makes us think of the real individual. Through the
principle ofcontiguity, or conjunction in time or place, imagining one part
of a face will call up images of the rest of the face. For Hume, causality reduces
to contiguity: we believe that A causes B, when each A is followed by a
B. Since all knowledge consists only of ideas derived from the senses, and associations between ideas come only from our experience, it follows that we
are creations of our environment, of our past. And...It was out of this empiricist
tradition that behaviorism grew.
Click here to read about the treatment method I recommend for dependency issues.
THE LIBERATOR METHOD
THE LIBERATOR METHOD