29 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, important and essentially true, September 24, 1998
This review is from: Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (Hardcover)
Margaret Hagen is an experimental psychologist who studies human activities. She is very much aware how little we know or can predict about human behavior, and that we know virtually nothing about how the brain works in everyday life. Clinical psychologists, the people who decide about mental illness, treatment, prison confinement, and guilt and innocence in court do not draw on this meager knowledge. Rather, clinical psychology depends on speculations about human behavior going back to Sigmund Freud, and on the intuition of the psychotherapist. In other words, clinical psychology is neither science, nor does it rely on firm knowledge. She refers to therapy and assessment as ineffective, a waste of time. We, the public, the courts, various welfare and other institutions, desperately need to assess and to know what to do with persons, including children, who are emotionally damaged, who commit criminal acts, or are just generally behaving weirdly. Society has empowered the clinical psychologist to make these determinations, to say who is sick, who is guilty, who needs treatment, and how to dispose of the case. The clinical psychologist has no, absolutely no, no kind, of science to base his or her judgement on. We simply do not know how people will behave in future, nor do we understand the working of the brain. "I have said it before, and I will say it again, there are no reliable valid, mental or `behavioral' tests for suspected child abuse worth a damn In this mythology, the individual is an impotent pawn of his environment and upbringing, and the family is more likely pathological, dysfunctional, and damaging. In contrast, "the ideas of free will and moral choice have vanished from the landscape." (p. 306) Clinical psychologists confidently assert that memories of trauma may be repressed, and will cheerfully help a client or witness in a criminal case excavate these repressed memories. This, despite that fact there is no evidence of repression anywhere in the large experimental literature on the subject. People can forget, they can avoid thinking of the unpleasant past, they may scramble memory, but they will not repress it. In clinical psychology children are fragile and have to be protected from the court, from their parents, and from unhappy experiences lest they be damaged forever. Yet, what we know about the brain, is that children heal more, better, and faster than adults, are more resilient, and can cope with adversity better than adults. This is a very interesting book, and, I think, essentially true as well.
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20 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must Have for ANYONE dealing with Psychs and legal battles, October 1, 1999
This review is from: Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (Hardcover)
SEND A COPY TO EVERY JUDGE IN YOUR COMMUNITY!! Ms. Hagen has done an OUTSTANDING job of exposing the fallacies of the Psych communities involvement in the legal system. If you are attempting to refute bad "science" this book will help you to understand how to go about it. It will not give you step by step instructions but the understanding of how and WHERE the flaws are will help to create questions and arguments against "SNAKE OIL SALESMEN" (might make a good follow up title?). I am buying a box and sending one to ALL of our judges. They ALL need to know what they are dealing with!
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28 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A surprisingly incoherent book!, September 24, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (Hardcover)
Based on testimony of one of those "psychoexperts," I have not seen nor spoken to my own children for more than 10 years, so I was enthusiastic about reading Prof. Hagen's book. But I was sorely disappointed: from the opening apologia for her "personal outrage," the book is a mishmash of promotional material for experimental psychology & condemnations of anything "clinical." It is poorly outlined, poorly written, badly edited (Restak & Restick in the same paragraph!), and, like so many of her colleagues, she repeatedly misreads Freud's "legacy." Freud, among others in the latter 19th century, sold the public on the idea that human beings could be objects of scientific inquiry, just like plants & animals; Prof. Hagen obviously believes this, and this places her squarely in the company of those she condemns. This is a surprisingly and sadly incoherent book, & Prof. Hagen can never quite explain why our courtrooms are overrun with psychoexperts: not because the experts are liars & the judges are fools but because they & Prof. Hagen sincerely believe that the scientist can explain the mysteries of human conduct by, to paraphrase Sartre, reducing the cultural order to the natural order.
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