In Search of Butterflies

Review of Jerry Kroth with Marvin Forest, Psychology Underground: From Politically Correct Orthodoxies to a New Century of Inquiry. Lima, Ohio: A.R. Press, 2001. ISBN 1788016881 (paperback), 447 pages, $29.95.

Jerry Kroth is Associate Professor in the Graduate Counseling Psychology program at Santa Clara University, where he teaches psychotherapy, personality theory, dreamwork, and research methods. With Psychology Underground, Professor Kroth has written a provocative book in which he challenges many orthodoxies prevalent in the field of psychology. He convincingly demonstrates how the leftist orientation of most psychologists has biased their “scientific” agendas. “It is very hard to decide often where science ends and ideology begins.…” (p. 124) For example, American psychologists have preferred learning theory (“nurture”) to innate patterns of behavior (“nature”), which has either been ignored or labeled (often with some validity) “reactionary.”

Several of the chapters were presented at

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recent International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) conventions, and all of them contribute to a jargon-free debate about such issues as love, maleness, the media, and parapsychology. Kroth writes with passion, animating his arguments with personal reflections as well as a wealth of data conveyed in the book’s many clear and informative graphics. The cover photo is of a man silhouetted at the mouth of a cavern with a bright light shining from the far end. It looks like a depiction of a near-death experience. The message is that illumination is to be found “underground.”

Ever since Wilhelm Wundt established his laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879, psychologists have been preoccupied with the scientific status of their field and have generally been reluctant to express any interest in topics that might compromise their respectability. The most odious term in their vocabulary and the one they most sought to distance themselves from was the soul. While its long association with Christian theology made it unacceptable in academic circles, it found refuge in the neurotic symptoms of everyday men and women. At the turn of the 20th century, a group of medical doctors led by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung sought to understand the role of the unconscious in the lives of their patients. Today the issue is still whether the unconscious is “concept” or “reality.” The author sides with the latter position: “There is room here not merely for rigid empirical recitations of fact, but for speculating and dreaming, wondering out loud about matters of the heart, the soul, and the eternal.” (p. 8) He clearly favors Jung’s mythopoetic approach to psyche, derived from the Greek word for butterfly.

In the “Media” chapter, Kroth explores the collective fantasies associated with the advertising industry. At the same time that ad men were perfecting their talent for manufacturing desire, Hollywood was beginning to bring these fantasies to the silver screen. Together these industries created a media empire that now dominates our mental landscape. Its most ubiquitous representative, and the author’s favorite target, is television.

Looking at several decades of research on the effects of television, the author repeatedly skewers afternoon talk shows and the six o’clock news for deliberately exploiting the habit of imitation found among young people who mimic the mind-set that is purveyed hour after relentless hour. The pandering and idiocy that characterize so much of it certainly factors into the troubling statistics about teenagers: high levels of illiteracy, passivity, and obesity. Kroth makes a strong case to identify television as a form of child abuse.

As someone who has been teaching in New York City public high schools for over 15 years, I can say that his critique is compelling. Those who would minimize the role of the popular media in youth violence miss the essential point: although a movie or video game may not “cause” a school shooting, it certainly contributes to the culture of insensitivity that is a necessary prerequisite for it. Too many of our children have been raised in a media cocoon their entire life and so have had their emotional, intellectual, and physical lives stunted as a result. The “Play” chapter functions as an elegy for these hapless victims whose development has been arrested by the media Moloch — a god to whom children are sacrificed.

I found the chapter “Maleness” especially insightful since its discussion of primate behavior connected to so much of what I saw this year while teaching ninth grade for the first time in several years. Our society has designated that grade, the first year of high school, as a crucial moment in a person’s “coming of age.” I noticed that the testosterone-laced quest for social status among the boys led to much acting out and fighting. The focus of the “Maleness” chapter was on those aggressive traits that are the product of evolutionary biology. In particular, Kroth uses Nikolaas Tinbergen’s theory of Innate Releasing Mechanisms and correctly connects them to Jung’s theory of archetypes. Jung himself was moving in this direction in his last model of the psyche. In it he tried to balance his emphasis on image by incorporating data from Karl von Frisch’s bee studies that had conclusively demonstrated the genetic basis for ritual patterns of behavior.

The chapter “Mystery” goes beyond gendered boundaries to explore psychology’s outer limits, parapsychology. Kroth cites statistics that indicate psychologists are more resistant than other professionals to the possibility of paranormal phenomena. Early psychologists adopted Newtonian physics as the model for their new science. Ironically, their successors have maintained that allegiance long after it has been abandoned by theoretical physicists who focus on theories of relativity and indeterminacy associated with Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The main result of this intellectual bias is that the paranormal field is mostly dismissed out of hand and conceded to New Age carnival barkers who hawk their books and courses on angels, channeling, and miracles. The author

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urges psychologists to admit that experimental parapsychology and theoretical physics now provide an adequate scientific basis for new breakthroughs. He relies on Jung’s theory of synchronicity, shaped by the thinking of the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

Psychology Underground exudes a spirit of adventure that the reader is encouraged to share. Kroth’s topics and style put him in the company of a writer popular with the 1960s counterculture, Norman O. Brown. He is quoted several times and the chapter titles of Psychology Underground evoke those found in Brown’s classic, Love’s Body (1966). Kroth and Brown share a blunt iconoclasm that is matched by an equally bold affirmation of the power of the imagination. Both definitely prefer chasing butterflies to experimenting with lab rats.

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