Is it Really Over Already???

2006 has just one day left. Is that possible? WOW! Seems I've been away from here awhile. I confess that with all the writing I do for school I haven't the time or energy most days to come here and report. Hmm, lessee what have I got up to since October?

Well I got my masters for one thing. Whoopee!!! It was no small feat since the university decided to play a little game with me at the end and refused me my degree over 0.4 credits. Yes, you read that right FOUR TENTHS of a credit! Seems I had transferred a class from a quarter system school to a semester system school and thus they gave me just 2.6 credits rather than 3 for the class. After letting this go unresolved and uncommented on for two years, they decided, after the last moment (in terms of my ability to do anything about it), to have a problem with it. This after six months of my constant prodding to let them know that if I did not have an October conferral date I would be dropped from my doctoral program. My adviser said it was not a problem and two letters from the Regent's office said the same. Thankfully I am 1) a pack rat and keep every last e-mail and letter I receive, and 2) have been through a court case in which I learned how to organize and present said documentation. The 8 'exhibits' attached to my petition were apparently what turned the trick, as the Chair of the Standards Committee told me they were going to veto my appeal offhand when they first read it. Wonderful people. Isn't it grand how a committee can trash your life in three minutes flat without so much as a hiccup of discomfort? Can you say lack of accountability?

So here I am a few days away from my second term in the doctoral. So far so great! Our little cohort had, and still has, a few personality clashes, but then I imagine if you took any 11 people and put them in a pressure cooker for 9 weeks, including discussion of their most personal issues, you might have a rough spot or three. As it turns out the previous cohort had similar problems at almost exactly the same point in their program, so perhaps this is a normal developmental stage for a graduate class. Comments and experiences welcome on this one! We have an age spread of 30 years in those 11 people, and being in a school that seeks to embody diversity, the class was chosen with an eye toward differences! But we survived, and to my knowledge lost only one member, and her reasons for going were more related to her personal life than the university setting. Can't wait to see what this term will bring!

I was wondering what was going to be different at the doctoral level, since many of the classes are the same old stuff as undergrad and masters programs. I was a little worried about that, but am getting the concept now. DEPTH. This is the key to everything. Yes, we did psychopathology and diagnosis again, but this time at a level of complexity that left me gasping. In my masters program there was a very CBT focus and in retrospect I would almost call that a two year technical training program. This doctoral, on the other hand, is more like the well rounded, classical education one gets in a Bachelors, but at a much higher level. So now instead of just diagnosing someone with Major Depression and then doing CBT, for example, I will look at the person's charachterological type and determine exatly how to word my CBT so that it will have the best chance of making a difference. I had been thinking that perhaps the primary reason that people responded so differently to treatments for depression had to do with different causalities. Like treating a headache, it's important to know if it is being caused by a stuffy nose or a brain tumor. I do think that perhaps there may be different things going on the brains of depressed people, in an organic sense, which may account well for why different meds must be used for different presentations, but the patient's personality style, i.e. the defences they use to navigate their reality, is critical as well. So a psychotically organized person with no defences to speak of is not going to benefit from a therapy that seeks to break down defences, whereas a neurotically organized person needs a new defence like s/he needs a hole in the head!

So all of this came in via the door of psychoanalysis. EEEK! For a nice pragmatic biologist like me that word has always been positively repugnant. Psychodynamic concepts I could accept, but classical Freudian psychoanalysis? Baw haw haw! Ok, so maybe I was a hint uninformed. I was also very much unaware of what had become of Freud's theories over the past 40 years. Honestly, I thought they'd died along with their progenitor. How much more wrong could I be??? So Ego Psychology, Attachment Theory, Object Relations and the like are all really modern day descendants of Psychoanalysis. Without the rich vocabulary and deep exploration into the unconscious and defense structure of the human mind provided by years of psychoanalytic thinkers we would not have nearly the understanding of psychology that we do today. And the interesting thing is that I still find myself thinking that it is all the same thing, the biomedical perspective, the pscyhodynamic perspective, the psychoanalytic perspective and the cognitive behavioral perspective... all different lenses for looking at exactly the same scene and all very much connected. Imagine my surprise to find I was reading CBT right into the psychoanalytic script as I read my Psychoanalytic Diagnosis textbook by Nancy McWilliams. What a shocker!

So life shuffles on and I am reading law and ethics and cognitive testing in prep for the new term. I am NOT reading the research methods book, I confess, and the family therapy class has a reader not to be had except in person on campus, so that's out as well. One doesn't want to be too well prepared, after all. =)