An Expert Look at Love, Intimacy and Personal Growth
Creators: name: Gordon, Robert
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2023
Subjects: Personality and individual differences

description: <em>From over a span of 30 years, I studied and treated disturbances of</em> <em>personality and intimacy with the expert’s tools of:</em> <em>1. Case study,</em> <em>2. Empirical research, and</em> <em>3. Theoretical formulation.</em> <em>I will tell you what I have learned about the nature of love, healthy</em> <em>and unhealthy intimacy and how to bring about personal growth. For</em> <em>this purpose, I rewrote and summarized some of my published papers.</em> <em>I picked the most relevant and made them accessible for the student and</em> <em>intelligent layperson. Much of the problems that people have are interpersonal</em> <em>in nature (social psychological) and from unconscious factors</em> <em>(psychoanalytic). This is why I call this collection of writings psychoanalytic</em> <em>social psychology.</em> <em>In college, my main interest was science, particularly theory building.</em> <em>I was curious about how scientists develop theories. Wondering</em> <em>how we come to understand and explain things (epistemology) led me</em> <em>to psychology, the science of the brain and mind.</em> <em>As an undergraduate, I coauthored research on preventive mental</em> <em>health with children, research on how people might have personal</em> <em>growth in groups, and research on defense mechanisms. I learned that</em> <em>the idea of change seemed easy, but defense mechanisms made change</em> <em>very difficult.</em> <em>I learned how we form our own naive psychological theories. We</em> <em>rarely correct and update our personal theories of others and ourselves.</em> <em>We often bring our biases into our intimacies. We tend to remain defensive</em> <em>about our thinking even if it repeatedly leads to dysfunction.</em> <em>x An Expert Look at Love</em> <em>Despite their best intentions, even scientists bring their biases into</em> <em>their research. In my second year of the Ph.D. program in psychology,</em> <em>I did a study that showed how researchers could produce biased findings.</em> <em>I found that I could manipulate a person’s perceived effectiveness</em> <em>of a treatment. I gave all the subjects the same treatment for anxiety, i.e.,</em> <em>progressive relaxation.</em> <em>People rated the treatment valuable or not, based largely on how I</em> <em>recruited the subjects. “Effects of Volunteering and Responsibility on</em> <em>the Perceived Value and Effectiveness of a Clinical Treatment” was</em> <em>published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1976.</em> <em>I demonstrated in my study that one could get the desired results</em> <em>based on the motivations of volunteer subjects and using obvious selfreports</em> <em>about the treatment.</em> <em>Today there are too many biased studies “proving” the effectiveness</em> <em>of short-term superficial treatments. They have problems of poor external</em> <em>validity (real-life applications). Most people have symptoms because</em> <em>of their personality traits. Personality traits do not easily change</em> <em>with low-dose treatments.</em> <em>In contrast, in 2001, I published research on treatment effectiveness.</em> <em>This time it was with patients with strong defenses, resistances,</em> <em>and with long-standing complex problems. The treatment dose was</em> <em>high with long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The treatment was</em> <em>aimed at disturbed personality traits. The outcome measure was not an</em> <em>obvious self-report, but a standardized psychological test (MMPI, Minnesota</em> <em>Multiphasic Personality Inventory) that measures enduring personality</em> <em>traits. I wanted to measure personal growth in high-dose</em> <em>psychotherapy. (I will share my findings in chapter 7.)</em> <em>If our theories of life are biased, there is dysfunction. This is true</em> <em>for all belief systems. This is true for people’s biased view of themselves</em> <em>and others. This is true for scientific research. So let us begin to</em> <em>see how a scientist-practitioner can try to understand the problems of</em> <em>love, intimacy, and personal growth.</em>