The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Marcia Gralha. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Marcia Gralha. Marcia is an independent scholar focusing on theoretical psychology and the Unified Theory of Knowledge. Welcome, Marcia.
Marcia: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Jim: Yeah, Marcia is a key collaborator, and as of last week as I understand it, the fiance of a Jim Rutt Show regular, Gregg Henriquez. Congratulations.
Marcia: Thank you. Yes. That’s so recent and exciting and I love that you acknowledged that.
Jim: Yeah, Gregg has been a regular on the Jim Rutt Show going all the way back to EP 59, where we talked about his theories on unifying psychology, and then we did a couple other shorter episodes and then a very interesting three episode arc, EP 176, 77, and 79 titled Addressing the Enlightenment Gap, where we talked about his very interesting book, A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. And Marcia and Gregg have worked together very closely and some of the things we’re going to be talking about are related to the things I’ve talked to Gregg about. So if you want to go into more depth, feel free, particularly the Addressing the Enlightenment Gap, which I got to say was one of my better multi-episode runs. Gregg was a great guest as always.
Anyway, today we’re going to start off at least by talking about the Common Core of Psychology. Gregg and Marcia wrote a blog on Medium titled that, and they also back that up with a considerably more interesting, I must say, scientific paper called The Common Core of Psychology: Bridging Common Factors with Unification to Frame the Center of the Field. With that, let’s jump in and why did you think it was useful or added to the discourse to define a common core of psychotherapy?
Marcia: Right. Well, there’s a lot of places to go with that. The common core of psychotherapy, I think in the name, you can already draw some conclusions about what that is. It really talks about what’s at the nucleus, at that nexus point of psychotherapy. I think a good place to start is to back out and think of psychotherapy in general as an advent in society. When we think of psychotherapy, what do we think of? We normally think of talk therapy, right? Some people talk about it as talk therapy. There is a therapist, a healer, talking to a client, somebody who’s suffering from some type of psychological ailment and they’re talking through the problems, and psychotherapy is then this institution. We can think about it as an institution. It’s a method in a cultural context.
And so first of all, what is psychotherapy? Right? It’s this service, this professional healing relation through talk that gets at a greater understanding about what are the problems that the person’s facing, what they’re going through, and it tries to get them to get to new patterns of thinking, feeling, acting to increase their well-being, solve those problems and get them to live better lives. So I think a good place to start is to frame psychotherapy in our cultural Western context in that way. Then we can think about the historical evolution of psychotherapy, which is very particular. You mentioned the Enlightenment Gap, and that’s something that I think becomes relevant when we think of how psychology in general as a science and psychotherapy as a service has evolved over time as a profession. So that’s a place we can grow if you think that’s relevant.
Jim: Okay. One of the things I found interesting or claim is that the actual outcomes are fairly similar for a wide variety of approaches. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit.
Marcia: Absolutely. And I think, again, backing up a little bit to get to that point of where the empirical studies actually got to that weird conclusion that is very counterintuitive, and why is it counterintuitive? When we look at the history of how psychotherapy evolved, we see that it formed through schools of thought as well as psychology. So psychotherapy followed psychology in developing inside of those paradigms. So there’s several of them. The most important historically will be psychoanalysis with Freud, behaviorism, we get the humanistic approaches to psychotherapy, the cognitive approaches with major figures like Aaron Beck, and both the paradigms in psychotherapy and in psychology emerge inside of those paradigms that historically don’t really talk to one another.
So they existed in opposition and you were either one or the other. If you were one, you could not borrow a technique, an intervention, or a concept from the other, and you existed in opposition between those different paradigms. The practitioners existed in those polarities, right? If you were one school, you cannot be in the other, and that was between the ’50s and the ’80s, that’s how the field existed. Then at the time, between the ’80s and the ’90s, you get a more diffusion of those rigid lines that would separate those schools of thought. You get a more eclectic take on the practice of psychotherapy. So practitioners for various reasons, some social-cultural reasons, some theoretical reasons, start to notice that they could borrow a technique or another technique, a concept, a theoretical implication from different schools of thought, and that would actually help their practice, and it would help their clients understand better what they were going through. It would help them practice tasks and interventions and different rituals that could get them to a better place, and that was helpful in the practice of psychotherapy.
So eclecticism was growing during that time, and nowadays actually, if we look at how most practitioners practice, they’re going to be using some form of eclecticism of integration between techniques. Part of this interest is that realization that empirically when the different approaches were pitted against one another, they had some very similar outcomes. They were finding that it doesn’t matter if you’re coming from a humanistic approach, like the person-centered approach, or if you’re coming from, let’s say, psychoanalysis, if you’ve had a general problem, let’s say depression, anxiety, maybe problems of adaptation to life transitions… The most common problems, which are called the internalizing problems, internalizing because there usually some type of suffering that turns inside the individual, so these common problems of anxiety, depression, et cetera. If you had a common problem and you are using a bona fide approach, then you would probably get success.
You would probably get a similar result independent of the approach that you were going with, and that’s because of what we call the common factors, right? That’s in the title of the paper that you mentioned. And the common factors are these common principles and processes that these different approaches, these different schools of thought do share that were associated with the success. So when they pitted one against the other, the common factors were in both, and the common factors were shown to be these things that were driving the success in these different therapies.
Jim: Very good. Now, talking about the old days, when I was at university in the early ’70s, and I looked a little bit into the psychotherapy thing, I must confess, I grew up in a redneck culture where nobody went to psychotherapy except under court order. We basically, “Ah, a bunch of fucking crazy people,” right?
Marcia: Oh, really?
Jim: But nonetheless, when I went off to college in the Northeast, I ran into a much more open destigmatized view about psychotherapy, and so I tried to learn a little bit about it, and I must say I thought it was a clown show with all these different schools all arguing against each other vehemently, the Rogerians versus the Skinnerians versus psychoanalytics versus three or four different styles of psychoanalytics. They all hated each other. I go, “This doesn’t sound like science. This sounds like poetry or something, an aesthetic argument rather than an argument about fundamentals.” And further, particularly, I looked into psychoanalysis, which seemed to be the most popular in Boston at the time, and I could find no scientific evidence that it worked at all. At that point, I just decided that, well, probably psychotherapy was useful for dealing with something like the death of a child or something. In general, these long-formed recreational psychotherapies were basically bullshit. Probably not true, but that was what my takeaway, seeing these guys argue with each other in a way that seemed utterly unscientific and much more like aesthetics, et cetera.
Marcia: And who could blame you, especially if you had access at that time to this finding that it doesn’t really make a difference which one you choose as long as you have these shared factors, and that’s really interesting that you actually lived through that and witnessed that in your own subjective experience, because I didn’t, to be honest. I got into the field very recently. I graduated in 2021, and when I started my master’s degree in clinical psychology, which is when I was really focusing on psychotherapies, I’ve had an interest in psychology for longer, but that’s when I really started to learn what therapy was all about. The eclecticism, this sharing of techniques and concepts was already the norm. So that’s how I entered the field, and I learned that historically these different approaches were pitted against one another. So that’s interesting, just that context that you actually had that experience.
And that’s what really motivated the integration movement, which is the tradition inside of psychotherapy that our common core exists within, and that’s a tradition that goes back to the ’80s, but really prominent in the ’90s. Between the ’90s and the 2000s, the psychotherapy integration movement really blossomed. The common factors was a big part of it, right? It’s one of the pathways to integration is analyzing what are these common factors and how can I integrate them into my practice? And then there are the other pathways as well. There are four pathways in total. There’s the technical eclecticism, which is my least favorite to be honest, because it talks about exchanging techniques. We check what techniques are the most empirically-supported, and then we use those techniques in the practice. I’m more on the theoretical side of things, because I just like theory. I think theory is essential for scientific understanding and for a practice that is based on science.
So like the theoretical integration, which is one of the pathways to integration, that talks about the merging of theories, and there’s work that does this merging of, for example, psychodynamic theory and cognitive theory. Paul Wachtel does this work of merging those two. And finally, there’s assimilative integration when you have your home base, your psychotherapy that you like to do, that you trained in, and then you can borrow from other approaches, different techniques and concepts, but you stay in your home base. That’s a very common one, very popular way to do integration. That movement blossomed there in the ’90s, and it’s in that tradition that we come with our common core as a solution to this fragmentation that took place.
Jim: All right. Well, let’s hop back a little bit and let’s go through the three elements of the common core.
Marcia: Okay, the three elements of the common core. There are actually three plus one. That’s another way that we can frame it.
Jim: Okay.
Marcia: Three plus one, let’s say it that way. What is the one actually? The one is the backdrop. The one is the backdrop to those three main processes of psychotherapy. So the question is why? What makes psychotherapy work? What are these common factors and how can we explain what they are theoretically from a unified perspective based on psychological science? That’s where UTOK comes in, right? You mentioned the Unified Theory of Knowledge. One of its main missions is to solve the problem of psychology, which stems from what you call the enlightenment gap. Maybe we can go back there maybe later, but going back to the main factors of the common core, what is the backdrop? What is the plus one? It’s the contextualizing of psychotherapy in our cultural context.
So psychotherapy, again, it’s this very specific relationship. It’s not just any conversation. You can go to your friend, to your uncle, to your mom and get psychotherapy. You need a professional, a professional that is licensed, a professional that for various institutional reasons has to be deemed worthy of doing that psychotherapy, has been deemed legitimate. So this plus one is the legitimization of the psychotherapy healing relationship. Within that context, once you have that backdrop, then you get those processes that go into healing, into the healing relationship. You have first and foremost, and that’s probably the most, the strongest common factor process and principle that makes psychotherapy work is the relationship. A high quality relationship. The bond between the therapist and the patient.
A lot of the times I get people asking me, because I’m trained in clinical psychology, they come to me, “What therapy should I get? I’m having this problem, I don’t know exactly who to go to. I see all these different therapies. I don’t know what’s going to be a better fit for me,” and what I usually say is, “Go with the therapist that you like the most. Go with the person that you find a good bond. That you feel like understands you, that you feel it’s really gripping your problem and that you can have a… You can be yourself, you can be genuine, you can have a good relationship with,” because the bond is so important, and that’s what study after study has found, that the bond really predicts the quality of the process of the therapeutic process.
So the bond is one. The second one is the shared understanding. Do we have the same story about the problem that you’re going through, and do we get a shared agreement about your expectations? Do we both feel like this is a good understanding and that this is going to be a process toward your healing? So that shared understanding, making sure we’re on the same page.
The third element is then the intervention. What are you doing to promote the change? It’s not just knowing about it, knowing what it is, getting good insight, that’s a crucial step in the process, but then doing the things that are going to get you from point A to point B. If it’s depression, maybe that’s behavioral activation, maybe that’s getting exposed to the things that you fear. If it’s social anxiety, the same, getting exposed to that anxiety, to being in public, to maybe speaking in public. What are these tasks and interventions, these specific ingredients that are going to make you move toward greater wellbeing? So those are the three process elements that are part of the common core that would predict then the success.
Jim: All right. Now, as I said, I come from a background that was pretty anti-therapy. In particular, my dad was a cop, right? He and all of his cop buddies. Of course, being a policeman, you could get some stressful, difficult things to deal with, and if you shot somebody on the line of duty, they’d send you off to the psychologist, which they called going to see the wizard, and they didn’t take it seriously at all.
And go to see the wizard, their view on it… And it’s funny, as you mentioned, a common core, I can lay this in two out of three cases. Says, “I don’t need to talk to the wizard. I’ll just go talk to my bartender,” and if you had a long-term relationship with your bartender, you had a relationship, you had a shared concept, particularly if it was a cop bar where the bartender has been for 10 years, 20 years, in one case 30 years, talking to cops pissed off about or agitated or unhappy about something. So those two things I think do fit the cop wisdom from 1965. But the third maybe not, and that is that the bartender probably doesn’t have any clue about the interventions.
Marcia: What do they have? And if you ask me, I think you can have healing relations with people that are not therapists, and you can go through a pretty psychotherapeutic process with somebody who’s not a therapist. That’s just not a guarantee. And it’s not a guarantee with a psychotherapist anyway, but the psychotherapist will have that cultural legitimization, right? It’s going to go through that process of studying, of getting their license, and you can be pretty sure that you are probably going to get a good experience. Maybe not. You cannot guarantee that.
But I would say that the competencies that a therapist learns that makes them know what interventions to use, what’s wiser, let’s throw in that word, to do in a certain situation where you’re going through psychological distress, they can understand your problem, they can make you feel seen, known, and valued in a therapeutic space, that can be a therapeutic relationship. But those competencies could be taught more widely so that we could be sort of therapists to one another. I think that could be a helpful thing for society. But that’s why we say this three plus one. So that’s the therapeutic process. The one is what legitimizes it and the cultural backdrop.
Jim: Gotcha. Now, if it turns out that the research shows that all the psychotherapies have about the same result, does that mean that choosing the interventions doesn’t really matter? That if you took the interventions, put them in a hat for… Okay, depression. I got 30 known interventions. Oh, let me say I might pick one at random out of the hat.
Marcia: Right.
Jim: Could you give the hat to the bartender and would it work as well?
Marcia: Right. That’s a great point. That’s what I was learning about. So just to contextualize the common core, what we do with the common core, it’s based on a model that is in existence that was developed by Bruce Wampold, that’s called the contextual model, and those elements that I told you about are the elements that are part of this contextual model. What is the common core is when we take that contextual model, which does a really good summary based on the meta analysis of different meta analysis to get to those common factors, and we add a meta theory to it, and that’s UTOK’s meta theory to explain why those elements do the change that they do. Why are they so important for psychotherapeutic outcomes? And when I first read the book, when got to that part, I was like, “Huh. I thought they had the specific factors from different psychotherapies would not predict the outcome.” I thought it was just what was shared. I thought it was this understanding and that the specific interventions wouldn’t.
So a way to summarize what they say, how they justify this is that you got to have a ritual. They call it rituals, and I actually like that word in that context. You go through a ritual that you believe that you have positive expectations about that both you and this professional that you trust, because he has this societal legitimacy, to go through the healing process with you, and through that expectations of that shared trust, you will actually go through the ritual believing that you’re going to get better, and if you follow through, it’s likely that you’ll get better.
It doesn’t mean that any task, it doesn’t mean that maybe drink more water, do a better diet, it doesn’t mean that that’s going to heal your depression. Of course, that’s got to be based on principles and processes that based on psychological science are going to get you to increased well-being. But if you’re engaged in tasks that you have positive expectations about and that you share those expectations with your therapist, you’re going to get to a successful outcome within that context combined with those other elements. The specific interventions are also part of what can predict the outcome.
Jim: Let’s talk about one specific intervention that has in some ways revolutionized psychotherapy, some people would argue for better and some would argue for worse, and that’s the pharmacological interventions. Basically, psychoactive drugs that are now a part of I don’t know what percentage of psychotherapy… Do you have a number and what percentage of psychotherapy client-patient therapist relations involve the use of psychoactive drugs?
Marcia: I do not have a number, Jim, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s… It’s very popular. Very popular, widely used. Some people go to therapy searching for the psychoactive drug. Several people I’ve talked to go looking for that, but I’d be curious to know if you have it. And that works. We don’t always know why it works. If you actually go through and see why, SSRIs are helpful for depression, for example. We don’t know exactly why, but it works. And usually it works in conjunction with the psychotherapy. It has to go through the psychiatric evaluation for that to be a valid treatment, and it works. We do make a point that there are principles and processes of psychotherapy that reliably can also make you improve in your problems without the necessary use of psychoactive drugs.
And clinical research is very tricky because we don’t have a good control condition. We still have not learned how to control for those common factors, and that’s another implication of the common core, because again, actually, we can argue that it can function as a control condition, and because of that, we still don’t know how do the minimum, the bare minimum of the shared factors in psychotherapy to get you from point A to point B, so the healing process, without maybe needing the psychoactive drug. But they’re definitely good resources to be used in conjunction with psychotherapy.
Jim: Okay. You mentioned that the outer framing of your common core and some of these other ideas comes from the UTOK, the Universal Theory of Knowledge. Why don’t you lay out, give a brief… I should say unified. Unified Theory of Knowledge.
Marcia: Yes.
Jim: Universal, Gregg, on a bad day might claim that, but let’s keep it with Unified Theory of Knowledge. Why don’t you provide our audience with a brief outline then bridge to how that informs your perspective about the common core of psychology?
Marcia: Perfect. So UTOK, like I said… Universal, unified. I think both of those words give this impression that it’s really grand, that some people would even say that it includes all of knowledge, which is not something we claim. Unified in this sense means taking a zoomed out perspective, looking at the different paradigms in psychology, the different approaches, the different single theories from the zoomed out perspective that sees the relation between them. So that’s the unification approach that we talk about both in psychology and in psychotherapy as well, the applied version of psychology.
And UTOK as a unified system is a system of understanding it. Again, its main mission is to solve the problem of psychology, and what do we say is the problem of psychology? It’s the problem that we do not know within the field of psychology how to give a consensual response to the question of what is mind, what are mental processes? We can extend that and say, “How does that relate to behavior? How does that relate to consciousness, cognition?” Those keywords in understanding who we are as human beings, as animals in the grand context of the universe. And so one of the main missions of UTOK is figuring that out, answering what is mind, what is behavior, and placing that in the context of nature, of the complexification of our universe. So it’s a new philosophy and meta theory for psychology.
Jim: Now, one of the things I love about UTOK, there’s a lot of things I love about UTOK, a few things I quibble about, but one I find most helpful, and it disentangles an awful lot of horseshit that otherwise floats around about the concepts, and that’s the distinguishing between Mind 1, Mind 2, and Mind 3. If you could do that for us.
Marcia: Lovely. Yes. No, that’s a great… In the lingo of UTOK, we call it descriptive metaphysical system for mind, which essentially says that we’re disentangling the confusions in the terms and we’re finding their reference in the world. When you hear people saying mind, there’s three main reference that they may be talking about, and if you don’t know exactly what it is, any conversation about it can get really confusing really quickly. So what do we call those three main references? My one, my two, my three. My one refers to the functional processes, the neurobiological functional processes and the responsivity of an organism to the environment. We’re talking about the nervous system, those processes within the animal, so the brain and nervous system working with those neurobiological processes. And in contact with the environment. So also his behavior, how the animal is walking around pursuing its goals away from threats and toward its valued goals in the environment. So that’s the very behavioral, both within the animal and outside the animal. That’s my one and that’s one of the reference for my one. Some people talk about consciousness in that way too, and they have that reference.
The second possible reference is the subjective experience of being. So your first person qualitative experience of the world that is not the same as the objective view from science. It’s from the inside out and it’s very particular. Only you can have that perspective, but only I have this perspective right now of speaking to you in this moment in time. So that’s the subjective experience of being.
Jim: Let me pop in here if you don’t mind. One thing I think is very important, I know Gregg and I agree on this, I’d love to get your thoughts, is that Mind 2 goes far back in time. It’s not just a human thing. Probably goes back at least to the amphibians and maybe even earlier than that. This is where I find people getting wrapped around the axle all the time. They think that consciousness is a human-only thing when if we think of consciousness as the experience of phenomenology. Thomas Nagel famously wrote the paper called What’s it Like to Be a Bat, or something like that, and he does a pretty good job, an evocative job of describing a phenomenology that include echolocation, using the sonar kind of system for navigation, which must be qualitatively different than ours, because we don’t have that.
But it’s amazing the amount of things I read where people write as if consciousness is only a human phenomenon and that just… For many, many years, I’ve been studying the science of consciousness for about 10 years now, and it seems to be very important to avoid the era of over-humanizing the discussion of psychology and at the Mind 2 level, and I think that’s one of the most useful parts of UTOK. What are your thoughts about that?
Marcia: Yeah, I would agree. I think having a shared taxonomy for mental processes is so important because of that, because we get confused that we don’t talk about the same things. When people say that consciousness is a very human-only thing, they typically have that Mind 3 reference, which is consciousness as our self-reflective capacity and our capacity to use language. So self-reflection in language, which is a reference for mind as well, so our Mind 3, and that’s human-only, of course. We don’t see other animals walking around talking to each other, justifying to use the lingo. In UTOK, we use the term justification to talk about propositions.
But Mind 2, Mind 1, we definitely see Mind 1 in the animal world, Mind 2 gets a little tricky. We get into the hard problem of consciousness, like you mentioned, what it’s like to be a bat, and we cannot be as liberal extending that. At least from a UTOK perspective, we do extend Mind 2 to mammals, to lots of animals that are highly likely to have Mind 2, to have a subjective experience. Since we cannot observe it directly and objectively, it gets tricky and we get into all those philosophical conundrums. But yes, Mind 3 is a human-only reference, but it’s only one of the three reference from mind, from a UTOK perspective.
Jim: So wanted maybe a little bit more about how the… And this is, again, I love about the UTOK approach, is that all three, Mind 1, Mind 2 and Mind 3, are in operation at one time in a human. A human has neurons, a human has phenomenology, and a human has language and culture. Why don’t just maybe give us a little riff on how those three all apply in psychotherapy.
Marcia: Yeah, this is getting cool because then we get into the meta-theoretical descriptions of how our mental processes work. If you allow me to get back a little bit and talk about the concept of justification in UTOK, because it gets really important for this. So UTOK says that justification is what makes us uniquely human. That’s what gives rise to our human culture. It’s not language per se, of course language is going to be the mechanism, the thing that substantiates that, and without language you couldn’t justify, but the concept of justification, which refers to how we legitimize what we believe to be the case and what we value, so will we think ought to be the case. So there’s these two dimensions of justification and UTOK says that evolutionarily, we encountered this problem in our human groups of having to justify.
So if I’m in a human group, I want to go hunt deer in a certain place. The person who’s next to me does not want to hunt deer, they want to pick up berries. I must justify why I think that’s better, why I think that’s how things ought to be and why I think that it is the case that that’s going to be more helpful for us. So we encounter this problem of justifying, and according to UTOK, that’s when we start to really put these propositions together in a way that we can use to communicate, to influence others, to move them in the way that we want them to go, to make decisions, coordinate our behavior in that way. So again, that’s in that space of Mind 3, that’s when we’re using propositions, using language, self-reflecting. We have an access to our own inner contents that are private and differentiating that from what we make public for other people. So this differentiation creates this filter according to UTOK, and that’s all within a meta theory within the UTOK system called justification systems theory.
This filter becomes one of the parts of our human consciousness system. It’s the persona filter. We call it the Rogerian Filter sometimes. Carl Rogers, he started the main humanistic psychotherapy and person-centered therapy, and he used to say that we do have this filter between our inner world and our outer world and the impressions that we think we make, the impressions we want to manage to other people, the way other people see us, all that really shapes who we become, and that can go wrong sometimes if we allow other people’s impressions to shape the way we see ourselves the way we are all the time. We create this mask, and then we feel like we’re not being genuine perhaps, like we’re not showing up in the world in a very autonomous, in a very independent, in a very genuine way, and that creates all sorts of problems. A good example of that is imposture syndrome when we think that people may discover who we really are behind our mask.
So that’s one of the ways that there’s that dynamic between those different mental processes. We have our ego, that inner private part of us that to get to the outer world, to get to others needs to go through that persona filter and the dynamics of justification as part of that. We’re going to be managing that all the time, how we justify to legitimize and coordinate our behavior.
Jim: And I got to say, I had all that and I could see that probably for most people that applies, but from my own perspective, I don’t think I play that game of having an inner being and a face to the world. For better or worse, I is who I is and I am who I am. If you don’t like it, fuck you. That’s always been my theory since I was six years old. Is that possible? Is that common? I’m just curious.
Marcia: That makes sense to me, because I feel like people have varying degrees of authenticity. Some people will have more of a mask and will have various coping mechanisms maybe or different defenses that make them put on this mask, and people who do that last, it’s more of a free flow. So you don’t do a lot of filtering, you just say what you want to say, you are who you are, you’re not really ashamed of that, you’re not trying to hide that in any way. The persona dynamics, the persona filter that UTOK’s about is a large part about this conscious filtering processes that we do to mask things sometimes, but it also goes broader to say that we have a persona in the world whether we want it or not.
It may be very congruent with our ego, with the private aspects, the private contents of our mental processes, and they may not be very congruent, but either way, you have an identity. So you’re Jim, you’re a podcaster, you’re a husband, I believe, you have a family, and people are going to have different impressions of who you are. They’re going to have different notions of you. You sometimes are going to be a different person for different people? You’re going to show up different aspects to different people sometimes because of the context and as the context changes-
Jim: They’re going to see different facets. They’re going to get a different perspective. Nobody’s going to see, except maybe my wife, the whole dirty story, but each person that you interact with sees a piece, right? That’s from within that context. But I would argue that the whole is holistic and that it’s not dynamically programmed for the situation.
Marcia: That’s lovely. That’s very healthy. We do want that integration of the different facets of us to boil down to a single idea of who we are, of how we show up in the world, and that’s… Going back to person-centered therapy, that was one of the goals of person-centered therapy, that Rogers would try to integrate those different aspects of you into a unified notion of you. That plays a big role in psychotherapy in general. Again, going back to the common core. The common core is how UTOK explains the common factors, so those elements I told you about. And the one of those elements, again, perhaps the most important one, the therapeutic relationship. It’s the bond between the patient, client and the psychotherapist, and UTOK explains that in part by this idea that we want to be seen, known and valued for who we really are, and the therapeutic context is the context for that.
What is a therapeutic relationship? It’s a relationship where you are seen, you’re paid attention to. That is your space to talk about your problems. You’re known for who you really are. You feel authentic, you feel genuine, you feel like you can talk about you the most vulnerable things without having defenses, and that’s one of the tasks of psychotherapy, discovering what are those defenses, those coping mechanisms that are impeding you from showing up how you really are. And you got to feel valued. You got to feel like that’s a space where you are valued for who you are genuinely. And if those ingredients are not there, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have a strong therapeutic alliance, a high quality relationship with your therapist, and that’s why that’s such an important element in psychotherapeutic success. It’s like having a surgery room without all the props of a surgery room. If you don’t have the tools, if you don’t have the room well cleaned, if you don’t have that environment set, you’re going to have problems and something’s going to go wrong in the surgical process, to draw a parallel.
Jim: Gotcha. Another thing that you guys talk about is the neurotic loop, and I know that many of the people that show up for psychotherapy are kind of in the neurotic range as opposed to the psychotic range or the depressant range. Talk about that a little bit. What are they? How do they affect our daily lives and maybe give some kind of grounded examples that the audience could relate to.
Marcia: Yes, and that brings up an important point about the common core, because it talks about the common core, a unified core of psychotherapy. It’s not for all problems, not for all psychological problems. I mean, if we use common core for a schizophrenic person, that’s not going to be enough. There’s more going on there. Generalizing, especially lots of disorders that involve lots of biological indicators, the common core is not going to be enough. You’re probably going to need something more specific on top of the common core. And when we go back to the second element of the therapeutic process, it was the shared understanding, Having the shared understanding of the problem between the therapist and the patient. How does UTOK identify the problems, these neurotic problems? The neurotic problems being this internalizing problems when distress is turned inward, depression, anxiety, relationship, adaptation problems, those are the most common problems, the things that people go to therapy the most to solve.
The neurotic loop, the concept of the neurotic loop is straightforwardly when there’s a problem, sometimes we call those from a UTOK perspective, bumps. Life bumps you, something bad happens. Let’s say you get fired, maybe you hit your car, you have a conflict with your partner, all sorts of normal daily problems. There’s a negative event, a negative feeling in response to the event, and that’s totally normal, happens to everybody. We’re all going to have negative feelings in relation to something bad happening. But then there’s a third ingredient to the neurotic loop, which is the thing that closes the loop and that makes it perpetuate, which is the negative reaction, a secondary negative reaction to the problem or the negative feeling. So as an example, let’s say… It’s not a very relatable example for me, but it’s the first thought that came to mind that I think cis men in general will relate.
There’s, let say, a teenager goes to a party is trying to approach a girl and he approaches the girl, gets rejected, and that sucks. There’s an immediate injury I imagine that you have to go through, and then how do you feel after that? How do you cope with that? How do you deal with that? There’s two general options. You may double-down on yourself, feel like she, “She rejected me. I must not be worthy of being with this girl,” et cetera, et cetera. You feel like shit, you get into a neurotic loop that perpetuates the negative emotion, and then you get into that cycle, or you could think, “Well, maybe she is not really feeling like it. Maybe she would reject any other guy right now. Maybe I’m just not her type. There’s other girls in the world. That sucks and I feel that and I recognize that pain, but I’ll move on. This doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world for me.” So that’s the example that came to mind of what a neurotic loop would look like.
Jim: Yeah, it’s funny, that last one I actually went through that, as did most guys, but fortunately at the age of 16 and a half, and I remember exactly when it happened, I internalized the theory, a theorist that I tend to be, which is, “Of course there’s a potential mismatch between guys and girls. It takes two to tango and all that, therefore it must just be a numbers game,” and once I figured that out, all stress was gone, all negative feeling, which is… It’s like looking to buy a car. You’re wandering around the lot to find the right car, though in this case, the car and you have to agree, and at that point, I never had another anxious moment about approaching women again.
Marcia: Hey, that’s a cognitive intervention. There you go. Yeah.
Jim: Yeah, and maybe that underestimates the use of theory. Theory can be useful. If you have a theory that you believe, it can override this basic biological reaction to being rejected. If you realize that being rejected actually makes sense within the theory, then it’s much easier to deal with.
Marcia: Right. That’s great. I mean, cognitive therapy in general, it’s based on that idea. I mean, if you change your thoughts in a way that makes you feel better, that’s a simplistic way to put it, but then you’ll feel better down the road, and that is one of what we call in UTOK our adaptation systems. So UTOK says that we develop our personality over time, the way we are, through these different systems of character adaptation, and that goes in that element of shared understanding. That is one of the tools that a therapist can use with a client to try to get a shared understanding of the problem. The character adaptation systems are these five systems of our habits. That goes lifestyle, eating habits, diet, exercise, all of those things. Our experiences, so our emotions. Another way to deal with that maybe would be to just expose yourself to rejection over time. Expose yourself, feel rejected, feel like shit over and over and over and over until you’re numb to it.
Jim: You don’t die, right? That’s the quick thing you learn. And it’s like fighting. People who are afraid to get into a fight, once you’ve been punched a few times… I grew up, again, in a rough neighborhood where everybody fought. You go, “You’re not going to die. What the fuck?” If you get into a fight, you get into a fight, you win, you lose, it Doesn’t really matter that much, right?
Marcia: Lovely. Yes. Emotion-focused therapy is that. So the cool thing about this character adaptation systems in UTOK is that it aligns with the major psychotherapies. So it transforms those interventions into different ways to deal with different systems of character adaptation, and all of those different systems of character adaptation that coexist within us. And over time, given our things like our genetics, our biological makeup, our development and our life experiences and our cultural context, those three factors, the biopsychosocial that is so popular, it goes into how we develop within those systems of character adaptation, and the psychotherapies from the vision of UTOK for psychotherapy are mapping those different systems. The difference is that they coexist. They aren’t dynamically changing themselves, dynamically impacting one another within our experience.
So in addition to the habits and the experiences, the emotions, there’s also our relationships, our defenses, and our… Well, in psychotherapy, we say cognition. Cognition from a UTOK perspective, from a general scientific perspective is broader than just our thoughts and just propositions, but in psychotherapy, it’s used a lot that way. Cognitive therapy is the major example. But in a UTOK lingo, it’s then the justifications, the propositions, the way we make sense of the world, those different theories that we have, how we interpret the events that happen to us. So those are the five systems of character adaptation, and those are part of the tools that UTOK brings to the table to aid those common factors and to have then a shared understanding about a problem.
Jim: All right. Well, let’s apply our tools to an example. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but last time I looked into this, which was probably 15 years ago, something called cognitive behavioral therapy was probably the most common psychotherapeutic technique, and for a very pragmatic reason, insurance was starting to pay more and more of the bills, and as you pointed out earlier, all the therapies seemed to have about the same result, but cognitive behavioral therapy could be done much quicker, and so therefore the insurance company said, “Less cost, same result? We’re going to start preferentially paying for CBT.” What do you think about cognitive behavioral therapy, and put it in the context of your theories. First, tell our audience what it is.
Marcia: Okay, so cognitive behavioral therapy is within the tradition of cognitive therapy. It’s another wave of it because it includes the behavioral elements of behavioral therapies. I will say that philosophically, theoretically, a lot of problems can be raised about cognitive behavioral therapy, but as a psychotherapy, it is highly effective for several problems. And indeed, Aaron Beck, who was the main proponent… There’s also Albert Ellis, but Aaron Beck was really the most famous proponent of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy eventually, ran lots of studies. I mean, cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, was really what made it so popular to run clinical trials in the psychotherapy research world, and it did well. Every time it would do well. Gregg would have some really interesting stories to share about that, about… He worked with Beck and he was present in lots of studies, and I will just share that he experienced a lot of branding in the CBT world. There was a lot of, “Let’s say that CBT is the best. CBT has got to do better than all these other therapies, and that’s what we’re going to publish.”
So without getting into the details, there was a lot of that type of manipulation of what was going on in the background of the research that was going on in CBT. But regardless, it is a helpful, it can be a highly successful way to do psychotherapy. Again, if we think of those systems of character adaptation, cognitive, cognitions, thoughts changing those propositions and how we make sense, and the behaviors changing the lifestyles, those are two systems of character adaptation, and then we have things like defenses and relationships and experiences, which are addressed by other psychotherapists as well. And from a UTOK perspective, all those different systems are coexisting within the individual. So cognitive therapy is great. It works. It has been shown empirically to work, and all these other ones also have, and that’s something that the psychotherapist, the modern psychotherapist, can be attentive to and critically think when they have a client in front of them, “What is this client going through? What is the context and how can I use these tools and this knowledge and theoretical knowledge that I have in my field?”
Jim: All right. Well, this has been a very interesting dive into the common core of psychotherapy and some context around UTOK. Now we’re going to switch directions a little bit. Gregg originally defined or did his work around UTOK in his reaction to the kind of incoherence of psychology as a discipline, all these various components. They don’t even attempt to make sense across each other in the same way a physicist does. Anything a physicist does has to be compatible with all other physics. In psychology, that’s not the case. We talked about in psychotherapy historically, all the various schools of psychotherapy thought the others were illegitimate, they were all wrong as it turned out, but that’s how it was, but within psychology itself, there’s still those issues. But there are other issues within academic psychology, and unfortunately, you and Gregg fell into one of those deep problems. Tell us what happened.
Marcia: Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. No, that is great. I’m really glad that we’re going to talk about this, because I think along with this whole fragmentation in psychology, this whole problem of the paradigms not talking to one another, Gregg will say sometimes that psychology just gave up on trying to make theoretical sense in a unified, consensual way. It just went to studies, “Let’s just run studies and publish findings,” and there’s a multiplicity of findings, but no unified structure for the science of psychology. That’s one major problem. And then there’s another major problem that is impacting psychology specifically very strongly, but other disciplines as well.
I would say that academia in general is dealing with this problem of ideology inside of the institutions, specifically a problem of woke-ism. It’s this ideology that in the past decade or so has really been growing strong. I mean, we see the implications of it not only in academia, but we’re in a pretty intricate social-political environment right now as well. It’s election time and we see a huge polarization that continues to exist, and I think woke-ism is a key player in this polarization and all the conflicts that we’ve been seeing, and definitely Gregg specifically and I by extent have dealt with this in the past year.
So here we are, Gregg… So I, like I said, graduated from my master’s in 2021. I entered a doctoral program in 2021 that was at the time combined integrated clinical and school psychology program at James Madison University. That’s where Gregg taught, and that’s where I met him. He was my advisor. And I stayed for one semester. It was a good time, I had good experiences in the program and for personal reasons at the time, I was in a past relationship and… In my home country. I was born and raised in Brazil, and through some personal difficulties that I was having, I left the program. That was in January of 2022 when I left, Gregg and I stayed in touch and we developed a relationship during that year of 2023, and in April, and here we are just living our lives, and he gets this notice. I was in Brazil at the time, I remember, and he called me saying, “Well, I just got a Title IX complaint, a sexual harassment complaint from JMU from somebody in your cohort,” my past cohort at the time.
And it was really weird, first of all, because if you know Gregg, and Jim, he’s your friend and his character, that’s weird already, a sexual harassment complaint. But we had no idea what that could be about. Gregg had been teaching the same way he taught for many, many years over 20 years at JMU, right? He was director of the program for many years and helped build that program and was teaching us as he always taught. And I attended his classes in the fall of 2021, and they were great classes and I learned a ton, and I never, ever, ever had any experience of sexual harassment, of sexualized language that was gratuitous and any offensive material really in class. I was wondering what that could be about.
When we got the actual complaints and could see the details about what the accusations were, those were 25 comments over the course of three classes that were being justified as creating a culture of fear and distress among the cohort. That’s the same cohort that I was part of for a semester. Culture of fear and distress, especially among the women in the cohort, that created a hostile learning environment that was objectively offensive. And then we went to see the comments knowing that they probably wouldn’t be any objectively offensive, but then we went to see them, and I have them here in front of me, and I can definitely read some of them to you, Jim.
Jim: Before you do that, let me just give my own sense of Gregg, who I’ve known-
Marcia: Yes.
Jim: He became one of my online collaborators and part of this broader circle of the liminal web and such, and then we discovered we lived 10 miles apart at the time, and we started having lunch together and really kind of hit it off, and Gregg is a strong personality. He’s a fast talker, funny guy, very vivid imagery. I imagine he’s a great teacher. He reminds me of some of the great… I mean, not just good, but great teachers I had over the years. So keep in mind, he’s not a kind of very dull professor type. He’s a very vivacious, very verbally creative, very fluid kind of guy. So I think it’s useful to understand that as Marcia gives some of these examples.
Marcia: Totally. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean, he’s a great teacher. I enjoyed the classes I have with him so much. Sometimes I miss that. I don’t get that anymore. But he jokes and he gives several examples. He talks about what’s real, and UTOK, the theory says very clearly about human psychology, we’re animals, we’re primates. We’re minded primates who can justify. Sometimes he calls us justifying apes, which I think is great. And that’s the reality. What does that mean? That we have a very shared common nature in that we… He uses this sometimes. We want to fight and fuck, rest and digest. We go through all these shared processes that all animals do. I mean, we’re mammals. And he will say that, he will say that in class, and that was always fine. He won a teaching award, if not more than one, now I don’t recall, for his teaching, because his teaching is so great.
But then again, we go over to see these comments. What’s this about? And the first one is a comment that says emotions are like orgasms. It’s a comparison he’s making between emotions and the sexual response. So with the sexual response, you get this crescendo, it peaks at the orgasm and then it descends. Emotions are very similar to that, and if you go read emotion-focused therapy, Leslie Greenberg, you’ll see that the response is very similar. I mean, you get a increasing of the emotional sensation, let’s say fear, it peaks, and then as you make sense of what’s giving you the fear, it descends. If it’s not something that requires an immediate response from you, it will descend. That’s how emotions go, that’s like orgasms go. And let’s face it, and the orgasm is a very relatable experience, and if you give that example, people will get it really quick.
That was the first problem the complainant had with the class. And again, there’s 25 comments, some of which importantly, he never said. And just to give a sneak peek into the whole story, JMU eventually favors Gregg in the whole process through the hearing. They conclude that all of the valid comments were done in the context of the classroom. None of them really classified as objective sexual harassment, and they were congruent with the material in class. I say that several times in my testimony for those hearings, and that was the case. All the comments can be drawn back to what was being taught, and again, he was teaching the way he had always thought for many, many years. So there’s something wrong about that process. The reason I find it relevant to bring it here is because I think it’s reflective of something that is a societal problem nowadays. I think it’s reflective of this problematic pattern of thinking and enacting of this ideology that is growing, and it was something to actually see it happen to my now-fiancé.
Jim: Yeah. Gregg reached out to me as it started to happen, and I did read the complaint and I hooked him up with a lawyer, one of several couple of them that he had, and I said, “Even if every single one of these is true, it’s still ridiculous,” and he was quite adamant that a couple of them were not true. I think he was able to prove that they were not true. So here we are, strong teaching examples that cause somebody to, “What the hell?” And as you say, it’s an ideology. How would you describe that ideology?
Marcia: Right. I mean, it’s called woke, right? That’s how I got familiar with it. Back in the day when I was still living in Brazil, before I moved to the U.S. to get my undergrad, I learned of this ideology and I was part of it. I will share that for many years I believed in it, it was a worldview for me, and I like this because I can talk about the alluring aspect of it, the things that draw you in into that. It feels good to feel like you’re part of this ideology. There’s many people who think like you, and you can justify your ways of thinking to that group, and that group will reverberate and reflect back. So you feel like you’re a part of something, you’re part of a worldview, you belong in that group. And there’s also the sense of being right. You feel like you can justify almost anything. You have those staples. There’s sort of words that can bring, like sexism, racism, oppression, power. You bring in those words and you can form a justification, and you’re very likely to get support. So you feel like you can be right.
Those are very alluring things. Back in the day when I was a teen in the 2010s, I started to learn about this woke ideology. And we make this differentiation, Gregg came up with this differentiation that I think’s very helpful. Between Woke 1.0, the first wave of woke, which goes earlier than the 2010s. It’s this awakening to social injustice. That’s something in the world. There is inequality, there are historical systemic patterns of discrimination, there are certain marginalized groups that on basis of different identity factors like race, like gender, they will impact a person’s experience in the world, sometimes in unfair ways, and being awake to those things, realizing that those are things in the world help you critically think about those experiences and be an ally. If it happens to you, you can have a good notion of where that’s coming from historically, societally, and you want to fight against that. You want to also give space to those multiple perspectives that people have. You want to dialogue about it. You want to understand the role that culture has in people’s experiences and how experiences are very relative from person to person.
And personally, I think those are all things I can get behind, and I did get behind that for very long. And then there’s this weird culture shift. There’s this weird thing that happens that just turns that whole thing upside down, and from a sensibility of being awake to social injustice and wanting to dialogue about it and wanting to raise awareness about it, that turns into a weapon pretty much, into a closed justification system, and I don’t know if I defined justification system from a UTOK perspective, I think it’s helpful here, but it turns into this closed rigid network of different beliefs and values that seem to strive to this purity of ideology that is very intolerant of anything that’s outside of it. So that’s the gist of the Woke 1.0 and 2.0 distinction that we’re making, the shift that happened in the culture.
Jim: And I think that is… I’m really glad Gregg wrote that article because I started using woke in that negative sense, and some people would push back, “Well, wait a minute. Woke just means what the hip hop musicians would be warning Black people, that they should be aware that systematic racial injustice still exists in the world,” which is an absolutely true statement and a useful thing for young Black people to know that no, it is not yet a level playing field and that there is injustice and be aware, be woke to the fact that you have to deal with the world that’s not fair, but like Gregg, I 100% agree with. I think that’s a great thing. But then strangely, this other thing came into being, which I now call neo-tribal racism and sexism, where instead-
Marcia: Love it.
Jim: It’s what it is. I’m a great believer that how we got to the civil rights movement and made the tremendous progress we did and how we got to strong movement towards gender equality, we’re not there yet, but the progress we’ve made is unbelievable in the last 50 years is from liberal universal humanism, which is embedded in documents like the American Declaration of Independence, United Nations’ statements of Human Rights, et cetera, which is at the end of the day, people are people and should be autonomous and should be judged as people, that we should not judge people as groups, and in fact, the name for that was racism and sexism. Unfortunately, this weird Woke 2 thing is recreating racism and sexism, but with a different polarity, right? At the most idiotic, you see some of these left-wing assholes will order their speakers at a conference based on intersectional bingo. So a left-handed Black lesbian in a wheelchair gets to speak first, and Chad, the white football player speaks last, and I go, “How is that not racism and sexism, my good person?”
Marcia: Right. I mean, speaking last I think is good from that vantage point, given that sometimes they’re not even allowed to speak, and that’s a very common narrative that you hear sometimes like, “If you’re not part of that identity, if you’re not part of that group, you don’t get to speak about it.”
Jim: I run to that occasionally online. “How can you say that as… You shouldn’t be allowed to say that as a old white dude,” and I go, “Well, fuck you. What you’re laying out is classic racism, ageism, and sexism.” It’s amazingly how often that shuts them up, just turn their woke vocabulary right back on them.
Marcia: Right. Yeah. I mean, just this morning… To give you an example, just this morning Gregg came to me, he was like, “Oh, I…” He published a blog explaining why he resigned from the APA. That was a few months ago. He resigned because there was this paper that came out on a main journal from the APA saying that the greatest goal now for academic psychology is to fight for diversity, equity, inclusion, is to fight for marginalized voices, and that ideological goal is now the main goal of psychology as an institution. And the APA is our biggest institution, most influential institution in psychology, and that’s worrisome-
Jim: By the way, that’s the American Psychological Association.
Marcia: That’s right.
Jim: And it’s a huge meeting. It’s like a hundred thousand people show up for it. It’s amazing.
Marcia: That’s right, yeah. It’s huge, right? And all through my schooling in psychology, that’s our main institution. That’s the thing you learn to respect and coordinate your behavior based on their guidelines. And for that to be the main goal of a discipline that claims to be a science, that’s worrisome. Anyway. That was the cherry on top that made Gregg reside from the APA. He wrote an essay explaining why, and just this morning he came to me saying that there was a comment in it saying that that was a great example of white patriarchy or something like that. Again, going into the idea that because he’s a white man, he cannot expose that opinion. In a perfect free country and free platform of the blogging platform of medium, he can’t say that.
He can say whatever he wants in there. And to think that language would be policed in that way is very worrisome, and that’s pretty much what was happening in that Title IX complaint, I mean, a level of language policing that really undermined his authority as a professor, the authority of the institution to have awarded him prizes for his teaching for so long, and clearly not a matter of objective offense, clearly a matter of subjective offense.
Jim: And of course, we’ve all heard this and I do a fair bit of work on college campuses and such, and so I’ve seen it as well, but what would be your estimate of the number of the people, and particularly in psychology, who are infected by neo-tribal racism or Woke 2?
Marcia: I think it is pretty polarized. I mean, if it was something close to 50-50, I wouldn’t be surprised. It may be more. But I think that as this grows, it becomes stronger and becomes more violent and closed and rigid, the other side also inflames in response, and I think that’s why we see this polarization, especially that we see in political times. Because if one side goes radical, there’s going to be a backlash, there’s going to be an answer, and I think there’s growing discomfort with the woke ideology, the Woke 2.0, and I think that’s one of the main things that incites the polarization. And personally, I don’t think any of the extremes is what we’re looking for to live in a wise collective, but I think that’s what happens inevitably when you go far on one side.
Jim: Yeah, I’ve been involved a little bit in the campus free speech wars. I was the co-founder and first president of the MIT Free Speech Alliance, and basically it was an alumni-mostly organization, and we have made great progress. So I would say that peak woke was probably reached around 2021 in particular when it started to censor totally legitimate speech under the woke banner. That’s where it started to lose its power. However, this is my assertion.
I’d love to see if you get the same sense, my guess is that today no more than maybe 20 across all disciplines, maybe higher in psychology, but probably no more than 15 or 20% of the professoriate are actually woke true believers, but another 40 or 50%, so a total of 65%, are intimidated by the woke bureaucracy and they’re afraid that things like what happened to Gregg will happen to them if they speak out honestly. And that at some point a tipping point will be reached where the coercive power of the bureaucracy is beaten down enough by things like free speech movements that the 40% who are acting under intimidation will abandon woke and only the little 20% will be left and they’ll be immaterial because they’ll just be yet another fringe political idea. Does that make any sense to you?
Marcia: It does. Yeah, I think that’s plausible. Maybe that is the trend. As we see that getting more and more ridiculous and hard to justify, hard to validate, and the other side grows in the response to it to combat it. I think there’s a lot of people who are fearful. Talk about the culture of fear and distress. You fear saying the wrong thing, you fear having the backlash happen to you, cancel culture. You just got to say one thing that descents from the general ideology and you’re canceled, and I think that’s what happened with that complaint. They were trying to cancel him for teaching in a way that brings up, yes, sexual examples, animalistic examples, gender differences, things that are… Even comments that throw back to evolutionary psychology and sex differences between men and women, that was among the comments of things that made people uncomfortable.
And in an academic environment, it does not suffice to be subjectively uncomfortable or offended by something to bring a Title IX complaint like that, especially in a doctoral clinical psychology program, I would say. I think that’s a very specific spot where discovery like that can be brought up to the person, it can be processed. That’s actually the ethos of that program. I remember going into it, we went through several orientations and over and over we would hear that if you feel discomfort with a subject, it may be that things are brought up that are controversial, that make you feel sensitive, that maybe are triggering for you in some way, talk to us. Bring it up. Bring it up to your advisor, bring it up to another professor. That’s something that was always encouraged, and it’s really interesting that that did not happen in that case.
Jim: Yeah. Gregg actually sent me a statement that he gave to all the students before class started and apparently had been doing it for years, and it said just that. If you’re going to be dealing with psychotherapy, you’re going to be hearing some horrendous things, some powerful things about abuse, about self-hatred, about suicide attempts. You go on and on and on, bulimia. It’s going to be one scary thing after the other. And so there’s going to be some strong things in these classes. I think he even said, “If you can’t deal with strong things, you probably don’t belong in psychotherapy and counseling psychotherapy,” et cetera. So he actually had in writing a warning of just the points you made that in this particular domain, the ability to deal with strong stuff is of the essence. It’s not just a secondary thing.
Marcia: Exactly. And what better place, what safer place to deal with those things, to deal with that discomfort in the classroom? I mean, you’re protected. You can process that inside the classroom. Maybe in private you can process with a professor. That is the safest spot, not with a client, not when you’re actually in the field dealing with something like that, dealing with suicide, dealing with domestic abuse, dealing with sexual violence. So yeah, clinical psychologists will be dealing with those things most likely, and you have to learn.
Jim: And finally on this one, my assessment from reading the facts that there was some personal animus that had nothing to do with wokery from the person that brought the complaint. It just happened to be a tool, a hammer, that she could hit Gregg with. That strikes me as one of the most dangerous things about having these tools laying around. What’s your thought about that?
Marcia: Yeah, I would agree, and I think the scary thing about that is that the institution will give legitimacy to something of that nature, and that means that it can happen again. It can happen to other professors, it can happen in other institutions if that’s the dominant narrative that actually is enforced, and I think that is true. I’ll even bring up that my relationship with Gregg at the time as a former student became public around the same time of the complaint. I mean, I think days later, a week later or something like that, the complaint came about, and the student took seven classes with Gregg over the course of her stay in the program, and the comments came from three classes only. And very interestingly, the complainant and a friend of hers who was also part of the cohort submitted screenshots of text messages. I’m not sure why, because that totally works against them. The text messages of them texting during class as Gregg was teaching, say some horrible things, Jim.
I mean, I’ll bring up an example and pardon my French because I don’t say that normally, this is coming from a person who is uncomfortable with sexualized language. Saying that somebody attended one of the UTOK meetings and it was like a bunch of circle-jerkers. That was the comment. The UTOK community has about 200-something people. Calling all of those people circle-jerkers. I mean, that’s unbelievable to me coming from a person who is uncomfortable with sexualized language, like Freud had a hot mom and emotions like orgasms, which are a couple of the comments. What is real sexual harassment? Texting in the background of the class, saying things of that nature. And other horrible things too. Comparing him to a demon, saying things about his family, the unthinkable things that were happening as he was teaching the material that was deemed to be within academic freedom. He was allowed to teach all that. It was within the First Amendment. He’s protected by that to talk about those topics.
Jim: Yeah, and fortunately in this case… I mean, he went through hell for… He was distraught and he couldn’t teach for a year. I mean, there were huge personal consequences to essentially a false and malicious charge brought under the banner of wokery. Fortunately in this case, he prevailed, but let that be a warning to anyone who’s an administrator of an organization that if you allow this tool of wokery, this hammer to hammer people without solid evidence, you are doing your institution and the people that work for you a huge injustice. If they have real proof of real sexual harassment, yes, of course you need to act. I’ve fired people on the spot for sexual harassment, fired them, done, “Your ass is out of here now. Put your shit in a box, you’re done.” But to allow a bogus charge to overturn someone’s life for a year just strikes me as amazingly bad sets of policies in our universities today.
Marcia: And it undermines those real cases that should be attended to that, you should do something about those. It undermines those because if you have 10 fake cases against five real ones, you got to put the resources where they’re meant to be put.
Jim: Yeah, and it’s also the boy crying wolf thing, the story that, okay, if nine out of 10 are false, then when the 10th one comes along, people tend to disbelieve that one too, even if it’s true, and there are still horrible cases of sexual harassment out there and these things need to be rooted out absolutely. Anyway. I want to thank Marcia Gralha for an extremely interesting two-part conversation. One about the common core of psychotherapy and the related UTOK theory, did a great job of linking those two together, and some personal adventures and misadventures in and around the issue of wokery and academia in the 2020s. So I’d really like to thank you for being a great guest.
Marcia: Thank you, Jim. I highly enjoyed that. Thank you for the space to talk about these things.
Jim: Yes, this was a lot of fun.