Forgive me for doing the trite thing of referring to Humpty Dumpty and definitions, but his connection of "glory" with "a nice knock-down argument" does come to mind after reading recent comments about whether there are recovered memories and whether childhood sexual abuse is invariably traumatic. Paying attention to the way another person has defined a term can often make a disagreement more constructive and less conflict-driven.
For many decades now, psychologists have been trained to make use of operational definitions. These are definitions that specify the operation or method of measurement one would use to identify the presence of some event or object, and ideally to ascertain how much of that factor is present. Operational definitions are strongly encouraged because they are of so much help for communication of information. For example, if I say that a particular 3-year-old seems to be dependent on his teacher, and another observer says he's independent, we might be stuck in disagreement unless we each stated our definitions. If I defined "dependency" as never going more than 6 feet from the teacher, but my colleague defined it as never going more than 5 feet away, our definitions would make us draw different conclusions even though we saw the same thing and agreed upon our observations. Coming to agreement on our operational definitions would help us work constructively.
Of course, not all psychological phenomena are easy to define operationally. For mental health problems, there may be a wide variety of symptoms associated with a problem, and any single individual may show only a few of them. In addition, typically-developing individuals may also show the same symptoms occasionally. Definitions become even more complicated when we need to talk about an internal state or subjective experience that we deduce from observations of behavior -- like "trauma" or "attachment". It's common to fall back on everyday definitions, but that can be problematic.
When we consider common definitions of psychological factors, we frequently find those definitions confusing. They may even interfere with critical thinking because they may be based on metaphors related to non-psychological phenomena or objects. It's all too easy to imagine, wrongly, that everything that is true about the non- psychological phenomenon is also true about the psychological one. A good example of this situation has to do with the terms "attachment" and "bonding". In the physical world, when A is attached to B with a rope, nails, or glue, B is equally attached to A. When A is bonded to B, as veneers are bonded to teeth, B is equally bonded to A. But the psychological world does not operate in the same way as the physical world it's compared to. The use of metaphor means that two things resemble each other in some ways, but not all ways. Thus, in attachment, a child may feel a strong connection to an adult without the adult feeling equally strongly about the child, and even if the adult's feelings are strong, they are not of the same type as the child's. In bonding, the adult feels strongly engaged with a baby, but the baby does not yet have the capacity to respond in kind. We make a lot of mistakes if we assume that the metaphor involves more aspects than it really does.
What about the word "traumatic"? That one has provided a lot of impetus to nice knock-down arguments for some time, and this has been especially obvious in comments on my recent post about Susan Clancy's book "The Trauma Myth". A number of readers were strongly opposed to Clancy's conclusion that childhood sexual experiences with adults may not be experienced as traumatic at the time, but that non-traumatic or even pleasurable experiences can be harmful and produce later difficulties as the child grows up. These readers responded with firm statements that such experiences are traumatic --- , indeed, that there is no alternative, and trauma must have been experienced.
Let's do the dictionary thing with this word "trauma", and see whether it looks as though a metaphorical approach is at work. I'll look in my unabridged Webster's with the back coming off... hmm, I see it gives two kinds of definitions. The first one is the medical definition: "a) an injury or wound violently produced; b) the condition or neurosis resulting from this." Interesting; we already have a psychological phenomenon being mentioned, but it seems to be limited to situations where a violent event has caused an injury. The second definition is the psychiatric one: "an emotional experience, or shock, which has a lasting psychic effect". Hmm again; does this mean that any experience which has a lasting "psychic" effect is a trauma, or does it mean that shocking experiences are traumas? It's hard to tell, and it does seem that some psychological effects are called traumas, not because they are the same as physical trauma, but because they share some of its aspects, as is the case in all metaphors. That means it's important for us to understand what characteristics they share and what they don't share
No wonder people like Richard McNally and Susan Clancy decided to work with a definition of traumatic events that was less metaphorical in nature. Although their definition involved a comparison, there were few issues about which aspects were similar and which were different, as would have occurred in a more obviously metaphorical approach. They defined a traumatic event as "either objectively life-threatening when it occurs (like getting shot at) or [an event that] subjectively results in the same kind of intense fear, horror, or helplessness that objectively life-threatening events arouse" (Clancy, "The Trauma Myth", p. 7).
The use of this definition does not mean that it's necessarily easy to identify what events are recognized as life-threatening, or what emotions accompanied other events. It does clarify, though, that pleasant or gratifying events would not be classified as traumatic under the definition just given.
If people would like to claim that no child can experience any level of sexual pleasure, or any gratification in the unaccustomed attention of a kind, gentle adult, they can then argue that all children experience all sexual activity with adults as traumatic under the definition above. (Of course, many decades of discussion of childhood masturbation would suggest that the first idea is not true.) But if they simply want to assert that all such events are traumatic, they would do well to offer their own definition of trauma to begin with. Without this kind of reasoning, we may have a nice knock-down argument, but very little glory, and not much help in understanding how to deal with child sexual abuse.
[Please note: I regret that an attack of flaming makes it necessary to block comments on this post.]
