{"id":57336,"date":"2015-05-29T20:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-05-30T00:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=57336"},"modified":"2015-05-29T18:36:24","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T22:36:24","slug":"psychiatry-thinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2015\/05\/29\/psychiatry-thinks\/","title":{"rendered":"psychiatry thinks…"},"content":{"rendered":"
According to Jean Piaget, the ability to create and use categories, to classify things, is a developmental achievement that antedates the ability to think abstractly – characterizing the period roughly spanning the Elementary School years. And categorical thinking remains an essential tool throughout the life cycle. In his landmark book, The Nature of Prejudice<\/font><\/em>, Psychologist Gordon Allport said …<\/div>\n
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The human mind must think with the aid of categories… Once formed, categories are the basis for normal prejudgment. We cannot possibly avoid this process. Orderly living depends upon it.  <\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
… before he goes on to explore that down side of categorical thought we call prejudice.<\/div>\n

Categorical thinking is thinking in general rather than specific terms – putting things into categories rather than seeing the details within them. And one can even think categorically about categorical thinking ["Doctors are locked into disease model thinking, and can’t see the person."]. Then, of course, there’s the almost universal tendency to put the category one belongs to on the top rung of any hierarchy of values. <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Aristotle’s first shot at rules of logic was designed to insure that we didn’t make categorical errors – called Categorical Syllogisms.<\/font> You might recall them as the "some<\/font><\/em>" or "all<\/font><\/em>" logic:<\/div>\n