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morgan_blackledge's review
4.0
not finished yet, but so far............
I avoided reading this book for a long time. I was afraid it would be laborious reading and that it wouldn't be directly clinically applicable. I thought I knew enough RFT to deliver ACT and I figured I'd just focus my energy on reading ACT books.
I decided to read Learning RFT after reading the authors other book The ABC's of Human Behavior. ABC's was so clearly written, fun to read and so clinically useful that I had to dig right in to Learning RFT the day I finished the other.
I'm literally inching my way through Learning RFT, page by sentence, taking extensive notes and popping back and forth between other sources and the text. It's a TOTAL blast. My notes are going to be around 1/2 the length of the book by the time I'm done, I'm in heaven. Soooooo much fun.
It's astounding how nearly everyone took Chomsky's critique of Skinners Verbal Behavior as an imperative to ignore the text altogether. What a setback for psychology. Chomsky's critique was of Skinners theory of language acquisition. It's absolutely valid and it paved the way for evolutionary psychology and cognitive science to be integrated into clinical theoretical psychology.
But Chomsky opened the gates to the barbarians i.e. all of the humanistic folks who wanted Skinners head on a stick. The world of 1960's academia was eager to oust Skinner and his ilk after their 20 year regain of terror type control of American psychology.
The shame of it all is that Skinner had something profound in his theory of verbal behavior that got completely flushed with the bathwater. Heays and colleagues did something incredibly ballsy by exhuming the defiled remains of Verbal Behavior and they unearthed a real treasure when they did.
RFT is so marginal in psychology, almost no one outside of the Functional Contextual crowd even knows it exists. But it's crazy deep. It's the best kept secret in the field.
I avoided reading this book for a long time. I was afraid it would be laborious reading and that it wouldn't be directly clinically applicable. I thought I knew enough RFT to deliver ACT and I figured I'd just focus my energy on reading ACT books.
I decided to read Learning RFT after reading the authors other book The ABC's of Human Behavior. ABC's was so clearly written, fun to read and so clinically useful that I had to dig right in to Learning RFT the day I finished the other.
I'm literally inching my way through Learning RFT, page by sentence, taking extensive notes and popping back and forth between other sources and the text. It's a TOTAL blast. My notes are going to be around 1/2 the length of the book by the time I'm done, I'm in heaven. Soooooo much fun.
It's astounding how nearly everyone took Chomsky's critique of Skinners Verbal Behavior as an imperative to ignore the text altogether. What a setback for psychology. Chomsky's critique was of Skinners theory of language acquisition. It's absolutely valid and it paved the way for evolutionary psychology and cognitive science to be integrated into clinical theoretical psychology.
But Chomsky opened the gates to the barbarians i.e. all of the humanistic folks who wanted Skinners head on a stick. The world of 1960's academia was eager to oust Skinner and his ilk after their 20 year regain of terror type control of American psychology.
The shame of it all is that Skinner had something profound in his theory of verbal behavior that got completely flushed with the bathwater. Heays and colleagues did something incredibly ballsy by exhuming the defiled remains of Verbal Behavior and they unearthed a real treasure when they did.
RFT is so marginal in psychology, almost no one outside of the Functional Contextual crowd even knows it exists. But it's crazy deep. It's the best kept secret in the field.
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