Hi there.
Have you ever read a book and wanted to throw it out of the window?
Today we're looking at a book that's pretty controversial, especially
for a psychotherapist like me.
And guess what?
While we're doing that, we'll also help you refine your English
listening skills with a particular focus on British English.
So, let's get started.
I haven't done a podcast on psychology as a topic for a while, but we
know that you like these ones.
And I think that this might be a two parter.
Do you know the book The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters?
It's got over 17, 000 reviews just on the UK version of Amazon and a whopping
73 percent of those are five stars.
But I'm not a fan, and I know lots of people who aren't either!
Stick around for an alternative viewpoint on this book.
And what I think is a more realistic take on human emotions and behaviour.
And all the while, you'll be improving your English at the same time.
The Chimp Paradox by Professor Tim Peters is a book I've disliked for years.
I was amused to read a therapist's comment on Reddit, who said, "It's
the only book I've ever thrown away!"
I feel similarly about this book.
It may help people who have certain problems, but on the whole, I think
the book is misleading and may actually be doing people a lot of damage.
I have clients that quote from it all the time, and I find that once they've
read this book, it's really quite difficult to move them on from this way
of thinking and its damaging effects.
Interested?
I'll explain in this podcast what The Chimp Paradox says, its theory
and why I think it's harmful.
And I may later on do another podcast which goes through a similar model of
human beings, but which I think is much more positive and encouraging,
and really rather wonderful!
Don't forget meanwhile that this is an English language podcast.
The interesting topic is just to keep you listening.
So don't forget to listen to it a number of times until you understand all of it.
Also, don't forget you can easily buy Adept English podcast bundles
online on our Courses page at our website adeptenglish.com.
This is good news if you want to be able to listen to podcasts when you're
offline or you want to have them in your own reference library on your phone.
So, The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters.
This book is on my shelf because a client who was convinced by
it actually bought it for me.
Unlike the therapist on Reddit, I haven't actually thrown it away.
It's something like the saying, 'Keep your friends close, and
your enemies closer', I think.
That's the way I feel about it.
But given its positive ratings and its popularity, you're probably surprised
to find that a psychotherapist like me really doesn't like this book.
But actually I reread parts of it to make this podcast, and I was surprised
once again by just how much I dislike it, just how vehemently I dislike it.
What are the main ideas of the book, then?
Steve Peters talks about three different parts of the brain.
That's B R A I N.
The Human, which he says 'is you' and lives in your frontal lobes.
So it's the most intelligent and evolved part of our brain in other words.
The Human is logic-based and it will attempt to establish the truth and
the logical version of any situation.
He talks also about The Chimp.
That's C H I M P.
That's short for 'chimpanzee', genetically our closest
animal relative of course.
Your Chimp lives in your limbic system.
That's L I M B I C.
And the limbic system is the part of the brain loosely associated with emotions.
Steve Peters says, your Chimp is 'given to you at birth'.
' It comes from your genes and it cannot change'.
The Chimp interprets things with feelings and impressions.
using 'emotional thinking'.
And 'emotional thinking' is based on hunches, paranoid
feelings, or defensive thoughts.
Confusingly throughout the book, Peters makes statements that 'the
Chimp is neither good or bad' and can have 'healthy processes'.
But he constantly characterises the Chimp and emotions as 'negative,
unstable, and unpredictable'.
It's as though those are the only types of emotions that we have!
And the Chimp is based on drives, like the sex drive, the survival
instinct, drives that want to attract a mate, establish territory,
find food and find shelter.
The Chimp is there, in other words, to take care of our basic needs.
The third part of the brain is the Computer and this stores information
from the Chimp or the Human.
And the Computer uses this information to act automatically.
It can serve as a reference point.
So the Computer tends to be our 'map for life'.
And it contains negative and positive elements.
This part seems to me to be the closest to Freud's Superego or the
'Parental Ego State' in Transactional Analysis, if you know that.
I have less problem with the Computer in his model than I do with the other
two parts, the Human and the Chimp.
But I do find it rather reductive.
That's R E D U C T I V E.
And that word means 'overly simplified', therefore having less value.
So my critique concerns mainly the other two parts of Professor Peters's model.
First of all, the Chimp Paradox could be a lot shorter.
The main ideas are described in the first few pages and the rest is a repetition
of this, with different examples.
It is the fault of many 'pop psychology' books - there is a
basic idea, which is interesting.
But the writer has clearly, agreed to a certain number of pages for the publisher,
so there's a lot of repetition.
And most readers probably abandon the book halfway through, having already
received its message many, many times.
Secondly, Professor Peters says when talking about the Human
and the Chimp parts of the brain
" It is important to grasp that only one of these beings is you - the Human.
The Chimp is an emotional machine that thinks independently from us.
It's not good, it's not bad, it is just a Chimp".
How are your emotions not you?
I'll come back to that one in a minute.
He goes on to say 'the Chimp is not good or bad' throughout the
book, and yet the Chimp is characterised negatively throughout.
He says that the core characteristics of the Chimp are that 'it jumps to an
opinion, it thinks in black and white, it's paranoid, it's catastrophic, it's
irrational and it uses emotive judgments'.
Well, those core characteristics don't seem neutral, 'not good, not bad' to me.
And the negative descriptions of the Chimp continue throughout the book.
And pretty much all of the example scenarios of the Chimp are negative ones.
And the very name.
I feel it's unfair on chimpanzees, our closest relatives, genetically, of course.
I like chimpanzees, but if someone called me 'a chimp', I would be offended.
And I imagine you would be too.
So the effect of this name is that the emotions are necessarily
characterised as negative things, even though the writer doesn't admit that.
Negative things which we can only hope to control or squash.
Emotions are not seen as something that has any value or
which can guide us through life.
Thirdly, Professor Peter says, "The Chimp is given to you at birth.
It comes from your genes and it cannot change".
I cannot tell you how much I disagree with this statement.
Absolutely 'No!'.
Our emotional reactions are very much coloured by our experiences
growing up and throughout our lives.
And it's quite possible to link someone's over-reaction emotionally to a [current]
situation to an incident in the past.
We carry our emotional experiences with us and our emotional selves
evolve through our lives, often in the most wonderful ways and that's
what shapes us as human beings.
We are influenced by our positive, warm experience with other human beings,
just as we're influenced by trauma and horrible experiences can change us too.
That's very evident.
Our emotional world is not fixed at birth, nor is it genetically determined.
This is a completely erroneous idea, and it goes against everything in Psychology,
Psychotherapy, and Neuroscience as well.
And it goes against common sense for most people.
Fourthly, Peters talks about the Human living in our frontal
lobes being 'logic-based'.
And yet he talks about the emotions that he regards as 'positive' as residing here.
They're based in the Human.
He calls it 'The Humanity Centre'.
So in here, he puts guilt, that's G U I L T, and empathy, E M P A T H Y.
Presumably, he sees those two emotions always as positives, because they
hold us back, constrain us, perhaps.
Though I would say they can have negative effects too, of course.
But they most certainly are emotions.
He also puts in there compassion, a sense of purpose or achievement.
So he puts those in the logical brain.
I don't think that makes sense at all.
I think what he's done here is package up what he considers to be the few positive
emotions and he's decided that these must live in the logical part of us.
This doesn't work for me at all.
I think empathy, guilt, compassion, sense of purpose, sense of achievement,
are deeply emotional human functions.
Fifthly, Peters constantly seems to equate 'emotional' with 'irrational',
that's I R R A T I O N A L, meaning that it 'makes no sense'.
He talks as though emotions do not have any value or justification.
I completely dispute this.
For example, I've worked with certain people on anti-depressant medication
and one of the effects of this is that your emotions are blunted.
You can't feel your feelings as deeply.
And often these people say that they cannot trust themselves to make good
decisions because they don't have access to their emotions which would guide them.
Indeed, it's hard to make decisions that might make you happy or satisfied in life
if you don't have access to your feelings.
And our emotional selves are very much what make us human, as
well as our frontal lobes and our capacity to think and be logical.
Lastly, those traits of the Chimp which Peters lists - ' It jumps to an opinion.
It thinks in black and white.
It's paranoid.
It's catastrophic.
It's irrational and it uses emotive judgement'.
And apparently, this represents everybody's 'emotional life'.
I agree that there are people whose emotional side can be like that.
And perhaps these are the ones who would benefit from reading this book
and learning to operate more constraint.
I think the group of people who probably like this book are those who value
thinking and logic above feeling and who are largely uncomfortable with feelings
and find them difficult to manage.
If you're already like that, I don't really see how this book helps you.
It just strengthens your idea that emotions are irrational and
negative and not to be trusted and have no intrinsic value.
In most evolved adults, emotions don't just happen randomly, selfishly.
They occur as a spontaneous and genuine reaction to something.
Emotions can be calm, quiet, valuable, dignified, meaningful, and very human.
They're not always some un-thought through, knee-jerk reaction that gets
the better of us and damages other people.
They can be that, of course.
But my belief is that human beings, even unevolved ones like
children, are better than that!
I could go on and on.
I think this book is potentially deeply damaging and the only people
who might benefit are those who struggle to control their impulses.
If you're interested, I'll give you another model of personality,
which is similar, it has certain similarities, but which I think is
much closer to human functioning, much more positive and much more useful.
However, let us know your opinion, especially if you
found The Chimp Paradox useful.
Enough for now.
Have a lovely day.
Speak to us again soon.
Goodbye.