“All of us were maltreated sometimes,” writes Oliver James in his latest offering, Not in Your Genes. A cheery thought, it forms the basis of the clinical psychologist’s long-held thesis that when it comes to personalities, mental health and emotional outlook, nature is a puny influence: it’s nurture that packs the punches. “I believe it is safe to say that genes hardly influence why we are like parents or different from our siblings,” he writes, nailing his colours to the mast from the off.
According to James, it is what happens in the womb and subsequently in your childhood that shapes your traits and, ultimately, makes you like your folks. Indeed it seems nigh-on every psychological issue an adult could have, from sexual promiscuity to schizophrenia, over-achieving to depression, can largely be traced back to the upbringing meted out by their “captors” – or parents, as the rest of us refer to them. “The truth is that the good and the bad in you results to a large extent from the unique care you received,” he writes. Argue with his stance and the chances are, he says, that you are simply suffering from Offspring Stockholm Syndrome. The only thing to do is to immediately take yourself off to a psychologist. Like James. Convenient, that.
There is more than a whiff of the armchair analyst around James’s diatribe
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