Yesterday Andrew Bolt, with some of his trademark snip-and-drop editing,  turned an essay by art critic Robert Nelson from Freudian to freaky. Today Michael Carr-Gregg -  a media-happy Melbourne psychologist who makes his living flogging seminars and lectures to whoever is willing to pay - weighed in with his two bits:

“I don’t believe that any six-year-old could possibly have the cognitive or emotional maturity to consent to being photographed in the way that her mother has photographed her,” Dr Carr-Gregg said. “I’m really worried that these pictures are on the net already and they will go around the world and that they have the potential to haunt this little girl for the rest of her life.

I’m really worried too, Mike. Much like at Chuck’s house, in my family home there are faded old Kodachrome pictures of my siblings and I playing naked in the backyard, jumping under sprinklers and what-not. My parents have shown these to literally dozens of visitors over the past two decades, both relatives and friends. Mum and Dad are obviously peddlers of child-porn; I’m obviously mentally scarred. Carr-Gregg has really opened my eyes … but the best is yet to come:  

“Now she’s very mouthy at 11 years old, she’s already been paraded in front of the cameras, and I, as an expert in bullying, would be very, very concerned about what that might mean for her in her school life later on.” 

We’re getting closer to Carr-Gregg’s quaint philosophy now - and he knows all about kids too because he’s an expert (and is happy to tell us so). Olympia Nelson might have seemed “mouthy” to him but to me she seemed confident and articulate beyond her years - is that something psychologists wish to discourage? Is his advice to children ’shut the hell up or you’ll be bullied’? What kind of social vision is that to be articulating in the mainstream press? No wonder Carr-Gregg is the go-to man for tabloids when they run sensationalised stories about adolescent behaviour.

Dr Carr-Gregg said many of Freud’s psychosexual theories were being discarded. “I don’t think it’s a viable argument, the whole sensuality of children argument,” he said. “I think ordinary Australians can and do interpret what (Mr Nelson) has done as furthering the sexualisation of children, and no amount of misconstrued psychobabble is going to change that.”

A psychologist accusing someone of “psychobabble”; just taste the sweet irony. Remember when a number of teenage boys were charged with tormenting and sexually assaulting a girl in the Werribee area, filming the attack and distributing the DVD? Carr-Gregg said we shouldn’t imprison them because it was all down to ‘neurological underdevelopment’:

Research says the last part of the brain to develop is that responsible for planning, impulse control, risk assessment, and that any vestige of self-control disappears in a pack.  [There is] scientific evidence from neuro-imaging studies that teenagers do have less culpability than adults because of their brain development.