The psychologist Oliver James has for many years been a part of the cultural landscape, writing best-selling books, making television programmes, contributing articles to newspapers and generally offering his views. As a practicing psychotherapist of many years’ standing, he has good reason to believe that he has important insights to offer.

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James is particularly exercised by the damage caused by casual emotional abuse – the explosive parent who shouts and swears at their kids, displays resentment against them or tries to coerce them into doing things instead of employing reason. No sensible person disagrees with him on this, and only a harsh critic would deny that James has played a strong and positive part in popularising these simple, important wisdoms.

That’s why it’s so very odd that James has chosen now to perpetrate casual emotional abuse on a grand scale. His latest book, Not in Your Genes: The Real Reason Parents Are Like Their Children, expands on an argument he’s been making for years: that there is no scientific basis for belief in the idea that there is any genetic element to any psychological trait. Even illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are completely down to the environment in which you grew up, not the complex interplay between nature and nurture that mainstream science espouses.

Even if James had conclusive evidence to back up his absolutist claim – which he does not – I would suggest that such news should be broken gently. Very many caring parents already suffer agonies of guilt as they support their children through these conditions, which can be debilitating and frightening. Instead, in recent weeks they’ve been turning on the TV or radio, picking up a newspaper or glancing at a website, to find that James is bumptiously confirming their darkest fears, and telling them that their child’s mental illness is indeed All Their Fault.

I think this is both unnecessary and cruel. James is putting his own need to express his iconoclastic and inchoate views above the need of vulnerable people to be respected, considered and supported. If he was confronted with a mother doing exactly that to her child, I’m sure James would consider it abusive.

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No doubt, in his own therapeutic work, James understands that the way to help a person whose behaviour is destructive is to work with them. It’s one thing to sit in a room with an individual, week after week, helping them to look at their behaviour, understand the impact it has on others and assisting them in finding ways to change it. It’s another to throw generalised accusations out into the world at large, leaving those devastated by them to weep into the marmalade.

So, even if James’s theories were sound, there would be good reason to chide him for expressing them so capriciously. But these are capricious views expressed capriciously, which is, in my opinion, really irresponsible behaviour.

James seems fond of explaining that his eureka moment arrived when eminent geneticist Robert Plomin declared in a 2014 interview on the subject of genes carrying psychological traits: “I have been looking for these genes for 15 years and I don’t have any.” But, in fact, James had already set his back to the idea of psychological genetic heritability, and his view is cited in the same interview.

Plomin’s point was that it was a long, hard slog to figure out DNA. James’s interpretation, which seems embarrassingly facile to me, is that if you haven’t found a thing after searching for a decade and a half, that can only mean that it isn’t there to find. He uses the quote to back up what he calls “the null hypothesis of the Human Genome Project with regard to psychological traits”.

Plomin himself rebuts James’s reading of his remark. Even if he never finds what he’s looking for, Plomin declares, “I will still believe that [genetic] heritability is true.” What Plomin means is that all of the evidence gathered thus far points overwhelmingly to genetic heritability existing, which, put simply, only means that people with similar biology are more likely also to have similar psychological traits. But of that second quote from Plomin, James commented: “This sounds more like faith than science.” Which, I’m sure James knows, is a really good way of roundly insulting scientists.

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Scientists are indeed pushing back. In the pages of the Guardian, Marcus Munafo, professor of biological psychology at Bristol University, refuted one of James’s most controversial claims. Munafo says that through genome-wide association studies “we have identified 108 regions clearly associated with schizophrenia risk. These together account for only about 3% of risk in the population, but when we take into account all of the rest of the common single nucleotide polymorphisms (not just those that provide the strongest signal) this increases to almost 20%.”

James’s misinterpretations and mistakes were pointed out to him before his book was published. In a letter to the British Psychological Society’s periodical, the Psychologist, Stuart Ritchie of the University of Edinburgh responded robustly to a paper James submitted on the same themes as his book. Ritchie pointed out that Plomin’s quote, and therefore James’s thinking, was out of date. “Genome-wide association studies in 2014 and 2015 have uncovered specific genes related to educational performance, to IQ and to the personality trait of neuroticism.” That, to me, sounds more like science than faith.

You have to be absolutely sure that you’re right if you decide to claim that parents cause schizophrenia in their children. I fear that, on this occasion, James may have a bit too much faith in himself.