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When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?
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RE: When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?
(May 13, 2021 at 4:18 am)Interaktive Wrote: Google is better than a psychologist

It depends on what you want. You can ask Google a question and sometimes it will give you the right answer. On the other hand, a good psychologist can ask you a question, and when you answer it it reveals yourself to yourself. 

Quote:Psychology is not a science, in the sense in which it is physics and biology

I agree with this, but I think that's not a bad thing. There is no reason to think that only physics and biology are worthwhile, or that other approaches to human problems can't be helpful. 

Psychology addresses the mind -- the way people think and feel. Biology can sometimes help with such issues, but this too is less definitively proven than some people like to think. SSRIs, for example, have been widely touted as a solution to lots of problems, but the objective scientific evidence for their effectiveness is very much in question. Maybe all this will change someday, but certainly not in our lifetimes. 

I am also skeptical whether it would be a good thing to have drugs that fine-tune all our feelings for us as we wish. The mechanical model, in which the mind is a machine that can be repaired with the proper tools, may not be what's best for people. (Though for people who are really suffering -- of course they should do whatever helps.) 

You won't read any of his books, but for more open-minded people I recommend the work of Adam Phillips, a British psychotherapist and writer. His readings of Freud (while not accepted by everyone) seem very wise to me. (He also has lectures on YouTube.) Psychoanalysis, and psychology in general, may be best thought of as something sui generis, not science and not art. I think of it as a kind of applied literature. It has to do with story-telling, and how we construct mentally what we are and what has happened to us. It isn't carried out in the interest of objective truth (as science purports to be) and it isn't created for disinterested aesthetic reasons (as literature is). But a person in therapy works sort of as a writer does, looking at the raw materials of what happened and arranging it into something coherent and meaningful, something that makes sense and can be lived with. The conclusions the analysand comes up with may not be true (and therefore not scientific) and are certainly not disinterested (and therefore not art) but to him they may be deeply significant. 

In a sense the paradigm case would be Proust, who lived a selfish and blame-worthy life, but who redeemed all of it by making a brilliant narrative. Not that any of us is going to rise to Proust's level, but the principle is nearly the same.  

I'd also like to point out that Freud had splendid taste in Persian rugs, among other things. I'd kill for a couple of qashqais like he had in his workroom. 

https://www.freud.org.uk/about-us/the-ho...tic-couch/
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RE: When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience? - by Belacqua - May 13, 2021 at 5:03 am

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