When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?

[Belacqua]

The link between conditioning, testability and Skinner needed no clarification.

Certainly you could put together a philosophical argument to try to persuade us that testability makes psychology better. The normal characteristics of science -- testability, quantifiability, repeatability, etc. -- may or may not be important for psychological projects. We'd have to have reasons to believe that, and the reasons would need to be backed up.

I am sure that for certain projects done by psychologists, these things are appropriate. For example, if a factory owner hired a psychologist to increase the workers' output and reduce sick days, the tests and measures would demonstrate success of failure. 

The worry I have is that this plugs psychology into an ideology that serves capitalism. And I have no reason to believe that the fundamental questions of psychology -- how we feel what we feel, what makes us happy or sad -- has any relation to such an ideology. I suspect that the farther our psychological therapies distance themselves from such an ideology the greater their results will be -- in a human, not a business sense. 

Since most science is funded with a goal, it is almost always provided from the beginning with ideological assumptions. A lively productive life is good. A contemplative life of withdrawal is bad. Happiness is achieved in certain societally-determined ways, etc. The danger is that what testable psychology tests is adherence to these pre-determined goals, whether they are best for the individual or not. 

Freudian talk therapy is in no way testable or quantifiable. There is no way to prove, even if you've done it for a few years, that it was a useful expenditure of money. You may be sad when you finish it. Nonetheless, it still may be a very valuable way to spend one's time.

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Psychology still seems to be at the level of alchemy: there is a lot of interesting data being collected, but there is also a lot of hokum and nonsense. There is a hope it will actually evolve into a science (as alchemy did to chemistry), but that is going to take a LOT more work.

Here is the latest issue from the annual review of psychology: Volume 72, 2021 | Annual Review of Psychology 

Based on the titles and their abstracts, could you point out which article seems like alchemy to you? The first article "Active Forgetting: Adaptation of Memory by Prefrontal Control" is open access if you want to skim through it and make any comments.

Forgive me for replying to something you've deleted -- I thought it was interesting. 

I agree that Freud is an outlier in many ways and certainly not the beginning. In William James' Varieties of Religious Experience there's a page where he lists some younger people in Europe who are doing promising work, and there is Freud's name in among a list of others who are almost entirely unknown today. He stands out to us, but to James he was one of many. 

I have a book on my shelf here called Plato's Psychology. And it's pretty clear that Plato was reacting to Heraclitus and Parmenides. So they'd win the prize for earliness, I'm pretty sure. Plotinus seems to be the first person to suggest that people have a part of their minds of which they are not conscious -- later called a subconscious. 

Though we may prefer the more recent guys, I think it's a mistake to rule somebody out just because he was early. There are still enormous benefits in reading them.