Mercutio said:
Jung, and probably many of the practices of psychiatry, psychology and indeed most of social science could probably be debunked in rigorous application of scientific method.
Just so, Mercutio, and I speak as one who majored in social science research methods. The problem is rather like that faced by your cliched typical retailer and his advertising policy:
"I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted - but
which half?"
Indeed, there is a great deal of absolute bunk in the social sciences generally, and psychology in particular. Unscientific, ill-researched, and ill thought out.
But on the other hand, there is a smaller but still significant body of knowledge which is of real value, and which has been well established. If you look hard enough, and if you know how to tell the gold from the sand, there is a wonderful amount of knowledge to be gleaned.
Alas, it is much more difficult to distinguish between the good and the bad in sociology or psychology than it is in metalurgy or physics. This is essentially so because most of us spend most our lives not knowing anything much about the fundamentals of knowledge gathering (i.e., what is it that makes scienentific knowledge "scientific" and "knowledge" as opposed to "opinion" or "a clever idea")
Most people have the vague idea that it has something to do with experiments and mathematics, and that is about as far as they go. And in the conceptually easy disciplines (for example, physics, maths, chemistry) this level of understanding will get you quite a long way. But as soon as you venture into more difficult disciplines (such as economics, psychology, history, sociology, and possibly even biology), it becomes impossible to learn anything much unless you first equip yourself with the conceptual tools.
Psychologists as a breed are a particularly unusual bunch. They, like biologists, like to think of themselves as "real" scientists like their brothers over in the physics lab, and to this end most of them become more and more rigourous with their mathematical techniques and their positivist methods until the point is reached where, by discarding suspect research strategies, they have become incapable of learning anything of significance at all. They are, if you like, nothing but glorified button counters.
And then there are those that react to their realisation of this and proceed to throw themselves off the deep end of rationality and dive into the murky waters of mysticism and intuition. This soon results in them covering themselves in the excreta of the psudo-scientific. Consider Freudian or Jungian theory for examples of this.
In the end, most psychologists have failed to ask themselves the most fundamental scientific question of all: "what is this thing we call knowledge?" And this is why most of them produce such miserable mixes of fact and nonsense, why most of them are unable to tie their knowledge together in any meaningful way, and why the measured success rate of psychological intervention is on average the same as the measured success rate of many alternative interventions, including astrology, palmistry and the occult.
Psychologists
do tend to do good work, they increase the chances of recovery from most individual problems to about 70% (figure from memory). At first this sounds rather impressive. 70% of psycolologists' paitents are "cured" or at least have their states "substantially improved"! But when you look a little harder, you discover that the success rate (measured in the exact same way) for no treatment at all is 50% (i.e., 50% of people just get better all by themselves) and the success rate for non-psychological intervention is also about 70%. A tea leaf reader, a priest, a fortune teller, or an astrologer, in other words, is just as likely as a psychologist to achieve a successful result.
Err.... I seem to be off topic.
