Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed
An article in the New York Times (27 August 2015) shocks us to the core!
“…a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested.”
We are simply shocked! Not!
We’ve said all along that psychology, along with psychiatry, is a pseudo-science; junk science, if you will.
This finding invalidates much of the core knowledge by which psychologists think they understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory.
One of the essential problems with psychology is its reliance upon psychiatric or biological behavioral models—a far cry from its foundations. Psychology once followed early philosophy and initially meant the study of the soul—psyche (soul) and ology (study of). The general thought was that the mind and body were separate entities. Thus, each man and woman was regarded as a composite of soul, mind and matter.
In 1829, Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language defined “psychology” as “a discourse or treatise on the human soul; the doctrine of the nature and properties of the soul.”
However, all this changed in the late 1800’s when German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt established the first “experimental psychology” laboratory in Leipzig University, officially rejecting the existence of the soul and declaring – without a shred of evidence – that man was merely a product of his genes.
By 1961, Merriam Webster’s 3rd International Dictionary defined “psychology” as “the science of mind or mental phenomena or activities; the study of biological organism (as man) and the physical and social environment.”
In placing man as the direct and unknowing effect of an authoritarian and soulless philosophy, those psychologists supporting this view are promoting the idea that one’s mental health depends upon an adjustment to the world rather than its conquest.
This presumes that man cannot, therefore, effect positive change on the world around him but must submit to its random will. Implicit also is the belief that he cannot even be responsible for his own mental healing, as his behaviors are entirely the product of the functions or malfunctions of the brain. In other words, that like dogs, men are basically stimulus response mechanisms.
Where psychiatric and psychological doctrine and thought influence and permeate our culture, those who succumb to this fraudulent philosophy have no hope of finding happiness outside of a medicine cabinet.
Click here for more information about this real crisis in mental health care.