Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Now, I'm just a layman, so I could be completely off the mark about this, but this is how it seems to me.

Doesn't every single generation of psychologists pretty much completely reject the findings of the previous generation? All of Freud's stuff is now considered total bullshit. All of the stuff psychologists said in the 50s about homosexuality being a mental illness is now considered bullshit.

In other fields of science, like chemistry or physics, this has never happened since the introduction of the scientific method. Scientists have been wrong lots of times, but never has the majority of the body of scientific knowledge been thrown out. Usually the changes are something small, e.g. "Einstein was wrong about hidden variable theory in some respect." Even the most drastic changes in scientific thought are usually just the narrowing down from a number of existing theories to a smaller number of theories. In most fields of science, we seem to converge on the correct result over time, with very small deviations.

Psychology doesn't seem to be converging at all. Am I wrong? If not, why is this?

Psychology is very young branch of science (Freud lived less than 200 years ago) and its subject matter is vast and complex: from low level neural mechanisms to perception to higher cognitive functions to mental illnesses to human cognitive development to behavioral psychology to decision making. Take, for example, schitzophrenia and bipolar disorder. Even if we don't understand them at the lower level and don't properly understand their treatments, we have become much better at diagnosing them early enough to help people from ruining their lives. It's a huge step forward.

Or at the lower levels, consider human perception systems. We start to understand how early layers of vision work, even if we don't yet have a good grasp of how higher levels of visual cognitive system work.

As a fun aside: Freud died in 1939, just 75 years ago. I know HN's demographic skews young, but I'll bet there are people reading HN who were alive at the time.

> All of Freud's stuff is now considered total bullshit.

This isn't true. Freud's enduring contribution to psychology isn't stuff like penis envy in women or interpretation of dreams, but that thing which you now likely consider a fact: recognition of the existence of the subconscious.

The impact of the subconscious, and the impact of life psychological history on later behaviour (and the fact that recognizing that impact of personal history can assist treatment) was not a recognized process before he promulgated it.

But a whole lot of scientists (including psychologists) consider the subconscious total bullshit.

You shouldn't confuse the subconscious with the unconscious. The former is part of Freud's legacy and rejected by most mainstream psychology, while the latter is widely recognized as an important concept.

Fair enough; a confusion of terms. But isn't it still true that Freud was the first, or among the first, to propose that the unconscious mind influences the conscious one? And also that one can learn of someone's unconscious processes by conversing with them?

The problem with your premise is that all of Freud's stuff isn't considered total bullshit. The mass media, science magazines, and materialists like to present it that way, but psychoanalytic and psychodynamic traditions (depth psychology) are still alive and well. It is, perhaps, not quite as prominent in experimental psychology (which I'm guessing is what you're talking about), but it's certainly still a force in clinical work. Humanistic, positive psychology, cognitive-behavioral, gestalt, and most other approaches were inspired by, informed by, and still use parts of depth psychology in their approaches.

I think you're mixing up clinical psychology and experimental psychology. The aims for both will vary, and I tend to agree with you that presenting psychology as a hard science is ludicrous (but unfortunately the only way to get funding). You're also right about the political component of psychology (your homosexuality anecdote); psychology can be used as an instrument by the leaders of society for political, social, and economic gains and control. That doesn't mean it has no contribution to man's knowledge of the world.

Just because the newer approaches appear to reject older theories does not mean the older theories aren't useful. Newtonian mechanics explains phenomena quite well for everyday living. Relativity was a revolution in the field but there's a still a place for Newtonian physics (i.e. you don't have to erase the classical theory). The way knowledge evolves in these long-standing fields isn't as mechanical as I think you're claiming it to be. Science is much more complex than that.

I don't think anyone is denying the overarching influence of Freud which is enormous, but popularity doesn't confirm or deny validity of his claims. Astrology is popular, but no one consider it to be science.

Freud wasn't a scientist, he was a philosopher and clinician who talked about things that are now considered part of psychology. If you limit things to psychologists who were clearly scientists then things have pretty much been converging. There have been a few big shakeups particularly with regards to the rise and fall of behaviorism, but it is a bit of a stretch to call them "pretty much completely reject[ing] the findings of the previous generation" and similarly large shifts have occurred in other fields (c.f. phlogiston theory).

I'm guessing here aswell but I think the greatest minds are more captivated by solving the puzzles of the universe than poking and prodding the human mind which is much more tedious and doesn't require that level of imagination / abstraction. Neurology might but lack of tools prevented significant advances.

So the smartest people aren't doing it and on top of that far fewer people in general go into it. I have no idea about this but maybe there's fewer grants for psychology and so fewer people are encouraged to go into research?

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