Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
Nine tenths of the economists spent the last ten years telling us the world economy was getting better and better and nothing could possibly go wrong. The other tenth who told us we were riding for a fall were starting from exactly the same data and theories, so the fact that they were right just shows that they had better intuition, nothing to do with science.
Or maybe the guts to stand up to status quo?

As for psychology, it fails all the tests of a real science: its propositions cannot be falsified, its predictions do not come right more often than chance, and there is no objective way to test one theory against another. All successful schools of clinical psychology are based on the simple fact that most people can heal their own mental problems if they can talk to someone non-judgemental for long enough. It doesn't make a scrap of difference whether the listener calls hirself Freudian, Jungian, NLP, CBT, Behaviourist or whatever, so long as se has the nous to keep quiet and let the patient talk hirself out of trouble.
While I find it horrible the way psychology is taken as an exact science to the extent of determining people's fates in a number of situations, I think this statement it going to far in the other direction.

Originaly psychologists were armchair thinkers and moralists, and there are lots of those still, to be true. But these days at least we have some imperical research as in collecting lots of material and comparing it all.

For example we have the big American and Norwegian investigations showing that people inot BDSM are no different from a vanilla control group. Or to put it in other words: we are normal. Meaning no disrespect to anyone ;-)

As for talk, there are those who have a sublime knack of helping people asking themselves the right questions, and thereby helping them rather better than just letting them talk. Also compiling info about special groups - alchoholics, junkies, terminally ill people, people who have been in wars or terrible accidents and so on have shown useful. For instance we know now why KZ prisoners and some soldiers can have so strange problems and act to weirdly.

But it is not an exact science and should not be treated as such.