Those who say psychology should be more like physics should read two recent articles and get their heads turned around: physics is becoming more like psychology.
A new article about Freud in Prospect Magazine begins with a fundamental error: it suggests that Freud has been repudiated by psychology for refusing to flatter mankind.
While his insistence that the psyche is neither a happy place nor amenable to reason may be out of step with contemporary culture – very out of step if you look at the self-help section in a book store – that has little or nothing to do with Freud’s reception by psychology. Instead, as Eugene Taylor has so ably documented, psychology was taken over by experimentalists with hard science envy. Freud was repudiated not because his philosophical ideas were out-of-step, but because he had philosophical ideas at all. By the end of the 20th century, mainstream psychology had jettisoned everything that wasn’t provable with computer modeling under laboratory conditions.
A fascinating article in The Atlantic points out that the same thing happened to physics, the hardest of the hard sciences … which also underwent revolutionary transformations during Freud’s lifetime. Continue reading The history of Freud and the future of physics