The Scope of Psychology

I am initially tempted to refer readers to introductory psychology textbooks used in universities such as David Myers’ Psychology or Coon et. al.’s newer Introduction to Psychology for a general introduction, Todd and Bohart’s Foundations of Clinical and Counseling Psychology or Clara Hill’s Helping Skills for therapeutic fundamentals, or Comer & Comer’s Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology for the majority consensus on disorders.

These books are comprehensive and scientific, but give a false impression that what psychology is or how people work has been settled. The scientific status of psychology is largely a product of modern perception or, more accurately, great marketing by the American Psychological Association (APA).

At least initially, we must begin with the fact that psychology, generally conceived, is not a unified discipline. We must at least conceive four disciplines to point to what is popularly meant by psychology — psychology proper (modeling and treating the mind), psychiatry (medicalized for prescription and diagnostic formality), and psychotherapy (the implementation of the principles of these disciplines in a formal treatment setting).

Distinguishing these three terms — psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy — is only the beginning. Psychology must immediately break into clinical, theoretical, and research fields, which are very disparate, different, and often unrelated, not to mention the views within these fields which often compete, such as behaviorism and cognitivism (on causality), constructivism and positivism (on meaning), dynamic and individual views (on determinism). Psychiatry splits into distinctions that meet medical and prescription needs, as well as the development and application of diagnostic criteria for mental disorders. And finally, psychotherapy breaks down into treatment approaches which either work, or don’t, according to previously held views of human wellness derived from whichever theoretical psychological or psychiatric framework the practitioner derives there definitions, reaching from psychodynamic approaches (assuming fixed systems of meaning) to psychoanalytical (treating disorders developmental disruption, seeing psychodynamic ideas as close to religious) to cognitive-behavioral (focusing mainly on resolving self-disruption through behavioral reconditioning and cognitive restructuring).

The psychology journal Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science recently devoted an issue to discussing whether psychology is, in fact, outdated. In this issue, Aaro Toomela comments, “psychology today is characterized by the incoherence of definitions of core constructs and lack of consensus in the scientific community.” ¹ Luca Tato replies that “psychology is neither a hard science nor a soft science,” but “an ecological life science, whose object is the whole system of co-developmental relations constituted by the presence of the organism in a given environment.” ²

This debate is nothing new. Even before many of the theories that dominate the landscape of modern psychology today were born, Rudolf Dreikurs comments in 1960 in The Journal of Individual Psychology: “we no longer need any schools of thought … the adherents to any one school, with their almost religious zeal, seem to discredit the whole field of psychology, making it a battleground of contrasting dogmas instead of integrating all available information into one systematic body of reliable knowledge.” ³

Dilemmas in Psychology

The discipline of psychology represents a paradox in human thought. On the one hand, we will never understand what human experience is on a philosophical level, and on the other, we necessarily assume a stable knowledge base in order to accurately describe the past (personal and global) and make demonstrably calculated predictions about the future, diagnostically and prognostically.

In other words, philosophy is mediating discipline between the abstractions of philosophy and the concreteness of human experience. Psychology neither has sure footing in epistemological nor scientific status. The discipline cannot reach both ends of the chasm it needs to bridge in order to do its job with the tools it has.

Nevertheless, it exists because it must. The realities it addresses exist, and the tools it uses are appropriate. The rise of psychological science in the early 20th century raised the bucket into which all confusion and frustration about the human experience was poured.

Psychology tried to medicalize itself through Freud, but that movement largely failed. People sometimes incorrectly refer to German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt as the founder of experimental psychology. ⁴ More popularly, the Russian Ivan Pavlov and his dogs received unwanted credit for his work, because it was being made into American behaviorist dogma faster than he could synthesize his own insights. ⁵ But it was truly the American philosopher William James of Harvard who created modern psychology as we know it, having mentored key figures who began the American Psychological Association (APA) primarily through an interest in studying religious experience. Through their work, the academy became aware of many false assumptions about the human experience (such as the accuracy of our own self-reflection), and it also prompted the institutional consolidation of the discipline to fill the scientific gap that religious professionals had filled for most of history.

It is in this place that we now stand as we approach psychology. It is a discipline that deserves to be taken seriously, but the way in which each published paper settles some issue about how humans work or behave is unfounded. More than this, the popular use of psychiatric labels in the DSM has become a serious problem for the profession and only makes the problem of accurately understanding human beings more complex. Cultural bias is now a catalyst for bad research hypotheses and what researchers call the “null-avoidance” phenomenon (4/5 studies are not published, because the findings are simply insignificant, which means the current psychological statistics data pool is missing 80% of the information should factor into the average of our understanding of the human populous).

I’m interested in the thinkers that shaped and continue to innovate in this discipline because it holds many of our most human concerns. Technical psychology is also the place where power consolidates, both interpersonally and academically, and should be treated with both respect for the necessity of its institutions and suspicion toward those who adopt a dogmatic disposition about any psychological claim.