Is Psychology About to Come Undone?
It seems that psychology has always been about the atypical rather than the typical. In most other sciences, the goal is to hopefully build a useful model of the typical, and observations outside that model result in alterations to the model.<p>In psychology the idea seems to be to produce the inverse of that, yet there doesn't appear to be any particular end goal of producing the typical model, only in defining the atypical cases to the nth-degree. The result? We have no better idea what the typical mind is like than we did a hundred years ago, but we have exhaustive lists of subtly different atypical models so encompassing that almost anybody could be recognized as having a psychological problem of some sort!<p>Describing a new disease (atypical model) is one of the only ways to get recognized in the field. But all the easy cases have been taken, so bizarre models seem to make the publishing rounds much more readily than new subtle delineations on previously recognized diseases.<p>In treatment this turns into quack and fad medicine like "I prescribe shared strip club night for marriage problems, with the idea that it forces couples to talk to each other about their sexual problems blah blah blah" or "Anger therapy" or "Primal Therapy" or other such nonsense.<p>I'd say that with the tools we have available today, that psychology is due for an Einstein level revolution, but I'm not sure that the field, internally, is ready for this.