Here’s the problem since psychology began: out of control fictional writing.
Our actions, talking, thinking and feelings are shaped by the world, our material environments. For humans, we are primarily shaped by social, societal, and group/cultural environments. The shaping events from these parts of the world are difficult to observe, unlike doing something for food or stop doing something because it is punished.
So, a wrong assumption has been made that because nothing can be seen in the immediate physical environment, everything must therefore be decided “inside” of us, even though there is no evidence for this, we cannot observe it, and no one bothers to observe all our social, societal, and group/cultural environments to check if those might actually be running the show in very subtle ways (except for sociologists and social anthropologists luckily).
[What we talk about as our ‘inner selves’ is the accumulation of our discourses and talking responses, but they are shaped by our real social and societal relationships. They appear to be somewhere other than the real world only because they can occur when there is no obvious outside shaping. This is why our ‘inner selves’ can appear spooky]
So, the problem since psychology began is that it has been ‘explaining’ how humans work but not by observing the worlds in which people are embedded, so psychology has been pure creative literature. You can invent any fictions which appear to ‘explain’ with reference to some unknowable and unobservable fiction happening ‘inside’ the person or their ‘mind’, and without bothering to check if the person’s worlds might actually be doing all this (that takes longer and is more intense as social science shows us).
When I read psychology I always wait for the middle bit where some unobservable ‘miracle’ event is ‘posited’ to ‘explain’ what is actually seen. It always appears in psychological writings, very abstract and hedged. A recent one I read in the middle of an ‘explanation’ was that things happen because “the body mobilises excess energy” (actually, excess real energy is stored as fat).
And worse is that while literary inventions are skillfully created, none of the life contexts going on are even observed or recorded by psychologists so we will never know what was actually going on for that person in their real world.
So, psychology has truly been 150 years of free and creative literary invention from the early ‘mind’ to Freud and onwards, to some unobservable ‘processing’ occurring inside us. We also now ‘explain’ by a dubious reference to brain correlations which tell us nothing because we are still not observing the natural social, societal, and group/cultural environments which shape what we and our brains can do.
Jerome Frank pointed out a long time ago that the main distinguishing quality of psychologists and therapists is that they are all skillful in using language and persuading people. And this is why. They are trying to get people to agree with fictions.
holisticelephants 