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Talk:Psychology

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 80.131.255.38 (talk) at 08:03, 19 April 2002 (*some additions to scheme III). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The below category schemes were added by an anonymous Wikipedia user. They really are not very helpful--they're completely nonstandard and they make zero sense to me. --Larry Sanger

Divisions of Psychology - Scheme II

Divisions of Psychology - Scheme III

I especially like the inclusion of 'great peacemakers' as a division of psychology! Talk about a totalizing schema. --MichaelTinkler

Why not take the chance to make some brains working, maybe even literally? Thanks, Scheme III is from me, as a new Wikipedian I just haven't figured out how to sign in properly, yet. Simply add my name and then fill out the preferences? I'll try it out immediately. --Wolfgang Moecklin

This is a very interesting article but it does not pay enough attention to the split (at least in the US) between social and clinical psychologists (and perhaps other divisions within psychology). For example, although I find the first sentence very very interesting and a little provocative, I wonder whether all social psychologists would agree with it. Furthermore, it seems to me that many clinical psychologists and social and experimental psychologists have rather different notions of what "science" is, what would constitute a "scientific" method appropriate to psychology, and how "scientific" psychology ought to be. Thus, the paragraph on critiques ot psychology as a pseudoscience is way too incomplete and biased. It needs to distinguish between criticisms of "psychology" by non-psychologists, and criticisms of one branch of psychology by practicioners of another branch.

I hope someone can develop the discussion of different branches of psychology, at least in the US Academe, and can rewrite the first paragraph and the paragraph on criticisms to make them more nuanced, taking these internal divisions into account. -- SR

This needs incorporation into the article . Freud is basically totally discounted in modern academic psychology, whereas psychotherapy is still based, to a large extent, on ideas he developed. One interesting example of this is the arguments over repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, enthusastically championed by "therapists" (who, to be fair, were not all actually qualified psychologists at all), and pooh-poohed by academics who rejected the whole notion of repression and did a whole bunch of studies demonstrating the unreliability of memory and the influence suggestions can have on people's recall. --Robert Merkel
Well, I agree that there should be some mention of Freud and a link to the Freud article. But I do not think Freud considered himself a "psychologist" and although many clinical psychologists have been strongly influenced by Freud, I don't think most of them would identify themselves a Freudians. So I don't think a lot of space should be dedicated to Freud or psychoanalysis. Still, there is a need to distinguish between social and clinical psychology and different forms of clinical [sychology such as psychodynamic, and cognitive-behaviorlaist, SR

This is in the article:

(N.B. There are many more approaches to psychology in existence today than listed above, and many more will likely be fashioned. The psychological dimension is now so well-established and universally acknowledged (in the industrialized world, at least) to pervade human experience that virtually an infinite number of terms might serve as adjectives before "psychology" to delineate new specialties or approaches in the field. Perhaps this Fill-in-the-Blank Psychology phenomenom suggests a dramatic expansion in psychology's scope towards an endpoint of total societal saturation, to be accompanied by a competition among specialties for authoritative predominance, or else an incurable fragmenting of psychology occasioned by the loss of concentrated focus within the discipline that concludes with a sea change in psychology's conception and particularly the emergence of a new paradigm of its essentials.)

Aside from being anti-psychology without a rebuttal from "psychologists" and thus not NPOV, I'm struggling to make much sense of it. Can anybody provide a translation into English, please, so I can figure out how to edit it appropriately? --Robert Merkel

Removed from the main article:

Additionally, psychology has been criticized for its dogged refusal to investigate the political, or ideological, dimension of the psyche. Since its beginnings, "mainstream" psychology has tended to be a function of the status quo, accepting without question whatever the dominant culture of the moment held to be "truth," "reality," and "normal" as the foundation of its "objective" study. Critics who perceive psychological and political significance in psychology's denial of the political argue that the discipline evades ideological subject matter - or more importantly, appears to evade it - by turning it into questions of scientific fact and individual well-being. Along with other modernist (Modernism) institutions, psychology encourages us to conceive of the world in terms of individual subjectivity on the one hand and scientific objectivity on the other, and thereby serves to blind us to the larger social structures such as discourses and ideologies that condition who we are.

Who are these anonymous "critics"? What evidence do they advance for their criticism? How do they know that psychologists don't study the mind as it relates to ideology? There *has* been research done in this area (one of my lecturers back at uni, for instance, did a paper relating the ideas of Piaget to the expressed ideologies of a sample of older children).

The paragraph can be saved, with some judicious editing, though, as with a lot of the critiques, I don't think it's appropriate to give over-prominence to dissenters to the status quo any more than ignoring them. --Robert Merkel

I agree with the removing of those two paragraphs above, even though I wrote the one ("There are many more approaches to psychology") and added material to the other. My intent was not to be anti-psychology, and at other places on the page I tried to tone down through editing the alternative perspectives on psychology that already existed. Still, in trying to accurately represent psychology, which I think has a lot of disunity and conflict naturally at its heart, I know that nevertheless I went overboard and just off-track for how this should described in an encyclopedia article. Certainly the proper route which I should have taken would be factual. To really accurately suggest the nature of psychology's importance to modern society, especially its role in all manner of conflict, a chronological history of what it has done over the last century (major changes or roles which are generally attributed to it) would be in order. Putting these changes into a time structure would be some guard against biased narratives composed of mere generalizations. There are a couple of web pages from the APA on psychology past and future that run along these lines that might help as solid material to shape the psychology article, which I'll also post on the entry page as they may be of use to those who come to Wikipedia.

[[1]] [[2]]

(The second one, giving predictions on psychology's future, does talk of a fragmentation and reshaping of it, but admittedly, in a much more coherent manner than I did. :-)

- Erika Schwibs

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