What Do You Think About Psychology?

Psychology is sort of a new age religion and also a philosophy. I think it's a lot of shit with a lot of shitty truth.

What do you all find about psychology?

Honestly I've enjoyed getting higher than psychology has been allowed to really explore. That's just me!

 

Psychology is multi-faceted, there are lots of different types of Psychology. It can range from hard science to pseudoscience, I've never really viewed it as "philosophy" per se, but if we consider Wittgenstien's analyses of language or Popper's analyses of scientific approach in Philosophy, then surely we can add several psychologists assertions regarding mental processes and consciousness as Philosophy.

I think if you are to consider the context of our understanding of the mind and brain throughout the centuries, for every bogus claim/assertion in modern Psychology, there are comparatively an exponential amount of good ones and I think it has only led us to an understanding of our minds and therefore our selves that the people of a century ago could not have even dreamed of.

 

It's cut down on some of the bs religious psychology for some of us. I regard any agenda as a philosophy.

 

I get the impression you are using both these terms in a very loose, generalized context.

 

There's a tangible aspect to psychology, and then there's the less tangible part. The problem is that because there is such a lack of concrete knowledge in this field we are forced to apply philosophy to real life scenarios. Psychology is at this point in time where medicinal science was not too long ago. It is still mostly a pseudoscience.

 

The brain has 2 hemispheres, connected by the corpus callosum, with 4 lobes. there are known parts such as cerebellum, pons, pineal gland, there is knowledge at the cellular level of synapses firing neurotransmitters and roughly 100 billion neurons. Brain measuring techniques continue to improve from EEG to fMRI.

There is plenty of concrete knowledge in psychology. I think the misconception there is partly due to those who view psychology as being synonymous with psychoanalysis, where one may lay on a couch and tell a therapist their feelings and dreams and what not or perhaps for others its that the research of say physical psychology is dealing with aspects of our mind(brain) which some may build up to be this "off limits" arena for scientific inquiry, perhaps as they feel it is an attack on their individuality and/or autonomy.

Don't get me wrong there is still a TON to explore and understand in this realm but it is definitely progressing and I'd be willing to pit the amount we do know in the realm of psychology against say for example the 4% of the universe we know in Cosmology/Astrophysics, where there is a staggering ~96% question mark of Dark Matter and Dark Energy that's unaccounted for out there.

 

i have a degree in psychology, with a minor in philosophy. i wish i had swapped those. philosophy is worthy of a college education, while psychology is interesting if you just cover the basics, but it turns pathetic if you decide to actually focus on it.

 

I have a degree in psychology and I minored in special education.

I wish I'd taken accounting.

Psychology gives you just enough knowledge to define what problems or illnesses (or issues) a person has...how to "fix" or help a person is not so pat nor easily determined. I don't know that I'd say its really pathetic to focus on it (lol) since psychologists make an ass load of money for sitting, listening and asking questions. I knew I'd never be interested in becoming a psychologist since they aren't supposed to ever really offer help...but they are supposed to "help the client realize they knew the answer all along". (oh puhleez)

Anyway, when I worked for the state I discovered that education in psychology was only the beginning of how to work with real honest-to-God people with problems. It gave me a vocabulary to work with and that was about it. Special ed came closer to giving techniques that actually worked or helped.

 

I have nothing against neuroscience but it's not exactly psychology. Neuroscience is actually very smart and matter of fact. Psychology never gets a diagnosis correct. I think a lot of the tests have their own short comings and impairments.

 

Men are from Mars
Women are from Venus
Psychologists are from Uranus.

 

I was in the state hospital over 15 years ago and the doctor wanted to check me for hemorrhoids. I was like WTF?

 

Psychology is simply the attempt to study human behavior and the mind scientifically. Like all human endeavors, it's fallible, and like all science its findings are necessarily tentative. Like the social sciences, behavioral sciences like psychology are "soft" sciences that suffer from difficulties in controlling all relevant variables and from ethical restrictions on the treatment of human subjects. But by and large it is an effort to apply scientific methodology, including testing of falsifiable hypotheses by gathering empirical data. Each of the major schools has its own limitations: introspective approaches can easily be influenced by subjective bias,sychoanalysis,which relies mainly on reports of one-on-one encounters between patient and therapist, entails a high risk of influence from that the therapist's theoretical preconceptions; behaviorist approaches using experimental approaches on humans and animals, exclude the subjects inner life that might be relevant: and cognitive/gestalt approaches focus on more situational factors that exclude possible long-term "roots". For further critiques, see http://www.springer.com/us/book/9780387253558 But in spite of these limitations, I submit that psychology has advantages over armchair guesswork about what makes us tick.

 

I think psychology is a load of crap. Psychologists are terrible. A lot of them see people as brains in a lab or products of evolution who are very predictable and easily manipulated. It's dehumanizing.

There are your non-conforming psychologists who meet you where you are. But they usually just BS.

I once paid a psychologist $136 for an hour. He had written a book, written for The Huffington Post, and gave lectures at universities. Expert opinion.

He told me a bunch of crap about how I have a Brazilian spirit and I should get a job that's a give and take and that if I have more gives and takes in life I will be less inclined to smoke, based on my telling him "one lie": that "I'm wearing white pants."

Idk, he might be right. It would be nice to be able to reason with people. What if that's the source of my smoking holy shit. But it just seemed made up.

Social workers are better, but anyone can do that.

 

I've been discovering best methods and mechanisms for years. I'm slowly working out my psychology toolkit, but there has been progress.

I didn't get along with my peers when I studied psych. They were crazy. Yes, there is an inside effort to to make tests show you are crazy and to stretch therapy out as long as possible.

 

Put it this way


Name 1 person in the last 100 years thats been cured of a mental illness

Its all just context

 

i had seen maybe ten psychologists and one psychiatrist- the psychiatrist was okay - but i learned that all drugs were hit and miss and none of them hit the spot, and all have pretty bad side effects.

the psychologists ranged in methods and one i hated as much as anyone i ever hated - his whole thing was to poke you and poke you until you burst then fight it out with foam swords called bataka. i still hate him more than 30 years later. he was useless and increased my troubles.

one woman from when i was young was very sympatico, like a friend but paid.i objected on basic principal about paying for a friend.

many years later - i had one last psychologist, and by this time i was sick of hearing myself talk about myself. the end.

i can't say any of them helped. except the shrink got me lots of drugs. which i tired of eventually and the best of them was lithium which does help one not be suicidal. a tiny amount of lithium a day (250 mg) and no more suicidal thoughts

 

two things really,
one is that emotions really do play a large part in many people's lives,
and on the other paw, its like a hammer to which everything looks like a nail.
in this case the nail is the emotions.

pretty much the same thing goes for how a lot of people see their own religious beliefs.
so there's no vindication there for pretending to know what is not known,
if the imperfections of the subject were intended to establish one.

 

That like everything else, is relative


in Some peoples lives they dont play a large part

 

rather my point exactly.

 

A good understanding of psychology helps one to understand one's own mind and its functions. One can even remould it to a better structure or state by cultivating virtues and getting rid of vices.

I would say that spirituality is but the psychological study of the mind .