This was not your point, but …

What this story brought to me was a validation of an opinion that has been growing in my mind over the decades: psychology is not a science.

Science is the process of formulating a hypothesis about the behavior of things in certain situations, controlling those situations in a laboratory environment, collecting data about the resulting behavior and using it either to affirm or deny the hypothesis. Underlying, and crucial to, the performance of the scientific method is the ability for the experimenter to be separate from the experiment, and this is why psychology is not and cannot be a science.

Psychology rests on the false premise that it is possible for people to rise above their own humanity, to become experimenters detached from their subjects, disinterested observers having no psychological issues of their own, coldly collecting data that prove or disprove a hypothesis. To become superhuman, in other words.

Unfortunately for the apologists of psychology, superhumans have yet to be found. The experimenters and the experiments are all stirred together, signifying nothing except the ignorance of those who take seriously their endless chorus of babble.

But surely psychology has brought net benefits to the world! Yes, I suppose. In the same sense that religion purportedly does with its bizarre supernatural claims. It would be easier to stomach the psychologists if they would stop pretending to be scientists and admit that, really, they’re just modern-day shamans.