From: utzoo!utcsrgv!donald
Newsgroups: net.misc
Title: REAL sciences don't eat quiche (reply to reply)
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.402
Posted: Thu Jun 17 16:31:06 1982
Received: Thu Jun 17 16:53:10 1982


Re: Laura's (utzoo!laura) reply to my reply.

I think you have confused the distinctions between PSYCHOLOGY and PSYCHIATRY.
They have the same relationship to each other as a biologist has to a doctor.
Psychology is the (at present fledgling) science which attempts to develop a
theory of human behaviour and the mind.  Although it is a young science with
rapidly fluctuating theories, that in no way equates it with Alchemy.
Psychologists are real scientists, regardless of whether they eat quiche.
Psychology has tried to force anything on anybody.  It is the psychiatrists who
attempt to apply the fledgling theories of psychology that you complain about.
But your furor should not be be directed to either psychologists or
psychiatrists, but to the people that go to them.  I don't see what you are
so paranoid about, the situation is no different than in the medical profession,
although I would agree that psychiatrists are roughly at the point where doctors
were when they were still bleeding people with leeches!

Your complaints about rival and contradictory psychological theories and their
transient natures are irrelevant.  That is the way of science.  Half a century
ago people were saying "Light is a particle" while other people were saying
"Light is a wave".  In astronomy we had Big Bang and Steady State.  Theories
are proposed and discarded in the arena (or to quote Sagan, "Science is a
self-correcting process").  Faith has little to do with it.

Anyway, rather than clutter up net.misc with our verbose flames, I'll move this
discussion to mail if you are agreeable.

						Don Chan (utcsrgv!donald)