Sigmund Fraud

It would be easy enough to criticize Saletan for being hopelessly out of his depth in the fields of "science, technology, and life" that his blog-column purports to cover, for being a scientific illiterate, for engaging in endless moral persnickery on questions about abortion and sexuality in which he extrapolates from his own juvenile discomforts broad social mores. But that beat is already covered in blawgonia, so let me say this instead: what columns like his prove, albeit unintentionally, is that psychology and psychiatry are total frauds, more pseudoscientific than more infamous fields like eugenics, which at least managed a pretense of consensus. The therepeutic fields are full of totally contradictory ideas and practices that are nevertheless held to have commensurable value. As a science, they lack predictability and repeatability. Any two psychologists can examine the same patient under the same conditions and draw almost diametrically opposed conclusions about diagnosis, treatment, or both.