Psychsomatics – an etiology lost and regained

not scientific reason, had come to dominate the field of psychology, which for me as a psychologist creates a feeling of embarrassment in retrospect about the situation my field had brought upon itself. As Hull’s musings about the behaviorists’ status in the history of science tells us, the belief in the behaviorist ideology had become a state bordering on pathology, the state of a delusion. Thousands of scientists around the world were afflicted by the condition for nearly half a century. And, more lamentably, generations of students had to learn the oddities produced by the self-proclaimed scientific giants. “Madness of our time” Weizenbaum would probably have diagnosed, had he been a psychologist at the time.

It took some time (more than 40 years) for the psychological scientific community to recognize that a psychology without psychological processes was not such a good idea after all, and it was eventually (around the end of the 1950s) abandoned. The analysis of what had gone wrong and why did not go very deep, however. For the problems with psychology as a science are of a deeper nature than that of acknowledging that mental functions must be the subject matter of psychology. They lie with the idea, upheld today by nearly all psychological scientists, that psychology must be a natural science and not just at times proceed like one. This very notion of psychology being a natural science is refuted by Koch’ s Psychology in Human Context (1999), one that draws insights not only from the natural sciences but also from the fields originally dealing with the human psyche, the humanities and, not to forget, from common sense.

As Koch has argued on a broad social-philosophical-methodological level and as I have documented on the basis of the failures of several ambitious psychological projects, some of them quite spectacular (Velden, 2010, 2016), psychology restricted to natural scientific proceedings simply does not work. According to Koch, it is “the institutionalisation of a delusion.” Most psychologists working in academia (not the ones working in applied fields) today remain afflicted by this institutionalized condition, however.