Steven-
On the other hand, that a degree of psychology is always going to be tied to the less rigorously testable field of economics, ethics and politics is inevitable since it often forms the basis of these other subjects. It's messy, in other words, and will likely remain so to some extent.
Would you say the same for biology, which is tied to psychology and all the above you mentioned.
Once upon a time there was a girl who was always getting into trouble at her school. She was constantly fidgeting and disruptive in class and never attending to her work. Eventually her teachers, in exasperation, called her parents in and informed them she was being expelled. In desperation, her mother took her to see a psychiatrist. This psychiatrist asked the girl all of the usual questions and administered all of the usual behavioural and cognitive tests. At the end of these tests, he told the girl that he was going to step outside with her mother and discuss her case. She was told to remain seated in his office and wait for their return. As the mother and psychiatrist got up to leave the office, the psychiatrist put the radio on. it was playing some popular music of the time. When he stepped outside, he left the door slightly ajar. He then asked the mother to peep through the gap and observe the girl. As soon as she thought they had left, she immediately got up and started moving around the room, eventually starting to move in rhythm to the music. At which point, the psychiatrist turned to the mother and informed her, "Your daughter is not sick, your daughter is a dancer".
He went on to recommended the mother place her daughter in a school for the performing arts. She did precisely this and, on the first day of entering that school this girl, who had spent most of the first few years of her school life being told she was wrong, suddenly found herself amidst a group other other children who were exactly like her. Suddenly, she found she was able to succeed and that she was not wrong after all. This little girl went on to become a renowned choreographer and live a successful life. If this girl had been born today, there is actually a fair chance she would have been diagnosed with ADHD, had Ritalin shoved down her throat and been told to sit down and behave.
Interesting story but I think your also assuming a very particular definition of what would be considered a disorder. There are people that function that way in practice and do give disorders based on that reasoning. However, I fail to see how that speaks to psychology as a whole. Doctors do similar malpractice in medicine, doesn’t mean medicine is not good. For me personally, a “behavioral disorder” cannot be divorced from it’s context and the person’s values/wishes, etc. However, there would a conversation to be had regarding what social requirements are for the girl in society at large but that is a separate issue of drawing the lines of mental health.
To suggest that this girl quite possibly had a material difference of brain functioning from the average is probably non contentious. What is contentious, however, would to extrapolate from that she was suffering from a "medical" condition that required "treatment".
Well no psychologists and even psychiatrist under best practices is suppose to treat simply based on non-normal scores from the average, even the contentious DSM requires some form of distress either to the person or the people around them. However, I do take your point that those things are often mispracticed.
Psychology, treated merely as a science, independently of the social context in which it exists, runs the risk of doing just that. Indeed, it has been and is guilty of just that, even today. The disgraceful over-prescription of Ritalin or it's pharmaceutical equivalents being just one current example. Social, political and interpersonal context as well as even more amorphous ethical judgements are everything and, as messy and difficult to quantify as these things are, they are important and unavoidable if we do not want to see grievous injustice perpetrated against people.
I want to partially agree with you here. You seem to have defined psychology in a peculiar way, perhaps limited to either psychiatrist or clinical psychologists. But as Mr. Samsa would point out if he was here, psychology is first of all not juts about humans, it’s about the behavior of non-human animals as well. The most famous psychologists of all time, B.F. Skinner, actually did his whole career’s work on non-human animals. Secondly, even within human psychology, not all of it is applied and even though the basic research in cognitive science often ignores social context, other fields such as behavioral psychology primarily student context as part of psychology. So I think we need to be more clear about what we are saying.
Now if we turn to the issue of clinical psychology or psychiatry, I think your absolutely right, there is a larger context for those. Clinical psychology is part science but also part values (both individual and societies). However, this is also trivially true for all of medicine so I don’t think clinical psychology is any more special in this sense.
When I talk of the field of psychology, I am really including that as part of the much broader category of the brain and behavioural sciences. Perhaps I should have made that clearer. When I talk about the entire social context and how this stands partially separate from science this is because, in the social and interpersonal arena, some judgements must necessarily be based on ethical, political, philosophical and other subjective belief systems. If there is too much emphasis on science being independently and objectively, a universal panacea for the ills of man, this is when the dark shit starts happening. In other words, those who would posit a purely scientific approach and would advocate we abandon all talk of politics, ethics and the broader socio-political context of behaviour and cognition (and I do personally know people in the field who hold such views) are also the same kinds of people who sterilized "inferior" people, who took children away from their aborigine parents and sent them off to white families, who stuck icepicks through people's eye sockets to perform frontal lobotomies and who did all manner of other horrors in the name of the "objectively measurable" benefits of "science". The science, of course, did not direct them to do that. Their own dark prejudices did. However the veneer of objectivity that the science gave them in allowing them to state (and even believe) that their actions were "scientifically objective" and above messy, inferior and subjective ethics and morality allowed them, to some extent, to do what they did. I am saying that subjectivity in this arena is inevitable and so, given that, we need to be careful that we do pretend to ourselves, as well as others, that it is not by employing the scientific perspective as a catch-all veneer of objectivity.
All of the above should not be interpreted in any way as my being anti-scientific, Far from it. My own academic area of interest is the evolutionary basis of behaviour (which is more or less synonymous with ethology). But, by itself, it is worse than useless, it is dangerous.
I read this post after I wrote the above so I think we probably agree more than we disagree on most issues. I think applied psychology programs do at times try to pretend to be pure science and nothing related to values but that is a highly mistaken viewpoint IMHO. Values are central to applied psychology and cannot be divorced from a concept of mental health.
I would however disagree on ethology unless there is some applied application of it. Ethologists don't necessarily need to be value driven, they could be well within pure basic science if there goal is to simply understanding animal behavior (from eve perspective) in the natural environment.