Psychology--what a mess! I have studied it, got high grades in it, and think that is very inferior in quality to mathematics, which I studied, too.

In a practical sense, the problem is the following: Let us say, you have some problems with your wife and you want some help and go and see Dr. Freud, then he will find out on the basis of his theory that you suffer from severe castration anxiety because your wife is obsessed with an acute form of penis envy, which makes her very hostile. You do not like this kind of analysis and change your shrink. This time, you see Dr. Skinner. He says that you do not give your wife all the positive reinforcement, which she feels she deserves, which makes her very hostile. Now, you give her the positive reinforcements, which make her even more hostile because now she thinks that you want to manipulate her.

The picture of the client--and all the interventions that follow from it-- change drastically with the theory or approach. There are not only the above two different theories (psychoanalysis and behaviorism), but many more. As a client of mine put it: "Every psychologist tells you something different."

The question is: Can we find out what is really going on with people and not just what we think is going on according to some theory? The answer is: "Yes, but psychology cannot do it today. But I think, I can together with my clients."

Now, you will say: "This is a bold statement. How should we know that you are telling the truth?" The answer is given by this site. I do not know whether the evidence will convince you. Let me give you some preliminary evidence: I am originally from Germany, but I am here in the USA because the American Government found my presence to be in the National Interest. But do not believe the Government, form your own opinion instead.

Let me give you a little of my personal history: My postsecondary education has all been American (two summa, one magna cum laude), ending with a Ph.D. When I was seventeen, I had read through the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. After that, I started to correspond with his daughter Anna Freud, then the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. She always wanted to turn me into a psychoanalyst, but she never succeeded. From a career standpoint, my resistance was crazy. But I had started reading through the works of Freud's designated follower, a Swiss psychiatrist called C. G. Jung. It was like entering another world. I was sure that the same client would be viewed and treated very differently by Jung. Who was correct?

The answer is none. Both Jung and Freud think the unconscious is not highly cognitive. This is wrong. It can be. Please, read now the page IS THE UNCONSCIOUS INTELLIGENT?

But we can formulate another critique already. To help you understand it, assume I take my pistol, go to the gun range and shoot three shots on a target with the shots all over it:

" This is not all too good," I say because I have the following ideal in my mind:

In psychology, the shots are all over the place because the same client will be described and treated very differently by psychologists of different persuasions. The ideal is called "validity." Something is valid if the shot are right there were they are supposed to be: close together and at the center of the thing you are looking at.

Assume now that over time I repeatedly get something like the following:

Even though the shots are close together, I still do not have validity because the shots are off center. This is the situation in psychiatry: All of them talk the same way, but the gunners miss the center.

To see this kind of invalidity, read through the page NOBEL LAUREATE MEETS PSYCHIATRISTS. For the shots all over the place, consult FEYNMAN ASSESSES PSYCHOLOGY.

Now guess, which form of invalidity is more dangerous: the first unreliable one--with the shots all over the place--or the second reliable one--with the shots tightly together? The first is easily recognized as invalid, whereas the second is not because all of the people involved talk the same way. The situation gets worse, when the people have a medical degree, with all its scientific prestige, and also dispense medication, which sometimes is very helpful.

Let me now address your attention to research concerning the effectiveness of psychotherapy:

The previous is from page 52 of Robin Dawes' book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth.

On the previous two pages, Dawes reports that psychotherapy is very effective. Now, how can these results make sense if the therapists' credentials, experience, their methods, and time invested do not make any difference? What are the minimum requirements needed to make "psychotherapy" effective? Maybe, a weekend course--as one given to an actor, who plays a shrink in a movie. If you want to call a service like that psychotherapy, then be it.

There obviously are people, who do not fall in this category, who cannot be helped by the above methods. A case like that is reported on the page REF ALLISON. Most of the time, I deal with clients like that. I ask clients to pay for my services--which they will only do if they have exhausted the usual cheaper alternatives (low copay, insurance), which did not work.