Is psychoanalysis pseudoscience ?

Psychoanalysis is a bit of vague term. Freud and his work were largely (and rightly) dismissed as pseudoscience by the scientific community from the beginning...

A 2010 meta-analysis found that no trial employing both blinding and psychological placebo has shown CBT to be effective in either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and that the effect size of CBT was small in major depressive disorder. They also found a lack of evidence to conclude that CBT was effective in preventing relapses in bipolar disorder.[47] Evidence that severe depression is mitigated by CBT is also lacking, with anti-depressant medications still viewed as significantly more effective than CBT,[14] although success with CBT for depression was observed beginning in the 1990s.[48]

Though there's plenty of skepticism about CBT for many mental illnesses. CBT is mostly only shown to be effective for anxiety disorders.

And the CBT is a treatment that the patient must practice for the rest of their life, not a cure.

If Freud were positing his theories for the first time in this day and age, he'd be banned from this forum for posting overly speculative personal theories. That alone indicates that it might be pseudoscience.

Are it's hypotheses falsifiable by experiment? If not, it's on par with Mesmerism and Astrology.

In the first half of the book, Berne introduces transactional analysis as a way of interpreting social interactions. He describes three roles or ego states, known as the Parent, the Adult, and the Child, and postulates that many negative behaviors can be traced to switching or confusion of these roles. He discusses procedures, rituals, and pastimes in social behavior, in light of this method of analysis. For example, a boss who talks to his staff as a controlling 'parent' will often engender self-abased obedience, tantrums, or other childlike responses from his employees.

The second half of the book catalogues a series of "mind games" in which people interact through a patterned and predictable series of "transactions" which are superficially plausible (that is, they may appear normal to bystanders or even to the people involved), but which actually conceal motivations, include private significance to the parties involved, and lead to a well-defined predictable outcome, usually counterproductive. The book uses casual, often humorous phrases such as "See What You Made Me Do," "Why Don't You — Yes But," and "Ain't It Awful" as a way of briefly describing each game. In reality, the "winner" of a mind game is the person that returns to the Adult ego-state first.

Are the tenets of any school of psychology falsifiable by experiment?

Are the tenets of any school of psychology falsifiable by experiment? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Anyone remember Transactional Analysis?:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)

Then there was "Gestalt Therapy", which got a lot of play.

No school of psychology I am familiar with falls into the category of Hard Science. At the same time, though, it's abundantly clear that psychological dynamics exist and are always in play when people interact. The same cannot be said of Astrology.

Astrologers would disagree. But I'll concede it.
But you have to concede Mesmerism.

Psychoanalysis is a bit of vague term. Freud and his work were largely (and rightly) dismissed as pseudoscience by the scientific community from the beginning, but a few characteristics of his theories have been assimilated into modern practice. Cognitive-behavioural therapy has largely supplanted most earlier approaches to psychotherapy.

Are the tenets of any school of psychology falsifiable by experiment? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Anyone remember Transactional Analysis?:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)

Then there was "Gestalt Therapy", which got a lot of play.

"Schools" of psychology went out of fashion decades ago, except perhaps in the clinical realm. I do research alongside cognitive psychologists all the time, and their predictions are entirely falsifiable, though I'll agree in general that most fields of psychology tend to be infuriatingly soft.

Give me an example of the sort of thing that's falsifiable. I only ever read studies casually here and there and haven't happened to encounter, not have I gone looking for, "hard" psychology. I'd be interested in seeing how that plays out.