There are many camps of people in psychology. Each makes considerable progress within their own niche. But there is not a global shared understanding of reality that marks the shared paradigms of the hard sciences. Without that, it is hard for an external observer to look at the subject and discern clear progress. See Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for more on this.

This is an objective statement, and can be proven in many ways. A fun instance of which is the inability of publishers, after carefully studying citation patterns, to identify core journals in psychology. Which is why the serial pricing crisis does not affect psychology. (I ran across this one in [link|http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html|http://www.arl.org/a...s/138/guedon.html].)

Again, this is not to say that lots of progress is not made. And that one psychologist cannot look at another and agree that they made progress. It is merely saying that deep divisions about what the best approaches are exist and persist.

Furthermore this is not a statement about the quality of people working in the subject. It has more to do with the subject matter than anything else. People are complex, and there are multiple ways to accomplish the same goal. As long as people using different approaches see success, it is hard to get consensus that it is good to focus on any single approach.

An amusing but simple example of how different methods can accomplish the same goal is the question of how to teach people to project their voice when they sing. It is possible to go through a lot of exercises about posture, opening your throat, etc to learn to project. (At at some point a serious singer needs to learn that.) But you can accomplish a lot of the same thing by telling someone to bend over, and sing while paying attention to how it feels in your forehead, right between the eyes. Then stand up, sing, and try to reproduce that feeling. The same sensation that is caused by blood in your head is also caused by vibration, and the continuous feedback helps people figure out the posture etc on their own!

Cheers,
Ben

I'll probably talk to him, but I'm unlikely to put a lot of energy into trying to convince him to change his beliefs.

After all I don't have anything useful to replace them with. If they work for him, then fine.

However I'd suggest that he not try to change my beliefs.

Cheers,
Ben

For instance I have trouble believing that a Freudian analyst, no matter how likeable, is going to actually help much.

But within reason, you've got a good point.

Cheers,
Ben

But it does make separating the effects of the methodology from the practitioner that much harder to do.

Cheers,
Ben