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Notes -
How much of psychology is real? Are "attachment styles" and "trauma bonding" stuff real? I just wonder how much of it is actually useful to read about. Maybe it's like doing an isolated lift, where instead, you should be doing compound lifts (reading something heavy in "applied" psychology like Dostoyevsky).
It's pretty easy to argue that any psychology based on survey data is bullshit-- which is, from what I can see, most of psychology. Much of the rest of it, even when you take out the large portion that was derived from outright fraud or BS methodology-juicing, suffers from the problem of being so abstract that the results are baked into the terminology itself: for instance, once you create a taxonomy for "attachment style," or once you agree that homosexual inclinations are or aren't a disorder, you've guaranteed a certain range of findings for your studies no matter what.
On the other hand, as an expression of our society's current conventional wisdom about human personality and relationships, I think most mainstream psychology does fine. It really does seem to serve a cultural function similar to the role of mainstream theology in earlier eras, which I guess makes sense given that etymologically psychology is "study of the soul."
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