2 Robert K. Beshara
continues to plague the discipline. Physics envy describes psychology’s
insecure attempt to legitimize itself as a scientific discipline by imitating
the positivism of the natural sciences through employing the experimental
method, which is the only scientific method that can answer questions of
causality (e.g., A → B). However, ethical questions aside—for the history
of psychology is full of unethical experiments (e.g., the Little Albert
experiment, the Milgram experiment, and the Stanford prison experiment),
wherein research participants, or ‘subjects’, were essentially tortured, not
mentioning the collusion of some psychologists, from the American
Psychological Association, with the U.S. military to develop ‘enhanced
interrogation techniques’ like water-boarding—, explaining things in
psychology is most likely doomed to fail, for how can one explain psyche
when it is inherent to both the psychologist and the psychologized? This
power dynamic framing the researcher/researched dyad is, of course, a
variation on old dualisms—the Cartesian mind/body problem and the
Kantian subject/object problem—, and is akin to the measurement problem
in quantum physics, or how the act of observation changes what is being
observed.
To put it in simple terms, the move to separate psychology from
philosophy, in the name of science (or scientism, rather), is a form of
denial because it is impossible to do psychology without philosophy. In
other words, whether psychologists like it or not, they are first and
foremost repressed philosophers, for unconscious philosophical concerns
implicitly inform their research questions, but these concerns are
disavowed in the name of objectivity or neutrality. Psychologists
defensively cling to their methods, therefore, out of insecurity.
Nevertheless, if they come to realize that they are lovers of wisdom (or
philosophers), they will view science as the systematic production of
knowledge, and then they will be able to see that hypotheses are nothing
but beliefs about truth, which are tested or falsified through a valid and
reliable (or trustworthy) method, be it theoretical, descriptive (i.e.,
qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods), predictive (e.g., correlation),
or explanatory. According to the narrow view of science, only through an
experimental (or explanatory) method can a hypothesis (or belief) become