Is psychology and ART or a SCIENCE?

Just sharing my ideas and knowledge of psychology. I am not an expert, I am a normal person that suffers with bipolar II, but I feel that part of my recovery is knowledge.

Psychologist are not all the same. Their perspectives vary greately and in my experience it has been very important to find the right one.

There are psychologists that strongly believe in SCIENCE alone. For them psychology is mostly a science. They see the fictional nature of the self as grounds for banishing all talk of it from the realm of neuron centere, scientific psychology. For them mental illness is an illness proper where the brain is everything including the fact that the brain gives rise to consciousness. Even though there is no definite evidence for the idea that consciousness raises from brain matter they go with this belief which, of course, is not a scientific thing to do at all. Consciousness is an area of scientific philosophy that defies rationality, that remains a mistery. We simply do not know enough about consciousness to speculate about it. To this day anything is possible including the idea that consciousness, far from being in the brain, may be an energy found in the whole Universe, the whole Universe may be conscious. Everything may be conscious. We simply do not know for sure, we have no solid evidence. Science has not yet found out the origins of consciousness with certainty. It is all speculation.

There are other psychologists that give more importance to the ART aspect of psychology. Accordingly they see the fictional nature of 'the self' as the 'firm' fundation from which 'person centered psychology proceeds'.

What does this mean?

We are beings that make sense of our life by narrating stories, stories about our lives. We are storied beings or simply people that need to tell stories to make sense of our life. Our life is a story, a lived story. And while the mind, as in consciousness, may or may not rise from the brain, our thoughts and visions and stories are powerful and have a real impact on real life and oon our bodily functions.

Our thoughts, while abstract, have a real impact on our well being. In this sense, trying to ban the self from neuron centered psychology is the biggest mistakes that cen be made. And yet, some psychologists, favour science wanting to eradicate any notion of the self. These are the psychology of the laboratory where they study the material brain matter, neurons, chemical reaction and experiment with small animals.

The implications of this is that while medication may be necessary for a treatment, therapy is also important because we make sense of our life by telling stories about ourselves and others and because thoughts and ideas have a real impact on our condition.

Fortunately, many psychologists today, but not all, do accept the fact that psychology is both and ART and a SCIENCE.