Is the Interpretation of Dreams psychology?

See this problem, especially want to write before their own article hair up. When I did not study psychology, I was full of doubts and even had many misunderstandings about it. Even now, I cannot say THAT I have a good and comprehensive understanding of psychology, but GRADUALLY found that psychology is not what I first saw, but a more charming and potentially infinite vitality psychology.

The following is my personal study of psychology some feelings, there is a wrong place also ask for advice.

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When it comes to psychology, everyone must have an impression: the zodiac signs, the color of Lucia's character, Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" or the consultant sitting across the table listening to you... It seems that psychology is more colorful and closer to our daily life than physics, biology and chemistry. Yet psychology is both familiar and unfamiliar to us: is it science? Is "common sense" as we know it true? If asked, many people look blank.

To answer the question "is psychology a science?" we first need to know what science is. Science should have two key words: positive and falsifiable.

1. The empirical

Psychology, physics, chemistry and biology were all still in the conception of philosophy in the germination period of ancient human thought, followed by the differentiation of physics, biology and chemistry, psychology was finally separated from the swaddling clothes of philosophy, it is still a relatively young subject.

We can all be sure that materialization is a science, but we are hesitant about psychology. Because we have an ingrained prejudice that chemistry is a series of chemical reactions between reagents, that physics is Newton's laws or Einstein's theory of relativity, that biology is a cell under a microscope... All of these subjects have a common characteristic -- demonstration. What about psychology? When it comes to psychological experiments, people can't imagine.

Some of you may have been paid to be a psychology experiment. You may have worn a brain cap. You may have been led into a dark room to press buttons on a computer. Different psychological experiments have different purposes, but behavioral experiments, which are more classic and account for a large part of psychological experiments, usually follow the S-O-R basic research paradigm.

At the beginning of the development of psychology, many people questioned the armchair approach of psychoanalysis school, which resulted in behaviorism and positivism. The main idea, in a nutshell, is that the Organism is like a black box. It is suggested that we give an Stimuli and receive an appropriate Response. The structure of this black box can be elicited indirectly from the Response. This kind of reasoning is perfect because it also fits into the basic pattern and laws of our exploration of the unknown, so this behavioral experimental paradigm has endured and is still widely used today.

The above is a glimpse of psychological experiments, more detailed content if interested in psychology, please move to professional books (such as "experimental psychology").

Evidence is a very important part of science, but many people don't realize it. We spend more than a third of our lives sleeping, and we're curious about this mysterious process. We know that our brains are not completely shut down during sleep, that we have dreams that can be spectacular or scary or bizarre. Primitive curiosity drives us to search for the meaning of dreams and enlists them with mysterious symbols. Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams satisfies people's desire and becomes a classic. But from an empirical point of view, although Freud was a rare genius, the interpretation of dreams cannot be called science, because the work is based on the accumulated experience of his treatment and the product of his wisdom, and empirical evidence is very difficult.

2. falsifiable

Falsifiability is the possibility that it can be proved incorrect. If we say that the sun rises in the east, then it's falsifiable because we can observe that if the sun rises in the west one day then it's a false theory. So science is supposed to be discredited, to be falsifiable. Religion can't be science because we can't question creationism, we can only accept it, and we can't prove that God doesn't exist. With that demarcation line in place, let's talk about why psychology is a science and how it is scientific.

The twelve signs (actually, I'm referring to the personality classification of people) are also part of psychological research. We often read about the different personalities of the twelve zodiac signs on the Internet, so in the spirit of scientific skepticism, we need to ask: Does zodiac timing really affect our personality? Psychologists have studied this for a long time. Researchers collected subjects' birth dates and mass personality questionnaires and found that personality was a random distribution of birth dates, meaning that there was no significant correlation, and that no constellation group had a dominant trait.

Scientists demand a spirit of questioning. Despite the research evidence to support this psychological theory, despite the fact that it seems to make perfect sense according to our common sense, despite the classical nature of the theory, the scientific attitude is not to accept everything but to look at everything with skepticism. Examples similar to the above constellation are numerous in psychological research, such as the development of attention model can be seen in psychological research is becoming increasingly mature. Once these theories are proved incorrect, they cannot be called science.

Many people may wonder: what's the point of many psychological studies that seem to be common sense? A building cannot be built without a foundation, and a science must have a solid foundation before it can flourish. The real development of empirical psychology began in 1879 when Wundt formally established a psychological laboratory. So we have to stand firm to advance step by step, starting from the most basic, from the so-called "common sense" to verify, our common sense has not been verified how can we say this is right? What if what we think of as common sense is completely wrong? Dare to question, dare to verify, that is science.

Whether in psychology or any other science, we see theories being refuted and put forward constantly, all of which are based on empirical evidence. However, we cannot completely rely on empirical evidence. Even if there are experiments and data to prove the correctness of a theory, we cannot accept it completely. We need to doubt that it can only explain part of the situation but cannot become a universal mechanism.

Therefore, psychology is booming science, it is a scientific territory that human beings must conquer, which will require us to use scientific attitude, empirical research to crawl forward. However, psychology is still a vigorous little tree with too many branches and branches to be pruned by a complete and systematic unified system before it can grow into a towering tree.