In psychology and psychiatry...

Psychologyⁱ is the collective name of the structured attempts at systematic classification of descriptions, notations and proposed explanations of human behaviour. It is not a science, lacking necessarily and as a matter of courseⁱⁱ two fundamental aspects of scientific activity : prediction and completeness. Psychology, being by its very nature fragmentary and very weakly predictive, stands as a sort of taxonomy, rather than as a sort of physics. It is however a scholarlyⁱⁱⁱ activity, because its flow through history immitates a V tree, which is the criteria for intellectual life^iv.

Psychiatry is a medical specialty, brought into being in the modern period through the process of linear extension^v of medicine as a concept, by the needs^vi of the post-WW2 restatement of the newly invented "democratic state". See the original^vii Ballas piece for details.

To put it simply : one's a lunatic^viii and the other's a bureaucrat ; there's no such thing as "psychology" or "psychiatry", they're just the respective lunacy an' the respective bureaucracy of a certain lunatic or bureaucrat. That's all.

1. This article started life as a footnote in another piece I'm writing (no, it has no title yet). Here's an ilustration, for the historically inclined :

   

   The first time I needed a footnote in this ever-sprawling megapiece, I hacked it in at the end (the first second footnote here (duh, meanwhile made the intro a footnote too!) was originally the closing paragraphy of this article, back when it was itself a footnote) ; but by the time the "fixing of logreference" came about and faced me with the need to either put proper footnotes into the footnote or do something else... I caved and did something else. This is that something else. [↩]

2. Oh and by the way, this regression could proceed ad infinitum, I might now explain what the difference is between "necessarily" and "as a matter of course" in the 2nd paragraph : cars require fuel necessarily, as pre-ordained before any cars were made, by the laws of thermodynamics ; but cars are run on highways as a matter of course, meaning that theoretical considerations aside, highways arise in practice from the practice of using cars, they're the natural result in the common course of the respective whateveritis. Suffice then to say, that my words are well an' specifically chosen, everywhere, and move on. [↩]
3. There are such massive an' self-obvious similarities between the practice of psychology and the practice of literary criticism (similarily the collective name of the structured attempts at systematic classification of descriptions, notations and proposed explanations of written texts) that I find it ludicrous these haven't yet formally merged ; god knows in practice they long ago have.

   I suppose the explanation is somewhat similar to why astrology and astronomy are still pretending to reciprocal independence : much like psychology, astrology clings to a hopeless pretense of explaining stars in the odd terms of their supposed personal relevancy to the reader, something that can never be ; and also perceives the ready liberties astronomy takes with knowledge in pursuit of its state-mandated missions unsavory. (There's entirely no need to explain here why the other side deems itself reciprocally independent -- they're spelled out in each an' any of the grant papers.) [↩]

4. As opposed to sexual life, the other typology of human activity. Fucking in the present does not require reference to any previous fuckings to work, happen, become & exist -- yes all four of those, they happen to be the four aspects of modern reality : productivity, phenomenology, gnoseology an' ontology. Because access to reality is always mediated, an' these are the forms of mediation known, or at least known enough to merit mention. [↩]
5. Might as well fix here the logreference for this matter :

   mircea_popescu let's take this one at a time. do you in fact understand what hole i see in "reproduce airplanes through egg laying" ?
   asciilifeform dunno what's the formula being sought, but how about that they don't, that can go to where built and see that it's factory and not farm ?

   mircea_popescu right. let's formalize : "the notion that airplanes could reproduce through laying eggs is merely a naive extension, in the vein of 'object A has properties a and b ; object B shares property a and therefore it is reasonable ~~~on a first approximation~~~ to expect it exhibit proerty b'. nevertheless, artifacts differ from nature in that one fundamental aspect, that they're inefficient, and therefore to achieve same ends end up heavy, and in the case of staying airborne, weight kills. so therefore, it makes way the fuck more sense to have iron bird's ovopositor on the ground, and construct a btcbase.org/log/2014-11-26#934786 rather than attempt a trilema.com/the-complexity-of-life-a-triad "
   a111: Logged on 2014-11-26 00:46 asciilifeform: have to understand, jet fighter is not really a complete machine. it is a tentacle of the larger industrial slave empire which produced and employed it.

   This isn't to say naive extensions "are bad" or anysuch nonsense. Naive extensions are fine on the first pass, and also constitute the bread and butter of scientific research in particular and of any exploratory activity whatsoever in practice. The only caveat is that they must be reviewed, they can't be permitted to simply stand forever, perhaps even to the point where they take a life of their own (which is also one of the many reasons this piece is seminal in the history of human thought : never before was psychiatry seriously reviewed). [↩]

6. These needs are carefully and systematically disavowed, as (perhaps correctly) perceived necessary precondition of the continuation of the fantasy. For good measure they're also projected, upon the imaginary category of "the public", the arbitrarily declared font of legitimacy and everything else in current socialism. [↩]
7. Meanwhile itself disavowed. [↩]
8. A lunatic does not simply denote the insane (though we must admit there's an undisguisable fascination psychology exerts on they more or less but always somewhat broken in the head). A lunatic is the fellow in that story where Newton fell into a ditch by the process of walking while looking at the stars ; and the peasant who dug him out inquired how he expects to figure out the movement of stars when he can't figure out his own movement enough to stay out of ditches. That's a lunatic (Newton I mean, not the peasant). [↩]