Neurologists and clinical psychologists are concerned about the increasing amount of what they consider pseudoscience promoted in psychotherapy and popular psychology, and also about what they see as pseudoscientific therapies such as Neuro-linguistic programming, EMDR, Rebirthing, Reparenting, and Primal Therapy being adopted by government and professional bodies and by the public. They state that scientifically unsupported therapies used by popular or folk psychology might harm vulnerable members of the public, undermine legitimate therapies, and tend to spread misconceptions about the nature of the mind and brain to society at large. Norcross et al. have approached the science/pseudoscience issue by conducting a survey of experts that seeks to specify which theory or therapy is considered to be definitely discredited, and they outline 14 fields that have been definitely discredited.

A typical concept used in some fringe psychotherapies is orgone energy. “There is an increasing degree of overlapping and blending of orgone therapy with New Age and other therapies that manipulate the patient’s biofields, such as Therapeutic Touch and Reiki. ‘Biofield’ is a pseudoscientific term often used synonymously with orgone energy. Klee states that there is even small minority of psychiatrists that promote orgone therapy, though such organizations are frowned upon by the general psychiatric community.

But there is also grave concern that a rush to evidence-based practice in psychology will ignore the evidentiary validity of the clinicians observations as well as ignoring the fact that neither research nor clinical practice are theory-free. And at this point in history there is no single model or theory in the body of knowledge we call psychology. This, combined with the subjective nature of the phenomena under study makes it more difficult to separate out bad theories attempting to explain actual results from bad theories claiming results that don’t exist.

(Source: Wikipedia)

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