I am grateful, and am certainly the wiser, for the excellent discussion which my comments under the heading, “The Lethal Influence of the Sub-Humanities”, has provoked regarding psychology. I thank Paul Adam, Dena, Kevin O’Brien, Jim Sekerak, and Paulo. I shall, however, take the liberty of making a few further remarks.

I call an academic discipline a “sub-humanity” when it purports to enlarge our understanding of humanity, but commonly or always uses methodologies, and assumes or favours dogmatic systems, which engender a harmfully distorted view of human nature, human needs, human dignity. Like Dena, and with due apologies to Paul whose explanation of where psychology does demonstrable good I very much appreciate, I tend to think that whenever psychology becomes genuinely scientific it becomes in effect psychiatry – which is like saying that whenever it’s good it ceases, by definition, to be psychology.

I am aware of an irony in my calculated denigration of psychology and sociology. Even when I, or Kevin, or Dena, seek to explain why these function as cults in the modern world, we are using sociological and psychological analysis to do so. Furthermore, nobody would appreciate more than Kevin that human intellectual endeavour has produced no more masterful an understanding of the psychology of (deserved) guilt than Macbeth. Indeed, a fundamental element of what makes most great literature great is the psychological understanding which informs it and which it imparts. (Homer might not be great psychology, but the immortal Greek dramas which his epics inspired certainly are.) The problem arises when inexact sciences – meaning by “sciences”, in this context, simply means to systematic knowledge – purport to be exact sciences, or represent as assured or sufficient knowledge concerning human behaviour and human problems what is merely in-group fashionable thinking.

Consider psychotherapy. The psychologist Hans Eysenck in the 1950s established by scientific survey that people who have neuroses have about a 50-50 chance of improving whether they undergo psychotherapy or not; but that if a juvenile delinquent is subjected to psychotherapy, there’s an appreciably greater likelihood that he’ll become a worse delinquent than if he’s spared it. Moreover, I’m sure we all cheered in “Crocodile Dundee”, when, after Linda Koslowski explains that her female cocktail-party friend is in psychotherapy because “People go to a psychiatrist to talk about their problems”, Paul Hogan asks, “Hasn’t she got any mates?”

Here in Australia a particularly cynical and ugly kind of quack-psychology has been introduced by the feminists into their key power-domains of “interventionist” social work, school counselling, and Family Court counselling. Undoubtedly it was devised by the sisterhood in the U.S., since our feminists are entirely derivative in their thinking (if their malign pavlovian cranial spasms qualify as thinking) except in their infiltration of our government bureaucracies, their “march through the institutions” as they call it, in which regard they boast they have been world leaders. I am speaking of the racket of subjecting children who are in unhappy homes, or who are simply suffering adolescent discontents, to examination by feminist-club psychologists (often males) to determine if they live in an environment of “family violence”. “Family violence” is defined to be not merely physical but psychological and emotional; and, of course, any of the club-accredited psychologists can always conjure up pseudo-evidence that such an environment exists in a home. Action is then taken against the father or, if the mother won’t play ball, against both parents. The parents will be told that if they don’t split up, and the child go with one of them (always the mother), the child will be fostered out – which is what happens when the parents resist. In the Family Court, fathers are now being forbidden ever to see their children when the Court’s feminist sub-judiciary of “family counsellors” and pet psychologists deems that they are incurably psychologically or emotionally abusive of women. The Family Court’s March 2009 guidelines actually specify that if a parent – meaning of course a father – refuses to accept a diagnosis by the Court’s counsellors or accredited psychologists that he has been “abusive”, his denial should be taken as proof that he is incorrigibly abusive.

Such hideous violations of human rights and Westminster legal principles could never have happened except that, in Australia as throughout most of the West, the feminists and their approved psychologists have been granted hieratic status by the politicians and the courts, and deemed to be the rightful interpreters and guides for the community – especially in relation to law reform – on marriage, children, the family, and gender relationships. It is exactly as if the Nazi Party and its racial purity “experts” were granted hieratic status by the courts and the politicians in relation to the welfare of Jews.