Neurologists, clinical psychologists and other academics 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 the general psychiatric community frowns upon such organizations.
However, there is also concern that overzealously striking down methods considered to ‘lacking scientific support’ could be ignoring any therapeutic value observed by clinicians and their patients. Moreover, the very nature of psychology is still under fierce debate, and no single central model has yet been accepted by the scientific community, implying that the rejection of any method on solely theoretical grounds could be in error. This fact in particular, combined with the subjective nature of the phenomena under study, makes it difficult to immediately and unequivocally discount or validate any given method or its theoretical justifications.
