is psychology a science or pseudo-science

i watched shrinking last week because some of you in the milk & cookies group chat swore it would land, and it did! it was awkward, funny, tender in the parts that would usually be sharp. the show kept pulling at the same thread i keep bumping into in real life: people trying to help each other while carrying their own mess, the gap between intention and outcome, the small wreckage that still somehow smells like love. that wobble: wanting to do right and doing something else instead; is what sent me back to the question in this essay: when psychology meets ordinary mornings and messy apologies, is it doing science or just making sense of the chaos? so here we are…

there’s a moment i keep returning to, the kind of small thing that reveals how tangled this question is. i was standing at a supermarket checkout, bag balanced on my hip, watching the cashier scan items with a practiced rhythm, when the woman behind me muttered, “therapy is just people talking, how is that science?” the sentence landed the way a pebble lands in a pond — not loud, but making ripples. i wanted to tell her about trials, about control groups, about measures and follow-ups, but mostly i wanted her to understand why someone would bring scientific habits to something as ordinary as a conversation.

psychology studies the parts of life that feel most private. it studies worry at two in the morning, the way someone folds their arms during a meeting, the way a child freezes when a routine changes. you can’t put a thought under a microscope and get a single neat reading. humans are variable, full of history and context. that is why psychology’s methods look different from the ones in a chemistry lab. they use interviews, randomized trials, long-term studies, neuroimaging, and statistics. that mess of methods is clumsy sometimes, but it is the field’s attempt to be careful with complicated things. when enough independent teams run similar tests and find similar patterns, the claim grows sturdier. when they do not, the field takes a hit and slowly fixes the holes. that repair work is part of what science looks like in psychology.