I hope that was just a proforma rant, because you're talking to somebody whose work involves facilitating the training of psychologists, and thus constant association with them. And one of whose siblings is a school counselor, i.e. an applied psychologist.

It's a good thing that the field has evolved beyond Freud. He set a marker in his time, and you're right, in the normal course of things, a generation is just about long enough for a fad to peak and then begin its decline. The 50s and 60s were doomed to be overly influenced by the popular misconceptions about Freudianism. How could "anal retentive" not turn into an epithet? Ten-year-olds just love those poopie references.

Then too, there's a growing dichotomy between psychiatry and psychology. The former is a branch of medicine, and can't seem to shake its addiction to powerful pharmaceuticals. The best you can say about psychiatry is that at least it doesn't consider a lobotomy the treatment of first resort any longer.

Sure psychologists are more touchy-feely today. Unlike psychiatrists, psychologists are in constant contact with their patients, in a form that encourages seeing them as people rather than lab rats. The field has coevolved with society, and is indeed a reflection of the growth of liberal values. You could say, with reasonable precision, that psychiatrists are the conservative branch, and psychologists, the liberals.

Speaking of psychology, and to change the subject only a little, I've been doing more reading since our last conversation about the psychology of partisan politics, with a morbid fascination with rightwing pathologies. I'm currently reading "Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences", which is just as interesting as the provocative title suggests.

Show of hands: Who likes broccoli? Turns out to be a marker for conservatism, because there's a gene that enhances the sensitivity of taste buds for bitterness, which turns out to be strongly correlated with self-identification as conservative. It was George HW Bush, I believe, who famously denounced the green stinking veggie. Now me, I eat broccoli several times a week. Go figure.

More when I finish the book. For a taste in the meantime, check out http://neuropolitics.org/. Their front page article is currently "Sociosexuality: The Reproductive Dichotomy Theory of Conservatives and Liberals". That's got to be a good read!

Oh, one last thought, speaking of sociosexuality: The book reproduces a table of responses by conservatives and liberals to a survey about their sexuality. I was fascinated to see that conservative women report having coitus around four times a week, but conservative men reported coitus only about twice a week. I guess they should have included pool boys and gardeners in that survey...