What? Recovered Memory Therapy wasn't a single anecdotal point. Facilitated Communications wasn't a single anecdotal point. Prefrontal lobotomy wasn't a single anecdotal point. All of them are symptomatic of psychology's tendency to put unscientific ideas into practice before any effort to establish if there's anything there.

Each of the above therapies became clinical practice without first being studied scientifically, and each of them became a disaster. Recovered memory Therapy, in particular, has been called a "debacle" by psychology insiders, but without anyone suggesting that clinical psychology either adopt scientific standards or be expelled from the field.

That you think this is all psychology is simply shows how little you understand of the field. Psychology is a vast field. My favourite parts have to do with attention and perception and have nothing to do with treating sick people.

You know, there are plenty of cranks in physics as well, like the people that crap on about Tesla's broadcast power. Does Physics stop people from crapping on about 'crystal energy' or 'pyramid energy'? No? Why then do you demand that Psychology work as a unified whole?

Does anyone get 'expelled' from physics? Where is the evidence that this happens in physics, that the right to call yourself a physicist is stripped if you do poor work? If you do shoddy work, serious physicists will ignore you and quality journals won't print you - just like in psychology.

If psychologists want to be known as scientists, they have to stop unscientific psychological practices, just as medical doctors did in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ah, you mean back when most physicians were still smoking, an activity which was not seen as adverse to the health? Apparently medical doctors are allowed time to get their ducks in a row, but clinical psychologists - a considerably younger field - aren't.

"Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."

Wow... so... you're saying... that modern psychology is using scientific approaches? Isn't that what I've been saying all along?

You're the one who's trying to have it both ways, by taking a narrow branch of psychology (being psychotherapy) and then claiming it's the entire field of psychology. Similarly, you focus on several admitted failures, that were discredited through the use of psychological science. You're also blaming psychotherapy somewhat for simply being a field that's difficult to work in. Human response to treatment in psychotherapy is extremely varied; it's difficult to find anything that works 100%. That doesn't mean that scientific principles can't be used in working with it, just that it's not as deterministic as physics. RMT was a failure, but unlike in physics where it's relatively trivial to organise most experiements, psychotherapy has long timescales and small datasets to work with.

Yes, true, but think about what you're saying. First, these small theories don't lead to an overarching theory that defines psychology, as is true for all truly scientific fields.

Here's another example of you moving the goalposts. Suddenly, it's not just necessary to have a 'falsifiable' theory to be 'science', you've also got to have an 'overarching theory' for 'truly scientific fields'. This is almost word-for-word a classic No True Scotsman argument.

So... how's that String Theory coming along?