> its practitioners can be called out on the carpet if they violate scientific standards.

Says who? Doctors routinely prescribe drugs off-label. No one calls them out on it, unless they are doing something particularly dangerous.

As to Recovered Memory Therapy: This has been reviled by cognitive psychologist for decades as the worst sort of pseudoscience. Apparently you don't know what cognitive psychology is, and you're not interested in learning.

Nor does cognitive psychology particularly study mental illness, except for brain damage disorders, because (1) such disorders often are very strange, such as hemispatial neglect, and consequently extremely interesting, and (2) such disorders provide keen insights into what the damaged area of the brain is responsible for.

And cognitive psychologist certainly don't treat mental illness. Cognitive psychology is pure research, and most of the experiments are done completely objectively. E.g., flash a word on a screen for a brief moment, then display a yes or no question on the screen, then measure how long it takes the subject to respond to the question. Analyze the data statistically.

Here's an example result from cognitive psychology: Two groups were shown a collection of faces, and then a month later given a test on which faces they had been shown the prior month. The first group was asked to memorize the faces and were told that they would be quizzed on the faces in a few weeks. The second group was not told that they would be quizzed later. Instead they were just instructed to rate on a scale of 1-10 how likable each face was.

The group that was given the surprise quiz the following month scored much better than the group who knew that they were going to be quizzed. And yes, cognitive psychology does aim to provide an explanation for this.

Cognitive psychology is interested in mnemonics in general because it gives us evidence about how the brain works, can be studied quantitatively, and is also quite useful for education.

> Nonsense. Absolute nonsense

Okay, you go to the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT and tell them that they are all quacks. But if you ask me, it's you who are the quack, not they.

As for us "having no idea how the brain works", we certainly know something about how it works. We don't know enough about it yet to give much direction to clinical psychologists at the moment, except that there are mnemonic techniques and the like that cognitive psychologists have given to those who treat people with certain kinds of brain damage. Clearly our understanding of the human mind scientifically is in its infancy.

Re Behaviorism, the Behaviorist did have explanations. They just weren't very good explanations. For them the explanation of the mind is that it is nothing but a large collection of simple learned responses to external stimuli. But your requirement that science must provide explanation is not correct. That's certainly desirable, but if a theory makes accurate predictions and is useful, it's still a scientific theory, explanation or not. Not everything can be explained. Newton's theories didn't explain what mass is or why momentum is conserved. It just told us how to measure mass and noticed that certain conservation principles always applied.

As to having an open mind, you apparently know nothing at all about cognitive psychology. Please follow your own advice.