ABSTRACT
Psychology may be said to have broken with philosophy as a study of the mind in the 1870s, arguably with long roots in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks 1 . It developed in different parts of the world and splintered soon enough into different schools of enquiry. At the end of the 19th century a would-be scientific behaviourism began to assert itself against a psychoanalytic psychology that relied on privately derived and non-verifiable case studies. It remains true today that Freudian psychology is suspect within academic departments of psychology. Behaviourism, however, especially in its originally classical insistence on there being no mind for science to study, had to give way to the cognitive dimension (there is a mind) and hence the broad discipline of cognitive science has arisen, which also includes information science and neuroscience. Like sociology, however, psychology is built on promises it never fulfils and is characterised by a weakness of purpose, nebulousness of scope and poor achievement when compared with the natural sciences.
