When a theory appears to be wrong it is revisited.

I am looking at "revisited theories" in PubMed and there are 816.

This is how science works.

A theory is tried out and then revisited if needed. Examples:

J Autism Dev Disord. 2013 Aug;43(8):1758-72. doi: 10.1007/s10803-012-1720-8.

Psychological correlates of handedness and corpus callosum asymmetry in autism: the left hemisphere dysfunction theory revisited.

Floris DL1, Chura LR, Holt RJ, Suckling J, Bullmore ET, Baron-Cohen S, Spencer MD.

Vision Res. 2014 May;98:107-12. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2014.03.013. Epub 2014 Apr 6.

Revisiting the Lissajous figure as a tool to study bistable perception.

Weilnhammer VA, Ludwig K, Sterzer P, Hesselmann G3.

Psychotherapy (Chic). 2013 Mar;50(1):3-11. doi: 10.1037/h0094491.

The outcome problem in psychotherapy revisited. 1963.

Psychotherapy (Chic). 2013 Mar;50(1):16-24. doi: 10.1037/a0030570.

The good, the bad, and the ugly: a 50-year perspective on the outcome problem.

Wampold BE. ([email protected])

Abstract

In the middle of the 20th century, Hans Eysenck reviewed studies of psychotherapy, which consisted primarily of psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, and eclectic treatments, and concluded that psychotherapy (as opposed to behavior therapy) was not effective and was possibly harmful. In the inaugural article in Psychotherapy, Hans Strupp challenged Eysenck's conclusions and discussed how psychotherapy research should progress. Eysenck criticized Strupp's conjectures and Strupp responded. In this article, I discuss progress in psychotherapy research by examining "the good, the bad, and the ugly" aspects of the Eysenck and Strupp interchange. Essentially, Eysenck and Strupp motivated researchers to pursue, with increased sophistication, process and outcome research, but each was defending a theoretical position (behavior therapy and psychodynamic therapy, respectively). Despite the progress, the conjecture at issue continues to be debated today.

Int J Psychoanal. 2005 Jun;86(Pt 3):841-68.

Are psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapies effective?: A review of empirical data.

Leichsenring F.

I have also quite frequently come across this notion in research on depression, anxiety, and suicidality.  Often, there are statistical approaches (e.g., confirmatory factor analysis) that synthesize different variables into a composite, which then operates in a similar fashion to its components.  In this way theories are not necessarily discarded but rather integrated into a broader process.  Alternatively, some research (e.g., item response theory) has taken the opposite approach and looked at subscales of survey measures to assess nuances in previously developed theories.  Often this is identified as an interaction between variables and has the benefit of defining barrier conditions under which a theory operates.

Today, the commonly accepted model of "causation" in clinical psychology is the Diathesis-Stress model, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diathesis%E2%80%93stress_model for a good summary of its logic and of references. No single statistical model is able to shed light on the "causes" of mental diseases - for the simple reason that causal research can only be conducted on the basis of experiments.

Of course there are examples of "wrong" causal models that still are widely accepted. One prominent example is psychoanalysis. Its core assumptions (e.g. "repressed" impulses from early childhood as the "unconscious" causes of "neurosis" in adulthood) have never been made plausible on an empirical basis.

As regards psychoanalysis with its "core assumptions of e.g. "repressed" impulses from early childhood as the "unconscious" causes of "neurosis" in adulthood as stated above I would not consider it wrong. If it is wrong it would not work well In some cultures where parents contribute to these "repressed impulses".

As regards psychoanalysis:

Psychoanalytic learning, training, teaching, and supervision in relation to the ego and especially the superego. Barnett, Bernard. In Independent psychoanalysis today, edited by Williams, Paul, Keene, John, Dermen, Sira, 163-179. London, England:Karnac Books, 2012.

In psychoanalytic circles, the superego has generally had a bad press. This is a pity, because the concept, together with its close ally, the traditional "conscience", does indeed have some very important positive attributes. I have in mind the contribution that the superego and the accompanying sense of guilt make to a person's individual well being and (as Freud himself emphasized) to civilization in general. However, in this chapter, I, too, will treat the superego as the villain of the piece, whatever the piece is. In this chapter, I describe some of the problems of psychotherapeutic training and education. I suggest that a central aim is to promote ego strength and minimise adverse superego influence and, more specifically, to seek to avoid "superego intropression". In doing this, I suggest that, in approaching these dilemmas, it is helpful to bear in mind and apply a few of Winnicott's central and interrelated ideas and especially his stress on authenticity, spontaneity, living creatively, and playing. Finally, I attempt to illustrate my use of his ideas with examples from my work as supervisor and teacher.

Psychoanalytic depth: A contemporary concept? Foehl, John C.. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 24.3 (May 2014): 287-288.

Although it sounds antiquated to refer to psychoanalysis as “depth psychology,” we continue to use the metaphor in relation to our clinical work. What does depth mean as we think about and engage in our work today? This is an introduction to three different arguments for a contemporary understanding of psychoanalytic depth followed by a discussion.

As a non-academic making anecdotes from field experience, I think that no explanation in clinical psychology meets historic criteria for medical "cause."

Diathesis-Stress model, referenced above is so simple as to be nearly useless except in conversation or treatment, where one goes from underlying vulnerability to stressful life incidents and back according to what the patient or family can tolerate or accept in a given moment.

Koch suggested four things for disease, thinking about infectious diseases: that the agent of disease is present in all patients (he initially added that it has to be absent from healthy controls, then learned about "silent carriers"), 2. that the agent can be isolated and grown in laboratory culture. 3. that the agent will cause the disease if introduced to secondary host. 4. That the agent can then be identified in the secondary host as identical to the original.

Working on cancer, Bradford Hill made a longer list of nine criteria, listed with critique at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill%27s_criteria

Because I work in parent support as a non-professional on a team with clinical social workers, my own practice in psychoeducation is to state that we do not know causes of behaviors, and that diagnoses in clinical psychology/psychiatry are operational and something like "bipolar affective disorder" may turn out to be 10, 30, or 200 diseases when we do know causes. What we know now are associations, and I describe to parents some developmentally age-appropriate aspects of the behaviors, some possible diagnoses associated with the troubling behaviors, and some interventions that have worked for some youth and their families.

It is a fair bet that almost all contemporary theories of cause in clinical psychology will be "proven" wrong at least once, and several will be revived afterwards, and some of those will be proven wrong again. What we have are treatments, and it is very difficult to establish criteria for how well they work, never mind *how* they work. I know some very good clinicians from whom the phrase "evidence-based practice" is a red flag and a warning.

So we try to help and try to do no harm, and since stigma traumatizes and many treatments traumatize and trauma reactions are a mental health problem... it is hard even to do no harm.

I love science, and I even sort of like pharmaceutical companies, and wish they would divert a few people from the snark hunt for a dementia drug back to finding an anti-depressant that worked more quickly than 4-6 weeks, but hold not thy breath.

This question was discussed at length in a classic, though depressing, article by Paul Meehl. Published in 1978, it is entitled "Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks." You should be able to find a PDF copy on line. An inadequate summary of Meehl's main point might go like this: We pay lip service to the concept of falsifiability and pretend that significance tests are doing this for us. But in fact, significance tests do not expose our theories or hypotheses to a serious risk of being falsified. In part, this is because everything really is related to everything else, so if the sample is large enough, significant relationships will tend to emerge. What happens, then, is that a fairly interesting idea is proposed with one or two studies that seem to back it up. Interest flares, and researchers scurry around to investigate further. As the results come in (some positive, some negative), there is a gradual loss of faith and interest in the idea. Even if it had merit, it fades away. Even if it didn't have any merit, it won't just die out altogether. What we ought to be doing, says Meehl, is developing models that generate fairly precise point predictions, then testing those out and modifying or rejecting them if they don't.

Incidentally, although Meehl was as hard-headed a thinker as you could ask for, he would have disagreed vehemently with the commentators who claim that Freud's ideas were untestable or have been proven wrong. (And I would add that most such commentators have little or no idea what has been going on with process and outcome research in psychodynamic psychotherapy for the last 30 or 40 years. It's as if we said the neuroscience of learning and memory was bogus because Karl Lashley made some mistakes.)

In the case of schizophrenia, I think one core problem is that because the disorder is so disabling to so many patients, they tend to perform abnormally on virtually anything one measures. So the challenge is to identify the areas of selective deficit (i.e., those that go beyond the expected level). Another problem is the well-known heterogeneity of what is more properly called the group of schizophrenias.