I don’t think that psychology fails and fails again concerning self definition. Rather I think that there are many threads that are not so popular, and not accessible to everybody.

Not every psychologycal school is based on the strict scientifical methodology as you had mentioned it. For instance the analitical schools, or the humanistic approaches has nothing to do with materialism. Some of the self psychology approaches even have strong relations to solipsism (see object relations theory, Jungian archetypes etc etc).

The question rather is how can we find the really usable approaches on psychology regarding self development topics. There are many usable theories out there, but very few are known by the wide audience.

I don’t think it’s two separate ways, psy and self-dev, you could also mention a lot of other ways of answering questions and needs, like tradition, religion, or even science itself. Oh, and art. Anyway, it’s not materialism where psychology fails, because science doesn’t equal to materialism, science is a method. There are social sciences or literary studies or science of theology e.g. Thinking about the world as a material thing is just as much a religious beleif as talking about spirits or waiting for Santa. Scientific method “is based on gathering observable, empirical, measurable evidence, subject to specific principles of reasoning”, “the process must be objective to reduce a biased interpretation of the results” and another very important factor is the possibility to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. Now, that’s where psychology fails the most. They don’t even try…

The marketing success of personal dev. schools doesn’t tell anything about their value or authenticity though. There are huge world religions practiced by millions of ppl that fail badly, there are successful sects kidnapping ppl… Only the results matter. I think it’s not important to make theories about how this or that works but if a method cannot be repeated and applied to most of the people with similar effects then it’s good for nothing. A lonely phenomenon can still be true and real even if it looks like a miracle but then it’s also useless.

As for the social demand, I can’t see it, this part of our life is rather oppressed. OK, self-realization is a trendy word but this “need” is far from being honest or serious. It’s rather a synonym for trying to look successful in every possible segment of life. Healthy, rich, loved and carrierist. Or is that all? Not for me.

@teodora
I don’t expect art or religion to deal with these modern traumas, although they could. This task is nowadays given to the two mentioned performers, “psy and self-dev”. Your example with sects is saying the same thing. It’s not sects who should deal with this. By no means I am thinking of changing or “saving” the world.

An obvious sign of this social demand is the number of applicants for studying psychology. I don’t have exact info about other parts of the world, but in Eastern Europe this is obvious. Actually I borrowed somewhat the concept from one dean of a social psychology faculty in Hungary. And I know about the same phenomenon of extremely high number of applicants in Romania too. This is just one example.

Yes, you’re right, it’s not. But who said that?