At its very best and most rigorous, psychology is pseudoscience. Perhaps that is true with the old literature (Freud, Jung, etc), even if parts of it also offe

At its very best and most rigorous, psychology is pseudoscience. Perhaps that is true with the old literature (Freud, Jung, etc), even if parts of it also offer some insight on human behaviour. But from what I have read, the turning point was when Albert Ellis and Aaron T Beck developed the idea of Cognitive Therapy, which started the whole evidence based therapy movement (they diverged a bit with Ellis calling his talk therapy "Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy"). Aaron T Beck perhaps laid the foundation by testing out his research theories with actual clinical studies (like pharma companies do, for e.g. conducting studies like treating one group with anti-depressants, another group with a placebo, and treating a different group of patients with his talk therapy and proving that Cognitive Therapy was just as effective as anti-depressants in alleviating anxiety and depression, and in many cases better than anti-depressants for the long-term). Since then, there have been a lot of similar studies done on the efficacy of such therapies for treating Schizophrenia and various personality disorders. (Interestingly, Aaron T Beck actually believed in Freudian psychology and practiced it as a psychoanalyst and one of his earlier studies was to prove that it was effective. But his study proved him wrong and thus he went on to develop CT, along with Ellis' and Buddhist ideas.) So it is no longer fair to call psychology as a pseudo-science anymore, in my opinion. (For those who like to use capitalism as some kind of yardstick / indicator of the efficacy of some new technology / science, it is interesting to note that most insurance companies now cover and push for such evidence based therapies.) But yes, a lot of self-help books are indeed based on pseudo-science or pop-psychology.