[Baron Munchausen]

Whoooeeee, what a lot of tangled ideas! These several topics are rather closely related, though.

Krsqk, who do you consider to be the 'founders' of Psychology? Freud was certainly an atheist, being a member of the Positivist movement and the Vienna Circle in particular. But 'psychology' was not his invention. And even his own movement - Psychoanalysis - had some rebels who disagreed with his reductionist views, Carl Jung being the most notable. Certainly there are many psychologists today who want to reduce the human mind to chemical activity in the brain. You can read some frightening things in the works of Thomas Szaz, a leading critic of modern 'industrial' psychology/psychiatry. But the 'reductionists' are not the only school of psychology.

Plato's analogy of the Cave was actually intended to deal with just this sort of mentality. Even in his time there were 'materialists' who discounted anything other than what could be learned through the senses. Being chained up so you can only look at the 'shadows' of things is his image of the sort of person who will only consider the senses as a source of information. Jung's psychology has often been compared to Platonism with 'archetypes' functioning so much like the 'forms' of Platonic philosophy. Like Plato, Jung kept saying there were other sources of information that just the senses. Poor Jung often got tarred as 'anti-modern' for his resistance to reductionism.