You make a lot of good points, in my opinion.

Psychology, I think, is both an art and a science. As a science, it is one of the younger ones. In my lifetime, I have witnessed both evolutionary and revolutionary changes in it. Some things that were once considered settled issues have later come into doubt among professionals.

I think it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that a certain science is nearing the end of its explorations and that all that is left is to fill in some of the minor details. But the history of science seems to show, I think, that even the very oldest sciences can experience major evolutionary changes and even revolutionary paradigm shifts.

So sometimes when I science, or rather scientists think that they are nearing the end of the history of their science, it could be that it is still in the middle of its history or even near the beginning.
Is psychology near its final maturity as a science or is it still in its infancy?

In every age, I think, there are those who think: "Ok, this particular science is nearing the end of the road and it is a mature science now and all that is left is to iron out small difficulties. And then, perhaps, something happens and the professionals in that science will say: "wow, we missed something really big and we need to rethink things."

I remember a time when medical science tended to think that all germs as bad germs. The insight that there are "good germs" had not yet been attained. I remember when Freudianism was seen as kind of the last word in psychology and now Freudians tend to be in a minority. No disrespect to Freudians!

Sometimes a certain set of ideas seem final and then the ideas are cast into doubt by new discoveries. And sometimes then the idea comes back again stronger than before and people will say: "hmmm, looks like we were kind of wrong about being wrong."

I don't know where the "working concepts and theories" of current psychology will be in 10 years or 50 years or 1000 years. Perhaps a time will come when the insights of those concepts and theories will be preserved and incorporated into a much more accurate and helpful model. And I don't know if psychology in the future is in for some revolutionary changes that we cannot yet foresee. so I try to be both appreciative and critical.

Sometimes it is imagination or lack of it which weighs us down. There were questions awhile back when people rode horses of what would happen to the earth when there were too many horses. But then someone with imagination found a previously underappreciated use for something called petroleum. The petroleum was always there but some imaginative person had yet to find a use for it. Silicon was once underappreciated and Lithium.
At one time the burning or deflagration of petroleum was seen only in its beneficial aspects. There then seemed inevitably to follow criticism of petroleum products for their underappreciated negative affects.

There is often the idea that the earth is running short of natural resources, the idea behind scarcity. But the earth is nothing but a huge ball of natural resources. Sometimes what is scarce is imagination, a mind able to find an important use for something that was previously considered trivial.

There are critics of the DSM and its categories, critics who say that it oversimplifies what is more complex and rich and that it mostly facilitates coding in psychology for the purposes of dealing with insurance companies. To be honest, I have not really read books by those who maintain this so I am unqualified to debate it.

I don't know the future of the DSM or the definitions in that standard text. I am certainly open to criticism of it and would like to be intellectually humble enough to appreciate its uses and abuses. I certainly, even without expertise, can believe that it is capable of uses and abuses.

Since psychology as practiced often seeks overtly or covertly to tell people "how they should live," it can sometimes usurp the field of ethics, since ethics also deals with these questions.

I think there is a certain tendency in a science for its practitioners to be temped to use the concepts of that science to try to explain "everything." This is a totalitarian temptation which has sometimes been called "scientism".

So I think it is good in some ways that there are different sciences which prevent each of them from becoming totalitarian in outlook, reductionist in the bad sense.

I think there is also a place in all this for philosophy which regards the totality of all things as a whole and not just as an aggregate as the sciences do. Hopefully all these disciplines put checks and balances on the tendency towards totalitarianism of interpretation of each other.

I am probably wrong about a lot of things that I have written here. What do you all think?