The Greatest Psychlogogist

ALIVE TODAY

 

I am the greatest!

And the winner is . . .

. . . the winner is . . .

. . . umm . . .

 

- OK, so we were a little naive. Sheesh.

Looking at the "greats," we can see that Einstein was one of the greatest physicists, Darwin one of the greatest biologists, Socrates one of the greatest philosophers . . . but as for psychology . . . well, maybe short of Freud, a century ago, the picture gets a lot more blurry.

And further, maybe we're still naive, but we're less interested in the whole thing of "retrospect" than we are in what's going on now. We figured it would really be nice to settle this sort of thing while somebody was still around, so they can maybe be appreciated, instead of - say, for example, the case of Socrates - the authorities forcing him to take a dirt nap, and afterwards talking for centuries about how great he really was.

So, we had hoped to hunt down the all-agreed-upon, universally respected best of the best, asking all the experts who the "greatest" was, narrow it down to the top four or five, make our final pick, and deliver our findings proudly to our faithful fans . . . but alas, it didn't take long for that naivete to be stripped and buried. While many psychologists are doing great work, many of them cannot agree on what exactly "psychology" is, (and are much more likely to give you a sermon about brain chemistry than human nature) - much less who is the "best" at it.

So in this respect, we're a bunch of phonies as much as anybody else.

Maybe someday in the future there will exist some sort of contest for "who is the greatest psychologist," a sort of emotional Olympics, where a persons' understanding of human nature will be as visible as, say, the winner of the mile run, or the pole vault.

But until that time, we figure we'll just have to do it ourselves.

While your LiveReal Editors have persevered in our duty, we wish we could report our findings with such precision, and deliver our findings with indisputable, incontrovertible, mathematical accuracy. In reality, it would probably be more easy to get a duck to moo.

So we figured, since our conclusions were going to be attacked as biased, unreplicateable, unscientific, uncorrelated, flawed, lacking a control group, lacking universality, lacking falsifiability, lacking the voice of God booming that "It's True!!" etc etc etc anyway . . .

- we figured we might as well make our judgment according to real-life, walking-down-the-street criteria. Our findings, then, are measured less by the number of Yale degrees one has, the number of books they've written, articles they've published, or their knowledge of whether Freud preferred strawberry or raspberry jam - and more by how their message rings true, on a real-world, practical level: who really understands human nature and can communicate it in a way that can actually improve my life, now?

We have narrowed our findings down to two figures, two men whom others have said to be worthy of the title. We will present them here, and the rest is up to you.