It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology: "The neglect has been criminal—and inexplicable. For about a century it's been assumed that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?"
"All right," he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. "Why?"
"Lieberman," she said. "Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the old-line topological psychology men—don't let the lingo throw you, Charles; it's just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on the mengenlehre psychology school—point-sets of emotions, class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits by proving that their constructs didn't correspond to the emotions and reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he tried the same acid test on his own school's constructs and found out that they didn't correspond either. It didn't frighten him; he was a scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn't happened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn't be found in the real world! And that's the way it was all the way down the line."
"So where does that leave us?" Charles demanded. "Is it or isn't it a science?"
"It is," she said simply. "Lieberman and his followers went too far. It became a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager. They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstood the claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims but straw-man claims they had set up themselves."
"But—psychology!" Charles protested, obscurely embarrassed at the thought that man's mind was subject to scientific study—not because he knew the first thing about it, but because everybody knew psychology was phony.
She shrugged. "I can't help it. We were doing physiology of the sensory organs, trying to settle the oldie about focusing the eye, and I got to grubbing around the pre-Lieberman texts looking for light in the darkness. Some of it sounded so—not sensible, but positive that I ran off one of Lieberman's population checks. And the old boy had been dead wrong. Mengenlehre constructs correspond quite nicely to the actual way people's minds work. I kept checking and the schools that were destroyed as hopelessly fallacious a century ago checked out, some closely and some not so closely, as good descriptions of the way the mind works. Some have predictive value. I used mengenlehre psychology algorithms to compute the conditioning on you and me, including the trigger release. It worked. You see, Charles? We're on the rim of something tremendous!"
"When did this Lieberman flourish?"
"I don't have the exact dates in my head. The breakup of the schools corresponded roughly with the lifetime of John G. Falcaro."
That pin-pointed it rather well. John G. succeeded Rafael, who succeeded Amadeo Falcaro, first leader of the Syndic in revolt. Under John G., the hard-won freedom was enjoyed, the bulging store-houses were joyously emptied, craft union rules went joyously out the window and builders worked, the dollar went to an all-time high and there was an all-time number of dollars in circulation. It had been an exhuberant time still fondly remembered; just the time for over-enthusiastic rebels against a fusty scholasticism to joyously smash old ways of thought without too much exercise of the conscience. It all checked out.