Should We Discard What We Can’t Measure?

A reflection on shouting from rooftops, quantum physics, and why the soul might not respond to megaphones.

In an article published by Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet on May 18, 2025, several psychology students voiced concern over their university curriculum being unscientific. One student exclaimed: “I want to shout from the rooftops — it’s damned wrong!”

It’s a powerful image — dramatic, urgent, and in its own way, deeply human. I don’t doubt the student’s sincerity. There is a strong demand for psychology to be firmly grounded in scientific evidence — especially in a world where people seek help amid uncertainty, confusion and crisis. I share that desire for integrity, care, and responsibility.

And yet, I also find myself wanting to respond — not by climbing up to a higher rooftop, but perhaps by stepping a little closer and offering a different perspective.

The students protest the inclusion of psychoanalytic theories and methods in their university program, arguing they are unscientific and lack evidence. It’s true that in Sweden, publicly funded university education is, by law expected to be modern, scientific, and evidence-based. But that raises deeper questions when it comes to studying psychology — the study of the human soul or mind — a field that often bridges the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. What do we mean by “scientific” and “evidence” in the context of the psyche?

With physics, things are more straightforward. The law of gravity works every time. But the psyche doesn’t operate by law. It contradicts itself. It hides and imagines. It speaks in images, symptoms, and stories. If we insist that psychology must only be what we can measure, we risk cutting away everything that doesn’t fit the grid — even if that’s where meaning might live.

In fact, the psyche behaves more like quantum physics than classical mechanics: unpredictable, context-sensitive, and shaped by observation. Here, uncertainty is not a flaw — it’s a feature. The unknown is part of the field. If we are to understand something as multi-layered as the psyche, we must learn to tolerate ambiguity.

So, let’s return to the rooftop where the student stands. What does it symbolically mean to call from above? You climb up there because you’re convinced you’re right. You want to be heard — and seen. And when you’re that high up, it’s hard to imagine there might be more than one perspective. The rooftop is a place of clarity, of proclamation. But it’s also far from dialogue. People might glance up, but you’re too far away to actually hear back.

And maybe that’s the trouble. When it comes to the psyche — with its contradictions, mysteries, and symbolic language — certainty can be limiting. Conviction has its place, but so does doubt. So does curiosity. Psychology isn’t always best served by the sharp edges of certainty. Sometimes, what our souls need are not megaphones, but a conversation. Not shouting from above, but sitting beside.

This isn’t to say psychoanalysis is beyond critique. It has been hierarchical, slow to evolve, and too wedded to certain cultural, social and gendered assumptions. Freud didn’t always get it right. But critique is not the same as rejection.

And Freud wasn’t alone. Carl Jung emphasized the importance of dreams, symbolic imagination and myth in the search for meaning. Alfred Adler turned attention to power and how we strive for significance and belonging. Melanie Klein brought the inner world of infants and early trauma into focus with psychological precision, while D.W. Winnicott showed us how a “good enough” environment supports the emergence of the true self. Together, them and many others, opened psychoanalysis to the symbolic, the relational, the imaginative — the very places modern psychology might risk neglecting if following strict scientific and evidence-based manuals.

One of the gifts of depth psychology is that it gives language to feelings that otherwise have no form. Sometimes we don’t yet know what we feel. We can’t explain it in clinical terms. But through dreams, myths, or symbolic images, we begin to touch something true. It’s a bit like learning a language — not of logic, but of the soul.

As someone training in this tradition, I don’t believe psychoanalysis should be taught as doctrine. But I do believe it still has something to offer. Not as the only truth, but as one way of remaining curious about what lies beneath the surface.

We can’t afford to exclude everything we don’t fully understand. Sometimes it’s the very not-knowing that invites us to stay open, curious and listening.

So yes, maybe shouting from rooftops may be a natural response to frustration and urgency — a way to be seen and heard when things feel unclear. And that’s okay. But understanding the psyche often asks something else of us: to come down from the roof, lean in closer, and be patient with the messy, complicated and mysterious human experience.