This paper belongs to the author’s “On Sheng series” of research, which aims to construct a unified theoretical framework that deduces from the basic logic of life to the emergence of complex systems. This paper argues that the traditional objects of psychological study—such “psychological entities” as self-esteem, emotion, will, motivation, and personality—are products of a category mistake. The “mental” is not a domain of entities. It is the conscious readout of a computational process—the stress system’s integration of signals from six core stress categories (energy, somatic, safety, belonging, sexual, cognitive). Traditional psychology mistakes this nominalized product of a computational process for independent entities with causal power, committing what Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Taking the bankruptcy of the self-esteem construct as its point of entry, this paper systematically reveals how this category mistake pervades all of psychology’s core constructs. It further proposes a replacement framework: the Stress Gauge as an integrated evaluative signal model, and narrative reframing as a uniquely human technique for tuning stress parameters. Within this framework, all of traditional psychology’s techniques are systematically reassessed: some techniques are technically effective but theoretically mis-explained, others are ineffective or even harmful—and the old paradigm cannot distinguish between the two using its own theoretical language. The new framework accomplishes this distinction with a single criterion, demonstrating that psychology has lost the theoretical necessity to persist in its old form. Finally, the paper proposes a disciplinary reorganization plan. The old psychology—the entity-based psychology that takes psychological entities as its objects of study—must be brought to an end. Its effective components should be reorganized into two or three clear directions: medicine (intervening on the physical foundations of stress); management and correction of stress outcomes (constructing safe environments in the target stress domain, altering stress outcomes through continuous exposure, or avoiding maladaptive stress triggers through input-source management); and logical cognitive enhancement (narrative reframing techniques and optimization of cognitive algorithms). The paper presents both an “independent discipline version” and an “integrated version” for discussion by the academic community. This is not a revision of psychology; it is a replacement of psychology’s foundation.
建康(jiankang) 周(zhou) (Tue,) studied this question.