Why Psychology Can’t Explain the Soul: The Case Against Materialism

It was a spring day in 2009, in a small British town near Manchester. Fifteen-year-old Gemma Houghton suddenly felt a strange sensation. Without knowing how, she simply knew: her twin sister Lyn needed help.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Gemma ran upstairs to the bathroom, opened the door, and found her sister slipping beneath the bathwater.

“When I lifted her head from the water, I saw she was turning blue,” Gemma told the British Telegraph. “I immediately understood she was having an epileptic seizure.”

A quick CPR response, exactly as she had learned in a first-aid course, saved Lyn’s life.

Psychologist Micha Ankori shared this story in an interview with Epoch to illustrate his view that the human psyche is not material and displays phenomena that cannot be explained by physical mechanisms alone.

Micha Ankori: A Psychologist Who Challenges Materialism

Micha Ankori is an analytical psychologist. He is also trained in physics and mathematics, so he has every tool to approach the mind through a materialistic framework — but he chooses to challenge that approach.

In his books and publications, he argues that modern psychology treats itself as a “science” and analyzes the psyche under the assumption that it is a material, mechanical phenomenon — thereby missing its essence.

The Crisis in Psychological Research

In one of his articles, Ankori quotes researcher Ian Semple, who found that 64% of psychological studies cannot be replicated.
Meaning, if the same experiment is repeated, the results are different — which illustrates that the original research did not truly reflect reality.

The conclusion, Ankori says, is clear: the methodology is flawed. Psychology is not functioning as an exact science because it mistakenly treats the psyche as a machine or a computer. Naturally, then, research findings turn out wrong.

He writes: “The attempt to formulate mental phenomena using quantitative scientific tools contains a deep contradiction. Beliefs, values, fears, hatreds, loves, desires and hopes are profoundly real and immensely meaningful in a person’s inner world — yet they have no objective measurement and cannot be observed through the tools of the natural sciences.”

Freud’s Scientific Ambition — and Its Limitations

Freud, the founder of psychology, tried to frame it as a scientific discipline. There is no doubt he made major contributions, but his attempt to model the psyche using scientific principles similar to biology led him and his followers, into significant mistakes.

For example, Freud borrowed a type of law of energy conservation and used it to explain the life and artistic drive of Leonardo da Vinci. Later historical investigation however showed that his explanation contradicted the facts.

Freud took a physiological model and projected it onto the human psyche — an entity that is far more complex and not physically measurable. Mental forces do not behave like physical quantities. A mother of four does not have less love for each child than a mother of one.

The Problem With Materialistic Psychology: Causality

The core problem in materialistic psychology, Ankori argues, is its obsession with cause-and-effect. Just as in natural sciences, researchers assume:

• A always causes B

• B always follows from A

But, he says, this assumption creates a fundamental barrier. This is why psychological studies cannot be replicated — the phenomena are not governed by fixed causal laws.

Mind and Spirit Are Not Material

Ankori concludes: “The assumption that science can decipher every human phenomenon is the root of the problem. The human soul and human spirit are not matter, are not produced by matter, and cannot be forced into the laws of matter. The relationship between body and soul has been an eternal question that has occupied the greatest minds throughout history. Attempting to solve it by ignoring it achieves nothing. When psychology is defined as ‘the study of human behavior,’ the field is narrowed, and its essence is lost.”