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I was browsing through my necron codex and then happened to be reading my C:SM and began to think really that necrons shouldn't be affected by a psychic attack. The warriors and immortals are mindless and a lot of the other units are machines which should be impervious to a psyker. Just a thought looking at it from a perspective of a psychic attack needs mental thought for it to work.

How it works isn't necessarily how it is explained...
For example Necrons are still effected by the 'Poison' special rule. They aren't actually poisoned but it is something in the weapon or projectile giving an added effect.

Maybe in the case of lowering morale the psyker tricks the Necrons into believing their mission parameters have changed and on taking relatively low casualties they must retreat.

Well aftyer thinking about this for a second. some pshyker attacks can be more phyical than mental. Like for the blood angels the Blood lance or sanguin sword.

A psychic attack, in my interpretation, means using the power of the warp to augment your own abilities or to acheive an effect at range using said energy. This could be anything from mind control, telekinesis etc. Ergo lowering morale or some such for necrons could manifest as rewiring some threshold for their xeno-metallic synapses etc etc.

Affecting a necron with regards to his soul, or interfering with his own warp presence would I persume, be rather different.

That's one of the things I wished they had carried over from the Retcrons...er, Pariahs. Would have at least been much better psychic defense than the gloom prism.

Psychic powers are simply the use of warp derived energy to affect the realspace universe.

Such powers can be used in the form of directed energy attacks. Warp energy can be converted into such conventional forms such as heat or electricity so all those fireballs and lightning bolts being flung around should do just fine in terms of affecting Necrons and their physical bodies. The Necron minds are also based in physical hardware. This can be affected. A Mind War for example could be destructive to the Necron mind through destroying whatever mechanisms are responsible for preserving the Necron's mind. After all, for Mind War against humans, it has been shown in the background before to cause bleeding from facial orifices and presumably from within the brain as well, so it would have had to do things that resulted in blood vessels rupturing.

As others have mentioned, powers based on fear or confusion can be messing around with the senses of the Necrons or their thresholds for retreat. Fear is just really a threat assessment and choosing self preservation instead. Necrons are not inherently immune to Morale checks and can still be forced to retreat by conventional weapons, demonstrating still an element of self preservation in the face of overwhelming threat. Thus any psychic power causing fear might just be again either lowering the threshold for retreat or simply be appearing so threatening that the Necrons make a threat analysis and opt for retreat.