The Humanistic Psychologist 2016, Vol. 44, No. 3, 242–255
© 2016 American Psychological Association 0887-3267/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hum0000033
The Case for a Humanistic Psychology This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Anton G. Hardy Comprehensive Neuropsychological Services, Albany, New York
Humanistic psychology has been overshadowed through most of psychology’s history by a scientific outlook that sets “behavior” rather than “the human being” as psychology’s proper subject matter. This outlook is the consequence of certain assumptions psychology makes, and the humanistic point of view cannot be fully realized unless psychology changes these assumptions. I examine 2 of those that are most influential and show how they have set psychology on its present path. One of these concerns is its underlying philosophical paradigm, and I describe an alternative paradigm that would be more supportive of a humanistic psychology. Keywords: humanism, science, measurement, theory of the concept, philosophical assumptions
The humanistic perspective has been overshadowed through most of psychology’s years by a scientific perspective that substitutes “behavior” for “the human being” as the discipline’s proper subject matter. In this scientific perspective, objective procedures such as measurement and research take precedence in the discipline’s methodology, and “behavior” is the human feature that most readily submits to these. Other features such as “mind,” “consciousness,” and “creativity” meanwhile become pushed aside. Behaviorism tries to extend its methods to these other features, of course, and promises to eventually bring the entirety of what is human under its umbrella. Despite its investigations into more central topics such as language and cognition, however, its hundred years of dominance has produced little by way of significant understanding of these features. Humanists, meanwhile, maintain that the human being should be psychology’s proper subject matter. They consider behavior to stand amid the wealth of human traits, amid all of the human being’s literary, artistic, scientific, and technological accomplishments, as something that is relatively shallow. The access a scientific psychology gives to these objective procedures does not compensate in their eyes for its poverty of content. Humanists tend to involve themselves in clinical work and stress the importance of becoming acquainted with the human being in all its variety of ways through simple observation. They carry this observation out in such venues as the psychotherapist’s office, the child therapist’s playroom, the institutions that house disturbed individuals, and the variety of natural settings in which human beings act and express themselves. They have difficulty, however, defining what their next steps should be. How does one turn the insights and understanding they gain through this observation into reliable knowledge? How do they arrive by this means at dependable facts and principles? They seem to
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come up short when it comes to describing what psychology’s overall methodology should be. I take up these issues in this article by examining two of psychology’s major assumption-sets. Both of these have played a major role in bringing psychology into its present state. The first concerns psychology’s aspiration to be a science: Is this aspiration realistic? Does psychology meet the criteria that a discipline must satisfy in order to be “science”? The second concerns its underlying philosophical paradigm: Is this paradigm compatible with its interests? Does it promote psychology’s disciplinary goals? My thesis is that a humanistic psychology will be unable to establish itself as long as it ties itself to these assumption-sets. In particular, its philosophical paradigm is detrimental to it and diverts it from its proper course. After describing the elements of this paradigm, I suggest another one that would be more compatible (Hardy, 1988). This is a paradigm that honors what is human and that points to the path that a humanly oriented psychology should take. In the course of my discussion, I address the question of what psychology’s methodology should be. I begin with the question whether psychology can be a science. Is this aspiration justified? And because measurement is the primary means by which science obtains its knowledge, I first examine the conditions for its use.
The Mechanics of Measurement The history of science shows that science could arise only when a certain kind of concept was introduced into our thinking. This was a concept that enabled us to employ number in our understanding of things. In our ordinary life, we describe the aspects of the things that we experience by means of concepts such as “long” and “short,” “warm” and “cold,” “slow” and “quick.” Galileo saw, however, that by creating a special kind of concept, he could make such descriptions more precise (Galilei, 1638/2010). He created the notion of “variable,” or “parameter.” Because these notions incorporate such qualities as continuity and divisibility into equal amounts, they could be aligned with the number system and, through an operation called “measurement,” enable one to obtain exact values for these aspects. By employing such variable-concepts as “length,” “temperature,” and “velocity,” then, one could say of things that they were “10 centimeters long,” had a “temperature of 73 degrees,” or moved at a “velocity of 87 kilometers an hour.” The imprecision that formerly affected our descriptions could now be replaced by exactness, and our knowledge of things correspondingly advanced. Another step was needed, however, in order to complete this process. This involved our notion of what an “object” is. In ordinary life, objects take the form of the rich and colorful “things” that we see, hear, and touch; they are what lies around us in all their variety. Now, however, they needed to be brought into conformance with the logical qualities of this new conceptual space. They needed to be made up entirely of these variables. Shedding their material qualities, they became a point, simply, at which these variables intersected. They were “mass points” that consisted of nothing but their length, mass, potential energy, and so forth. Because the results of measurement were being expressed now in numbers, this conceptual space became ruled by mathematics. And by investigating through “experiments” the relationships these variables had as they interacted with each other in the empirical world, science could develop such formulas as f ⫽ ma and g ⫽ mm’/r2. It could set ahead the goal of “discovering the laws of nature.”
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Psychologists needed to take similar steps, then, in following this path. They first needed to develop the variable-concepts with which they could measure. In order to do this, they turned back to concepts they had already been creating in their nonparametric efforts to understand the human being and endowed notions such as “depression,” “anxiety,” and “intelligence” with inner uniformity and continuous divisibility. Devising instruments then for their measurement— checklists, questionnaires, inventories, tests— they administered these and arrived at “scores.” Because these scores were expressed as numbers, they considered themselves to have made significant progress toward their goal of making of their discipline a science. To complete this process, however, they also needed to change their concept of their object. To this end, they created the notion of “subject.” A subject represented the place where these variables met. It shed its human qualities and became the abstract point, simply, at which these variables intersected. When psychologists brought their subjects into a lab for measurement, they no longer viewed them in terms of their human individuality; they did not see them as young or old, male or female, healthy or handicapped, unless these were among the variables on which they were measuring. They were blind as well to any other human dimensions that might be entering their situation—to such facts, for instance, as that their subject was involved in a contentious divorce, that it had just learned that it had failed a course, that it was in pain from a recent operation. Their attention was limited now to the abstract dimensions on which they were measuring, and other aspects of the human situation fell outside their vision.
Unexpected Obstacles As they proceeded along this path, however, psychologists encountered unexpected obstacles. These derived from several sources. One was the variability that affected their subjects’ responding. These subjects might be alert and attentive at one administration of a test but fatigued and careless when it was repeated. They might be preoccupied with something else at the time and unable to give full attention to questions. They might be bringing with them one or another kind of reaction to the matter of being observed, tested, and evaluated in the first place—made anxious and unduly constricted, perhaps, or wanting to please the examiner and provide the answers they thought were wanted. They might have an overriding agenda of their own, the desire, for instance, to qualify for disability. Another source of these problems lay in the ambiguity that was inherent in any use of language. If subjects were asked “Do you often have trouble sleeping at night,” their response depended on what they took often to mean. If they were asked to respond yes or no to the statement “Sudden noises make me nervous,” their response depended on what they took nervous to mean. And still further problems stemmed from the setting itself. Subjects could be affected by the general atmosphere of their surroundings, by any random noise that was present or by excessive heat, cold, or stuffiness in the room. They could be affected by the examiner’s manner, by whether the person was warm and supportive or cold and aloof. In attempting to carry through with their measurement, therefore, psychologists necessarily turned to the task of removing, controlling, and adjusting for these sources of error. Any moves they made toward more rigor in their test administration, however, put them at risk for making their measurement more artificial. They removed it further from the real-life situations in which their subjects experienced their depression, anxiety, and so
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forth. Measuring thus became less and less the simple and straightforward activity it was expected it to be. It seemed to be less like operating on something that was fixed and stable than dipping their measuring stick into a heaving sea, each sounding of which brought up a different state. Still, they were able to produce with their measurement a degree of knowledge. They were able to arrive at conclusions such as that, for instance, a subject had an abnormal degree of depression, that it was more than usually intelligent, that it had a memory impairment. And these conclusions could all be expressed in terms of numbers, in terms of the scores they obtained. But were these scores truly numbers? Did they meet the requirements for legitimate use of the number system? A number is an element in an organized structure. It is a position, merely, that takes a determinate place among other positions. In the whole number system, for instance, the number 9 stands between the positions 8 and 10; the number 236 stands between the positions 235 and 237. And this system itself is governed by certain conditions. Its positions must be set at unchanging intervals from each other. They must be arranged in order so that one may say of any one of them that it is “more” or “less” than another. They must extend continuously in both directions. And these scores? If one subject scored 60 on a scale of anxiety, did this mean that it was exactly twice as anxious as one scoring 30? Was it just as much more anxious than one scoring 50 as this second subject was than one scoring 40? Because these scores could easily change on a test’s readministration, could psychologists be confident even that a subject had “more” of the quality on which they were measuring than one who was scoring lower? Clearly they were going well beyond what was justified; they were overstepping with their numbers the bounds of what they could meaningfully say. In terms of measurement theory, they were at best meeting the requirements for the lowest of the four levels of measurement, the “nominal” stage at which one could simply identify the class to which one’s data belonged (Stevens, 1951). They were far from reaching the most advanced of these levels, the stage at which they could make legitimate use of the whole number system. But it was dubious even whether this operation of “identification” could be reliably performed! The intense debates that have recently accompanied efforts to revise the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have illuminated how much clinicians are still trying to define these classes. Which of the current ones should they keep? Which should they merge with others? Which should they further differentiate? The difficulties of this task become apparent when we consider a notion like “depression”: Should depression include in its class the emptiness of the psychopath? Does the depression-cum-anger of the young lover who has been jilted belong in the same category as the acedic soul-weariness of the spiritual seeker? Is the acute grief of a mother who has just lost her child the same as the black hole into which William Styron fell (Styron, 1990)? Research psychologists who tried to measure on these concepts were not usually clinically trained; they were unlikely to be aware when they composed their research groups of whether and how much they were mixing apples and oranges.
Significance And then there was the question of significance. We have seen that entering upon measurement requires transforming the human being into a subject, and that this requires that psychologists exclude from their view anything except the variable-concepts in which
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they were interested. Is this a good platform, then, from which to develop an understanding of the human being? Is it the best route to meaningful knowledge? It became more and more apparent as these steps were being taken that psychology was suffering from a deep division. One faction was committed to scientific standards of reliability and validity, and the other faction insisted that psychology’s reach exceed its easy methodological grasp. One was committed to attaining a knowledge that was reliable and the other to attaining a knowledge that was significant. In 1949, a conference was held in Boulder, Colorado, to try to resolve this split (Raimy, 1950). The outcome was the decision that psychology should continue on its scientific path and consider its clinical branch to be merely an “adjunct” to its measurement and research. Clinicians’ efforts were to be subordinated to psychology’s scientific efforts. In the ensuing years, this decision defined for psychology its governing mind-set, and it remains in force today.1 Thus psychology’s clinical branch was downgraded in the discipline as a whole. Despite this, however, it showed a surprising vitality. In the years that followed, it established a PsyD program to stand beside the traditional PhD program and proved to be the branch most often chosen by those who were newly entering the discipline. Many of these younger psychologists followed the ruling mind-set, indeed, and attempted to provide a scientific basis for clinical work in “objective facts”; in study after study, they attempted to validate various methods, approaches, and concepts that clinicians were using. But there were many others, as well, who ignored these studies. They considered them to be irrelevant to their goal of understanding the human being and, although not challenging the prevailing outlook, “voted with their feet” in a quite different direction. This was a direction in which they engaged interactively with their clients, seeking to gradually increase their understanding of human ways. This understanding was embodied in the field’s concepts, and they sought to develop and improve upon those they had inherited from clinicians who had gone before. In general, it was by means of these concepts that they acquired the “handles” with which they could take their clients; it was through them that they were able to understand human “being.” The conference had done little to heal psychology’s division, therefore, and the discipline continued to be severely split. It was a division that appeared, furthermore, in other social sciences as well. Sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics—all developed a division between those who relied upon objective procedures for their understanding of their subject matter and those who put their trust in “field work.” All these disciplines had for their object, furthermore, the human being. Was there something about this disciplinary object, then, that made this division inevitable? Was the human being in contrast to other objects that scientists studied recalcitrant to exact knowledge? Was it possible, in fact, to develop a rigorous knowledge of it at all, and if so, how was this to be done? To answer these questions, we will need to go more deeply into the philosophical foundation on which psychology and these disciplines rest.
1 A good deal of discussion followed the Boulder conference and its advocacy of a scientistpractitioner model. See, for instance, the six articles in the February 2000 issue of American Psychologist (Albee, 2000; Baker & Benjamin, 2000; Belar, 2000; Nathan, 2000; Peterson, 2000; Stricker, 2000). See also Frank (1984) for a study of the causes behind the difficulty clinicians had with accepting this model. A compilation that is particularly thoughtful can be found in Soldz and McCullough (2000).
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Philosophical Assumptions These disciplines all assume the philosophical paradigm of Realism. Realism is one of the two major philosophical paradigms that have been developed in the course of intellectual history, and it is by far the more prevalent. It has dominated philosophical, scientific, and religious thought through the ages. This paradigm posits two primary postulates. The first is that there is a reality out there, and the second is that this reality is copied somehow into our minds. On the basis of these postulations, then, it develops an explanatory system that will answer fundamental questions such as how we come by the contents of our mind, how we can agree with each other on what is “there,” and how we can arrive at our intersensory correlations (Hardy, 2012, pp. 16 –18). This is a system that agrees well with common sense: Indeed, how can one oppose the belief that there is a reality out there when it is so obviously all around? How can one argue with the idea that it is this reality that is the source of our mental contents? Realism’s assumptions are so obvious, so apparent, that we are habitually unaware of them. They lie so close to us that we do not even see them—a situation that is exacerbated, undoubtedly, by the fact that for a long time there has been no other paradigm to which one could take resort, no place outside Realism in which one could stand for viewing it. In time, however, Realism showed itself to be holding within it a number of problems. Its two postulates proved not to be as straightforward as they first seemed. In regard to the first, the realization gradually grew that we do not in fact have this reality. We are not directly given what it contains. For when we close our eyes, it disappears. All its firm and stable things vanish as soon as we take this relatively trivial action. So what we actually have, instead, is images of these objects and events. What actually appears to us is the mental percepts and concepts of what we take to be real. Reality itself, therefore, becomes problematic: We cannot be certain what it in fact is— only how we see it and think it to be. We are by no means ready to abandon the belief, however, that this reality exists out there. In order to preserve this belief, therefore, we take a certain step: We establish a division between two realms, the one “objective” and the other “subjective.” We assign reality to the former, then, and what is in our mind to the latter. This belief subsequently becomes an essential element of our Realism; it becomes necessary to its very maintenance. When Descartes was criticized for introducing into philosophy a polarity between res extensa and res cogitans, there was little realization on the part of those who were criticizing him of how indispensable this polarity was. As difficult as bridging the division that was being created between a “physical” and a “mental,” between “body” and “mind,” now became, this was a polarity that was essential to their underlying beliefs. A number of important consequences followed from this step, however, and these appeared in this paradigm’s subsequent development. One was the need to “validate” what was subjective, to constantly put to test what was being seen and thought. The ruling principle here was adaequatio res et intellectus, the adjustment of what was mental to what one took on the objective side to be the reality. Another was the freedom Realists acquired now to construe reality just as they wished. Because it was out of reach, because its contents were inherently unknown, one could make of it anything one willed. If one were primarily interested in accounting for what was objectively around, for instance, one could construe it as consisting of substantial things that corresponded in form and number to the things we have in our perception. If one were interested in explaining what in our mind was abstract, one could construe it as consisting essentially of ideal entities such as “number,” “truth,” and “justice.” If one wanted to bring it in all its diversity into a single unified system, one could posit some
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supreme “spirit,” “law,” or “principle” as the ultimate reality. In time, therefore, Realism developed a number of subphilosophies; and as empiricists rose to argue with idealists, realists (small r) with rationalists, monists with pluralists, a dialectic ensued that seemed as interminable as time itself. This very interminability, however—this inability to make progress over time— raised the specter that Realism might be holding within it an inherent flaw. And this suspicion was confirmed when Realists turned to their second postulate. The stipulation that there was a copying of some sort that transformed what was real into what was mental required elaboration; it required some sort of explanation. Just how was this copying carried out? What was the mechanism that enabled this transition to take place? It was a question that brought one’s focus to perception, the place where this transformation was to take place. Philosophers turned with special interest, therefore, to this area; but try as they might, they were unable to find a solution. When psychology came on the scene, then, it took the matter from the hands of philosophy in confidence that its new experimental methods would enable it to succeed; and it was only a matter of time before it found itself enmeshed in the same complexities, blocked by the same stubborn obstacles, that had stymied philosophy. We can become apprised of these complexities if we consider the matter of visual perception. Our assumption here would be that the eye simply casts an image of something real on the retina—a tree that is out there, say—and this image is then transported along the optic nerves to a projection area in the brain. This turns out, however, to be naïve: Optic nerves do not transmit images but impulses, and the brain does not have any area where such “projection” can occur. It does not have any area, in fact, where all these impulses end up. Impulses march uninterruptedly on to association areas and motor pathways, and there is no place where they can attain some kind of terminal coherence. In addition, individual nerves are of different length and fire at different rates, and these impulses become dispersed, therefore, in both space and time. Thus the puzzle: How can the image acquire its coherence? How can it acquire the unity it has when one cannot even say of the original tree-stimulus “where” at any moment it is? Or for that matter, how does it attain its stability when these impulses are in constant motion? We see the copy problem emerging again in present-day neuroscience. When neuroscientists try to explain how the new structures they are discovering in the brain can produce something that is mental, a “hard problem” arises. How do the nerve impulses, chemical exchanges, and energy patterns that take place in the brain turn into “hot,” “red,” or “sweet”? How do these new structures and processes that they were discovering produce the experience of a sunset? No matter how much progress they made in understanding brain anatomy and physiology, this puzzle remained: Every explanation they put forth contained a “jump to another category”; it incorporated in its derivative chain a break that invalidated it. Indeed, the more they wrestled with this problem, the more they were tempted to think of the image as some kind of mirage, as belonging to an occult world of phantoms and apparitions, of homunculi and ghosts-in-the-machine: Realism was requiring of those who are trying to understand mind nothing less than a transubstantiation.2 If we draw back now and review the results of our examination thus far, we find that the efforts clinicians make to meet the qualifications for science fail. Their human material
2 See Slaney and Maraun (2005) for documentation of how neuroscientists “run amok” with analogy and metaphor in trying to effect this transition.
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is subject to so many influences, is so changing, that it does not present with the stability that dependable measurement requires. And their concepts for the human qualities that they were measuring fail to possess the inherent continuity, divisibility into equal amounts, and so forth that would enable them to become variables. In addition, they adopt a philosophical paradigm that is historically beset with difficulties, among them a “copy problem” that resists all attempts at solution. This paradigm puts them under a constant pressure paradigm to “be objective,” furthermore, and to turn away from the “subjective,” which is their proper area of inquiry: It is in the subjective that one finds the human feelings, expressions, and thoughts that is their subject matter. Under all these influences, the discipline has gradually deteriorated from a thoughtful pursuit of its disciplinary goals to a mere filling of thousands of journal pages with studies that are scarcely memorable. But if psychology is beset by these problems, where should it turn? What path is appropriate to it? Clearly, it must adopt different philosophical assumptions. It must find a philosophical paradigm that provides it with the support and theoretical backing that a humanly oriented endeavor of its kind needs. And for this, we turn to Kant.
The New Paradigm In 1787, Kant broke with Realism in his “Copernican revolution” and initiated a new philosophical path (Kant, 1787/1929, p. 22). He began by refusing to overlook the fact, already established in Realism but largely ignored, that the objects and events of a real world are not directly available. Any statements we make about these Dingen an sich cannot, therefore, be confirmed; they are, in positivism’s terms, “unoperational.” What we have in their stead is always our mental percepts and concepts of this reality. We have the representations of it that we have in our mind. Let us then go back to these percepts and concepts, Kant advised, and to the “experience” in which they reside. Let us adopt experience rather than reality as the ground from which we proceed in our efforts to acquire understanding and knowledge (Kant, 1787/1929). Thorny new problems now arose. Most pressing, perhaps, was the question of how we come by the contents of our experience now that reality cannot be their source. In answer, Kant pointed out that experience is always structured. Its contents always stand in some relation to each other—next to, above, or beyond others in space, preceding or following others in time, functioning as their causes or effects. To account for this, he introduced general categories such as “space,” “time,” and “cause” through which this structuring takes place (Kant, 1787/1929). These categories become a necessary element, then, in our experience; they are a condition for the very appearance of anything. For if a content were not to have a location, if it were unable to endure in time, if it did not have any influence on other contents, it would be so vague and transitory that it could not be held: It could not become “experience.” Other problems arose as well. Now that we are ensconced in mind, how can we avoid an unacceptable solipsism, a belief that the world reduces simply to my world and I alone with it? How are we going to account for any “validity” that exists among our contents? How can we explain our common experience, so easily accounted for in Realism by reference to an external reality that we often agree with others on what is “there”— or agree with ourselves when we look at something, look away, then look back again and see it still there? And how do these structuring agents themselves come about? We can no
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more invoke God in our explanation-of-things than we can reality3 (Hardy, 2012, pp. 85–90). All these problems require solution, and they make it difficult for even one who is convinced of the inadequacy of Realism to move easily to the new paradigm. In the course of history, a number of neo-Kantian schools arose to attempt to provide these solutions. But it was not until Ernst Cassirer introduced his symbol philosophy in 1923 that they received their final resolution (Cassirer, 1923/1953).4 With this, Kant’s initiative acquired the status of a full-fledged paradigm, a philosophical system that could stand as an alternative to Realism. It was a system that honored mind in all its manifestations and that brought understanding of the inexhaustible energy the human being displays in all its artistic, scientific, mathematical, and technological accomplishments. Because it is profoundly human in its orientation and because it addresses living experience in all its variety, this paradigm can properly be called “phenomenological” in nature.5 Thus, the new paradigm makes it possible for psychology to replace its present paradigm with one that is more compatible with its mission. It releases it from assumptions that have distorted its view of what its path should be. And at this point, we need to spell out in some detail what the implications of this paradigm for psychology are.
3 It can be seen that these changes affect primarily Realism’s second postulate, the assumption of a copy process. Rejection of the copy assumption, however, does not entail rejection of Realism’s other assumption, belief in the existence of a reality. On the contrary, we have every reason to view ourselves as living in a real world of things and events, as subject to outer circumstances whether these be cataclysmic in nature or mundane, as ensconced in a wider universe that lies all around. The “critical” point so essential to Kant’s position, however, is that this reality, being forever beyond the horizon of experience, lies outside the bounds of what we can meaningfully inquire into, think about, and understand. Our statements in regard to it, drawing as they must on conceptual structures we have developed for experience, will always be metaphorical in nature: They will consist in figures of speech hurled into the dark from our station in the light. And so we readily see that we cannot help but speak of this reality in terms that are spatial, temporal, and causal in nature. We say of it that it is “outside” and “around” us; that it continues “before” and “after” us in our temporal existence; that it is the “causal source” from which all things animate and inanimate arise. The realm of meaning is developed in relation to experience, and when we step outside it, we enter the realm of the meaningless. 4 Cassirer was an unusual philosopher. The range of his knowledge was extraordinary, and the magnitude of his accomplishments still goes unrecognized. Few thinkers since Aristotle have achieved his degree of erudition, have mastered to the degree he did the different concepts and ideas that were current at his time. Fluent in many languages both classical and modern, possessive of a photographic memory, he wrote with a scholar’s knowledge in such far-flung areas as metaphysics and epistemology, science and mathematics, history and literature, language and psychology, myth and art. There was virtually no area of human inquiry that he left untouched, no important contributor to the history of ideas that he left unaccounted for. But he was not simply a recorder of already established ideas, a discerner amid these ideas, even, of the trends that were historically influential; he was also an original thinker. It was his power of insight and analysis that made him able to bring to fruition the project begun by Kant, and the ramifications of his masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer, 1923/1953, 1925/1955, 1929/1957), are still largely unexplored. 5 The term phenomenological has become increasingly used recently in both psychology and philosophy. It points to a general trend to honor the simple phenomena of human living alongside the data that numbers and statistics provide. In this usage, however, there is little understanding of the need to establish a systematic framework for its approach, a body of concepts and principles that will support it. Lacking this general framework, such efforts have been scattered and unorganized.
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The Concept A key step in this undertaking concerns our understanding of the “concept.” In the new paradigm, the concept takes on a markedly different role from the one that it has in Realism. It becomes, in fact, the producing agent of our mental contents. It becomes the force that brings these contents into being. And it produces not only what is abstract amid these contents but what is concrete as well; it gives rise to what is sensory and perceptual in our experience. Because of its centrality to our understanding of what the path for a productive humanistic psychology should be, I spend a few paragraphs elaborating on this new conception. In Realism, the concept is considered to be an “abstraction.” It is thought to be created by gathering percepts together that are similar to each other and lifting out what they have in common; and by repeating this process with concepts we have already formed, then, we are able to advance to concepts that are more general. This doctrine, however, contains a vicious circle. For how can we know what percepts to gather into such a group unless we already have the concept in hand? How can we say of one percept as it comes along that it “belongs” and of another that it “doesn’t” unless we are already exercising the very concept that we are putatively deriving? The explanation rests upon a petitio principia; it takes for granted the very thing it claims to explain. Clearly a new theory of the concept is needed, and this was provided by Russell and others at the beginning of the last century (Cassirer, 1910/1923).6 In their interpretation, the concept becomes a rule by means of which things are related. It becomes a principle that constructively connects things. Both the rule and the things it relates can be represented in the expression f(a, b, c . . .), where f represents some rule of relating and a, b, c, . . . the elements that are being related. The former expresses the concept’s intension and the latter its extension. By this means, now, we are able to see how the concept comes by its remarkable power and versatility. By establishing a rule of “same,” it enables us to gel from among the scattered contents of experience a “tree,” a “house,” a “star.” By establishing a rule of “superordinate–subordinate,” it enables us to develop botanical tables of species and genera. By establishing a rule of “side by side” it enables us to generate the order of coexistence we call “space.” By establishing a rule of “after each other,” it enables us to generate the order of succession we call “time.” By establishing a rule of “conditional upon,” it enables us to generate the order of dependency we call “cause.” With each of these acts, we link together contents that are otherwise unrelated. We establish amid the disarray of raw experience a “one in the many.” And by repeating these acts over and over, we gradually make of our initial blooming, buzzing confusion a panorama of fixed things all spread evenly before. We create the field of structures we call “experience.” And these structures include those that we have in perception. In the perceptual realm, we find a prevalence of “constancies.” In order for a perceptual “thing” to appear in our experience, in order for us to have “objects,” these objects must be able to maintain their identity through changes that they undergo. They must remain unchanged in their
6 Casssirer abundantly substantiated the role of concept development in the knowledge-making of physics and chemistry (Cassirer, 1910/1923). He then documented it further when he brought into his purview the humanities and portrayed its role in, for instance, myth, language, and religion (Cassirer, 1923/1953, 1925/1955, 1929/1957).
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perceived color, for instance, when they come under the reddish hue of the setting sun. They must remain unchanged in their apparent size when they move closer or farther away. They must preserve their identity when their shape radically changes as they are turned. And all these constancies are created by applying a principle of “same” to what is in fact changing: They emerge as a consequence of the distinctive action of the concept.7 It is by means of the concept as well, then, that we acquire knowledge. For whenever we bring elements that are unrelated in our experience into some kind of order, into a relationship of “same,” “next to,” “dependent upon,” and so forth, we are endowing these elements with “intelligibility.” Whenever we make of what is scattered and diverse a unity, we are grasping what seems to be an inner coherence that, hidden all this while, brings to them now “understanding.” In this process we are applying a new rule-ofordering, are bringing forth a new concept; and when we denote this concept with a name, it becomes ready to join with other concepts in a still further relationship; it brings us to a still higher level of understanding. After establishing concepts for “mouse,” “horse,” and “giraffe,” for instance, we are able to bring them into a higher order concept of “animal”; and by exercising a principle of superordinate–subordinate, we are able to bring “animal” along with other concepts for “plant,” “bacterium,” and so forth under a still more comprehensive concept of “organic life.” At each of these steps, we attain a greater power of survey over the particulars. We effect that “generality” that is the hallmark of understanding.
Clinical Knowledge When it comes to attaining knowledge in the clinical field, then, we see the same principles operating. By applying a rule of “same,” clinicians are able to establish amid the unorganized welter of their field—amid the abundance of human features, traits, and characteristics that faces them—initial concepts for such classes as “depression,” “anxiety,” “delusion,” and “dementia.” Applying a rule of “superordinate–subordinate,” they are able then to create both subtypes for these classes and more general categories into which they fall, notions for the different kinds of depression on the one hand and for such more inclusive concepts as “affective disorders” on the other. Not content with this taxonomic mapping and sensing that there is something “behind” these various classes, however—something that is operating “in” and “through” them—they begin a new dimension; they adduce the concept-form of “cause” and, creating new concepts for “intentions,” “motives,” “needs,” and “drives,” begin an activity of “explanation.” Similarly, then, with concepts for psychological dynamics; developmental stages; and psychoanalytic, transactional, and so forth systems— each represents a new direction of constructive action and engages the clinician in the creation of fresh concepts. All together, these concepts and concept-sets are the means, then, by which clinicians come to understand their disciplinary object. Each has its history of birth and development, and each brings with it insight into what has hitherto been opaque. When Erikson introduced his concept of “identity period,” for instance, he illuminated features of adolescent life that before had been wrapped in obscurity; he brought intelligibility to the confused jumble of mood changes, impulsive behaviors, volatile feelings, and directionlessness that characterized this age group (Erikson, 1950, 1968). When Kernberg intro7 We are able to look in on this process of object-formation when we study early childhood development and the building of the child’s world (see, for instance, Piaget, 1950/1954).
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duced his concept of “borderline personality,” he stamped into a unity phenomenon that had hitherto been unrelated; he added to the category of “personality disorder” a subtype in which such traits as impoverished self-image, swings between grandiosity and debasement, and impulsivity were connected (Kernberg, 1993). The method clinicians use in this activity is traditionally called “observation.” But this is an observation that is not just a looking at but an articulation and organizing of what is looked at as well. It consists not only in seeing but in creatively shaping what one sees. And in clinical psychology, it has a special twist: Investigators here are of the same nature as what they observe. They can understand their object from the inside as well as from the outside. In light of this, their observation can properly be called “participant” in nature. And the method that clinicians use can be described in general as concept development in the context of participant observation. It is by means of this method, then, that clinicians obtain their knowledge. It is a knowledge that consists in a body of interrelated concepts, and this body gradually becomes more and more accurate, refined, and comprehensive in its representation of the human being. We see that, in terms of measurement theory, then, psychologists are still trying to meet the requirements for first-level “identification.” They are by no means ready to advance to higher levels of ordering and to the use of number. How, indeed, can they make reliable judgments of “more” and “less” in a concept like “depression” when this concept is still in flux as to what it is? How can they put forth meaningful scores on concepts for disorders that may eventually go the way of “neurosis” or “melancholia” and cease to exist? This is not to question whether clinicians are making progress; on the contrary, proof of this progress is given when we compare the conceptual array they have available to them at this time with that of 100 or even 50 years ago. Such a comparison shows that they have at their disposal now a concept manifold that is more finely nuanced than they had then. They have attained a degree of understanding of their human object that is clearly advanced over what they had before.
Conclusion My examination gives strong support to the case for a humanistic orientation in psychology, then, but shows that changes are needed in this discipline’s assumptions if the promise of this orientation is to be fulfilled. Present-day psychology must give up its aspiration to be a science; its human object does not submit to the effective measurement that science requires. And it must adopt a different philosophical paradigm; its present paradigm pushes it away from the steps it needs to take in order to obtain a significant knowledge. The alternative paradigm I have described restores the human being as psychology’s disciplinary object. And it defines the method by which it proceeds to attain its knowledge. This is an undertaking in which clinicians are oriented toward the human being as a whole. Other human aspects that come under the psychologist’s purview, therefore— “perception,” “learning,” “memory,” and so forth—will be seen as part-functions in this whole. Each such topic will require development of its own instruments and procedures. Each will show its contextualization, however, within this larger arena. Perception, for instance, will exhibit its dependence upon an individual’s developmental stage; memory will exhibit its dependence upon an individual’s age. In this holistic context, research and measurement will continue to have a place, but this place will have to be redefined. It will take a subordinate role in the clinician’s ongoing observation and concept development.
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And we see a new perspective emerging now in regard to science. With its focus on the human being, Kant’s paradigm must include in its purview the entire range of human expression and activity. It must extend this purview to such human initiatives as myth, language, art, literature, mathematics, and religion. And among these initiatives is science. Like the others, science takes inception under certain conditions and sets for itself a certain path of construction. These conditions include, as we have seen, the institution of a special kind of concept; and this path is oriented toward acquiring a knowledge of the objects and events that constitute what we call “nature.” Nature is its proper domain, and whenever it steps outside it, it finds that its methods become ineffective. If it tries to measure in, say, myth, art, or religion, it finds that its measurement cannot “grip”; and if it tries to measure on the human being itself, it finds that its measurement refuses, in Steven’s words, “to stay put while [one’s] back is turned” (Stevens, 1951, p. 21). As one among these initiatives, then, science is not fitted to understand the whole. It does not have the conceptual tools that are needed for understanding the entire circle of initiatives. For this, other tools are needed, and Cassirer found the key to these in the notion of “symbol”: It is through the human capacity for symbol-making, he proposed, that all these “symbolic forms” can arise (Cassirer, 1923/1953, 1925/1955, 1929/1957). Each requires a certain adaptation in our symbol usage: The fluidity of mythological thinking cannot give way to the stable objectivity we have at a later stage of civilization, for instance, without a modification in word usage; science cannot progress with its task without making a transition from our ordinary language to mathematics. In general, symbol-forming represents the unique capacity that differentiates the human being from animals. It is the means by which the human being is able to bring forth that endless wonder, the multidimensioned phenomenon we call “culture.” Psychology must see itself, then, as operating within this larger context. The task it sets for itself is to understand its human object’s “inner dynamics,” to develop a concept structure for “personality.” It takes place alongside other disciplines that study, for instance, the influence of group and societal dynamics on human functioning and the ways in which this functioning differs in different cultures and past civilizations. If it tries instead to place itself under the aegis of science, it finds itself diverted from this task; it finds itself devoting its energies to interests and concerns that are spurious. Altogether, the circle of activities of which psychology is a part holds ahead of it a common goal: This is to bring understanding of the most fascinating, complex, and intimate object of all, the human being.
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Author Note Anton G. Hardy is a clinical psychologist presently working with a brain-injured population. He received his PhD from Clark University and has served in a number of facilities including Veterans Administration hospitals, college counseling centers, and psychiatric hospitals. He has published in the fields of psychology and philosophy. His special interest in the latter is symbol theory. Received March 6, 2016 Accepted April 16, 2016 䡲