The primary purpose of a discipline such as psychology is to obtain knowledge. In line with other disciplines like astronomy, biology, and geology, it selects a certain sector of the world around and investigates it as its “object.” Psychology's object is the human being. And its goal, therefore, is to arrive at a knowledge of “human nature.”
When we evaluate psychology's success with this task, we cannot help but be disappointed. The knowledge it advances affords us little by way of significant understanding. Couched as it is in the language of objectivity, in numbers and statistics, it scarcely goes beyond what we already know through common sense. In addition, the discipline presents a dismaying face of disarray. Split into major clinical and research directions, it has fragmented even further into specialized areas that have little by way of mutual communication.
The cause of this malaise, I believe, is not difficult to detect. It lies in psychology's underlying assumptions. These assumptions stem from the philosophy of “realism,” the system that explains our mental contents on the basis of a copying from the outer reality. This philosophy leads to a resolute objectivism, and this in turn induces psychology to construe the human being in the manner of a physical object. Adopting the methods that are appropriate to physical science, then, it selects that aspect of its subject matter that submits most readily to measurement. This is “behavior.” And construing its object in this manner, now, it mutates into “behavioral science.”
But behavior is the most superficial of its object's aspects. In comparison with such features as thinking, imagination, and creativity, it scarcely touches what is distinctively human. Psychology loses its object, therefore, in its pursuit of methodological rigor. And as an enterprise, it presents the spectacle of, in Thomas Kuhn's words, “a condition in which [all the discipline's] members practice science but in which their gross product scarcely resembles science at all.” The measurements and data it so avidly pursues do not by themselves constitute knowledge: for this, they must be integrated into overarching theory. And when this theory is anchored in something as superficial as “behavior,” it is destined from the beginning to be lacking in significance.
Meantime, psychology's clinical branch deals directly with these neglected aspects. Confronting the discipline's object in all its conditions of young and old, normal and abnormal, male and female, clinicians attempt to learn about its various features — its perceiving and thinking, its imagining and remembering, its aspirations and emotional life — as these are displayed in their real-life functioning. The outcome of this learning is the notions they develop for “personality”; it takes the form of concepts they create for personality traits, inner dynamics, pathological disorders, and developmental stages. Taken all together, then, it is these concepts that bring to the discipline a meaningful knowledge: it is by their means that we are able to see to the degree that we can into “human nature.”
But this is a kind of knowledge that is not condoned by official psychology. Marginilizing its clinical branch as merely a “treatment enterprise,” the mainstream views these concepts as lacking in the all-important quality of “objectivity.” They arise from the clinician's overly subjective involvement with his object, they argue, and are, therefore, “unscientific.” Thus, any contributions the clinician makes to the discipline's knowledge base are ignored. And the clinical branch itself is regarded as a mere “adjunct” in the discipline's overall enterprise.
Examination shows, however, that it is these clinical notions that frequently provide the psychologist with his “variables.” It is the concepts that the clinician develops for the different aspects of the human being that supply the material that the researcher uses in his measuring. The psychologist acquires, therefore, a distorted view of his methodology: as a result of his philosophical assumptions, he is led into misunderstanding the manner in which he actually operates. This distortion can be corrected only by changing these assumptions. And to do this, I turn to Kant and elaborate the implications for psychology of his “critical” viewpoint.
And now the epistemological function of the clinical psychologist becomes clear. In involving himself in this hands-on way with his human object, the clinician is carrying out the necessary operation of “observation.” He is acquainting himself with his object in all the different ways in which it manifests itself in his experience of it and developing the discipline-specific concepts that will order these ways. As in any science, later stages must be built on these initial steps. And measurement and research, to the extent that they are meaningful, must proceed from the material this initial labor provides.
The path that enables psychology to attain its knowledge, then, comes clearly to view. And an essential unity is seen to underlie its present diversity of directions and sub-specialties.
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“Psychology's goal is to
arrive at a knowledge
of human nature”
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