As a graduate student in psychology at Clark University, I was struck by how little the various research and experimental procedures we were learning about touched the subject I was interested in. I had chosen this field because of the excitement of attaining a knowledge of this most fascinating of scientific subjects, the human being. But these approaches were producing little more, it seemed, than what we already knew through common sense; pursuing the ideal of methodological rigor, they were focusing on the aspect of their subject matter that was most measurable, “behavior,” and pushing into the background such distinctively human characteristics as thinking, imagination, and creativity.
At the same time, a humanistic branch was trying to restore these more significant kinds of knowledge. But its proponents — such figures as Allport, Rogers, and Maslow — also disappointed. They seemed to be unable to devise any dependable means for attaining this more significant knowledge. Psychology was thus split between those who were devoted to the rigorous methodology that brought “validity” and those who strove for significance. As a whole, it seemed to be unable to achieve the ideal of a knowledge that was at once dependable and significant.
From the time I had been in college, I had been interested in philosophy, and my reading had brought me to the writings of Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer was a member of a German school that took its incentive from Kant's “Copernican revolution.” He was not easy to understand; while his writing was thankfully free of that obscurity that German philosophers seem to have such an affinity for, his ideas themselves were by no means plain. It did not help that he nowhere made explicit exposition of his "system," and this had to be slowly constructed through years of reading and re-reading. In addition, there was little to be found in collateral literature that would aid with this task: “official” philosophy was by and large ignoring Cassirer, and philosophers seemed unwilling to put the effort that was needed into absorbing his ideas.
What gradually emerged in the course of my study, however, was an entirely new way of approaching things. Profoundly phenomenological in its orientation, it offered new perspectives on such standard philosophical issues as how we acquire our perceptual world, what the place of “reality” is in our thinking, what role language and symbolization play in cognition. Of particular interest in terms of my concerns was his perspective on knowledge: by extensively studying the various disciplines, both scientific and humanistic, that were engaged in knowledge-making, he was able to expose the key role in these enterprises of concepts; whether these disciplines were physical in their orientation or human, they depended on these small nuggets of meaning in their elaboration of theory. This provided me with a view of the path, then, that could lead through psychology's dilemma: by examining how psychology formed its concepts, I would be able to go below its surface divisions and come to its knowledge-making heart.
This was the task I undertook in Psychology and the Critical Revolution. Since it is the clinical branch in psychology that deals most directly with the human being, that contacts its disciplinary object in its actual functioning, I went to its activity and examined the different concept-forms that clinicians develop as they try to understand this functioning. This resulted in a definition of initial “type” concepts that made primary organization of the diversity of human ways, categories like “depressive,” “paranoid,” and “schizophrenic.” Concurrently, they formed “subtypes” that made useful differentiations within these categories. In another direction, they developed “causal” concepts for underlying drives, motives, and dynamics. And in still another direction, they articulated “developmental stages” that brought into consideration the individual's life span. Finally, those who were research-minded took certain elements from this general concept matrix and turned them into “variables.” This was a concept-form that, by embodying such characteristics as continuity and infinite divisibility, permitted measurement.
Since my focus in this book was on psychology and the process by which it attained a knowledge, I was able to provide only a sketchy portrayal of the philosophical background on which I was relying. I felt the need, therefore, to spell out this “critical” viewpoint in more detail, particularly as it was not well known to the American readership. I undertook this task in Perspectives and the Construction of Consciousness: The Phenomenological Alternative, advancing as an entire “paradigm” the new philosophical direction that Kant had introduced. Since it opposed the generally accepted realism in which our mental contents are thought to be copied from this external reality, it avoided the objectivism that had been such a strong influence in pushing psychology into its behaviorism. I proceeded to systematically ground this paradigm by showing how it resolved philosophy's “fundamental problems.” And in the end, I was able to advance a new foundation for the psychological discipline, one that promised to bring fresh insight into those human features such as thinking, creativity, and consciousness that were so obscure under realism.
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“Psychology was unable to achieve a knowledge that was at once dependable and significant”
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