A Humanities Approach to the Psychology of Personhood

Jeff Sugarman, Jack Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000042542
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this set of insightful essays, the concept of the psychological humanities is defined and explored. A clear rationale is provided for its necessity in the study and understanding of the individual and identity in a discipline that is occupied largely by empirical studies that report aggregated data and its analysis.

Contributors to this volume are leading scholars in theoretical psychology who believe that psychology must be about persons and their lives. In these essays, they draw from a variety of disciplines that include art, literature, life writing, and history to make a case for the psychological humanities. A final chapter provides a critical commentary on the value of the psychological humanities. The chapter argues that psychology must draw on the knowledge and practices of the humanities, as well as the sciences and social sciences, in order to attain a greater understanding of personhood.

This book is aimed at upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars of psychology, particularly theoretical psychology, philosophy of the mind, and those from a humanities background interested in exploring the concept of the psychological humanities.

1
Introduction

Jeff Sugarman and Jack Martin

Like psychology, the humanities have a long history of descent from antiquity and a comparatively brief history of emergence as distinctively recognized fields of study. Recent histories of the humanities have linked them to studies derived from the expansion and splintering of philology from ancient through Renaissance and Romantic ages and into the twentieth century (e.g., Turner, 2014) and to a broader range of studies concerned with finding patterns, principles, and styles that can be discerned over time in the study of “texts, languages, literature, music, art, theatre, and the past” (Bod, 2013, p. 7). Earlier histories have uncovered and covered both similar and different lines of descent and emergence. In the contemporary academy, the humanities include, but are not exhausted by, literature and linguistics, history and historiography, musicology, theatre, art, media, religious and cultural studies, and the philosophical and theoretical study of these and related disciplines and undertakings. Central to the humanities, however historicized and classified, are concerns about humans as particular kinds of beings, their contexts, their activities, and their experiences.

The purpose of this book is to introduce readers to a psychological humanities of personhood. The “ways of knowing” employed by psychologists may include but frequently go well beyond the methods of scientific psychology. The psychological humanities contrast with, yet complement, psychological science. Fundamental to this volume is the idea that to attain a greater understanding of the psychological features and capacities that not only make possible and constrain what we are but also what we might become, psychology must draw on the knowledge and practices of the humanities. Nowhere is such necessity more manifest than in the study and understanding of the human person, since the person is much more than a physical, biological being. To be a person requires being immersed in social and cultural practices that constitute ways and traditions of life, replete with values that guide our decisions and actions, perspectives, and possibilities for acting in consort with others, narratives that shape our existence, and strategies and designs for undertaking life projects. All of this is the very stuff of humanities disciplines like literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, languages, political studies, and the arts. This book presents a set of essays on the psychological humanities of personhood. Following this introductory chapter, leading contributors to the psychology of personhood discuss their work from the perspectives of those particular humanities disciplines from which they have drawn ideas and inspiration. In doing so, they clarify why psychology must rely on the humanities as well as the sciences and social sciences to adequately illuminate key central topics in the psychology of personhood.

Thomas Teo defined psychological humanities in his 2017 presidential address to the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology as “the transdisciplinary idea that psychology needs to draw on the knowledge and practices of the humanities to access extensive content and material as well as a long tradition of research on the processes and products of human mental life” (Teo, 2017, pp. 3–4). However, Teo was certainly not the first to think of psychology as an undertaking in the humanities. Before disciplinary and scientific psychology emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, psychological studies were understood to reside in the provinces of philosophy, theology, and literature. Since then, many prominent psychologists have produced important works in the psychological humanities. These include William James’s studies of religious experience, Erik Erikson’s psychobiographical studies of Luther and Gandhi, B. F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two, Henry Murray’s literary analysis of the works of Herman Melville, and Winifred Mahrer and Brenden Mahrer’s historical investigation of the “legend of the ship of fools,” in which they refuted Michael Foucault’s literal interpretation of the phrase as alluding to the transportation of “the insane” in ships.

James Korn (1985) highlights Joseph Royce, Lee Cronbach, Brewster Smith, and Sigmund Koch as notable advocates of the psychological humanities throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Koch (1981), in his desire to free psychology from what he regarded as its “epistemopathologies,” echoed Bertrand Russell’s (1945) desire to pursue reflections on human life that might teach us “how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation” (cited by Koch, 1981, p. 263). Koch urged psychologists not to turn away from “questions that are intensely meaningful to all human beings—questions over which many experience great anguish—… [questions which] are meaningful but rationally undecideable in principle” (1981, p. 262). In chastising humanistic psychologists for not being sufficiently humanistic, Smith (1982) noted that the humanities offer not only insights into human experience but also “a literature of criticism and interpretation which has been much concerned with psychological issues” (p. 51). Joseph Royce (1967) decried psychology’s “superempiricism,” which he opined was “almost completely at the expense of the metaphoric approach” of the humanities (p. 27), and Cronbach (1975) urged psychologists to join the humanist and the artist in attempting to “gain insight into contemporary relationships, and to realign the culture’s view of man with present realities,” noting that “to know man as he is is no mean aspiration” (p. 126).

Others, such as Bornstein (1984), have asserted that “Psychology resonates humanism and science, is by nature multivocal, and articulates equally and effectively with humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences” (p. xxx). J. H. van den Berg, a Dutch phenomenological psychiatrist who over the past fifty years and in more than twenty volumes, has developed and defended a broader disciplinary approach to psychological understanding states pointedly that “modern science cannot explain the essential problems of man” (Romanyshyn, 2008, p. 383). Van den Berg surmises that, “We need something else, a new grammar. In our modern era of successful science and technology—successful only for a certain range of problems—we lack the words to grasp and to understand the wonder of nature” (Romanyshyn, p. 383). Even Noam Chomsky, who has argued strongly that psychological capacities are biophysically constituted, declares that there is

no reason to suppose all the problems we face are best approached in these [scientific] terms. Thus it is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.

(1988, p. 159)

Korn (1985) describes the humanities as searching “for the ideal, defining and showing the best that a person can become, often by contrast with the worst” and holds that “such ideals of thought and life can be found in literature, philosophy, and history” and in other disciplines in the humanities (p. 189). He points to five important themes in humanities scholarship, which we interpret here as especially relevant to the psychology of personhood:

1. The use of expressive language, rich in metaphor, symbolism, subjectivism, and open to interpretation
2. The exercise of arts of symbolism, including creative writing and reading, persuasive speaking and careful listening, and multiperspectivity
3. A deep involvement in and concern for life, including the meanings, purposes, and comportments of existence
4. A constant concern with values
5. The use of imagination, especially in intuition, empathy, and fantasy.

The themes that Korn discerns connect to the rationale for orienting to the humanities as an important avenue for psychological inquiry.

It has been sixty years since C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 Rede Lecture, in which he lamented the divide separating “the two cultures” of intellectual endeavor in Western society: between science and the humanities (Snow, 1993). Snow admonished traditionalists in the humanities for their refusal to grant science any authority, blamed their contumacy for impeding modernization and the failure to address the most pressing issues of the time (i.e., the threat of nuclear war, overpopulation, and the disparity between rich and poor), and urged the building of bridges in an effort to spur the progress of knowledge and social betterment.

Although intervening years have seen the divide enlarge and become even more deeply entrenched and Snow’s thesis continues to receive attention, much has changed. Science ascended in the shadow of the Cold War and the balance has tipped greatly in its favor. Technologies that were little more than fodder for science fiction writers in the 1950s have become common reality. There is little to dispute the success of science, its contributions to improving the ease of daily life, its integral role in matters of governmental policymaking and decision-making, and the growth of its popularity and promise in the public imagination. By contrast, the humanities are languishing. The Enlightenment foundation of the humanistic tradition has been profoundly shaken by postmodernism and left-leaning liberal politics that have flourished in the academy. In universities, the sciences are prospering in enrollments and funding, while the humanities are in decline. Despite remarkable scientific progress, the same major threats to civilization in Snow’s day persist, and new ones have emerged, casting doubt on Snow’s firm faith in science and technological intervention to solve all of humanity’s ills. Moreover, as science advances and new biotechnologies are ushering a posthumanist era in which we will perhaps be able “to take human nature into our own re-creative hands as the next great step in evolution” (Post, 2010, p. 37), psychologically, socially, and ethically dealing with the outcomes of attempts to remake humanity come with unforeseen dilemmas, solutions to which will not come from more scientific study and technological innovation.

The struggle between rival knowledge paradigms appears culturally and historically endemic (Waugh, 2009). As Waugh observes, for the ancient Greeks, nascent scientific thinkers championing the rationality of argument and evidence were pitted against those who favored the value of rhetoric for a thriving culture of orators practicing law and politics. In the Renaissance, an uncompromising scholasticism was challenged by the birth of humanism. The terrain of Snow’s analysis had already been mapped in the nineteenth century in an exchange of essays between Victorian scholar Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley, nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog for his pugnacious defense of evolutionary theory. There also had been debate between those of the Vienna circle promoting positivist philosophy and the human-istically inclined who found it untenable.

Waugh (2009) detects that underlying these antipathies is a structure of values intended not only to stipulate the terms of disciplinary inquiry and claims to knowledge but also to offer a vision of the good society and guide-posts for educational reform. Such values are not the product of an explicit knowledge of scientifically ascertained facts, but rather, they grow out of a more fundamental pre-reflective knowing with which persons inhabit and negotiate their cultural worlds, sense and discover the significance of their lives, and are prompted to pursue the matters that concern them. If scientific forms of inquiry provide an explanation and understanding of the world of material phenomena, approaches given by the humanities help us to grasp the value-saturated world in which we are already always embedded. They provide the means of interpreting, understanding, and promoting human flourishing, what is valuable about it, and the meaning and profundity of human suffering, frailty, and finitude. As Korn (1985) intimates, the humanities have a moral purpose that science does not provide. Psychology is not merely descriptive and explanatory; it is also inherently prescriptive and therefore ethically implicated (Sugarman, 2009).

Our reason for revisiting briefly Snow’s two cultures controversy is not to perpetuate the clash, warranting a psychological humanities by diminishing the validity of psychological science. Rather, our aim is to offer the possibility of greater psychological understanding by encouraging a more sophisticated multi-perspectival ethos that legitimizes and incorporates approaches adopted from the humanities. Korn (1985) charged that psychology has not been “as broad or as liberal as it might be. The emphasis on science today has become dogma. In textbooks, curricula, accreditation criteria, licensing examinations, and elsewhere in psychology, science has been given exclusive rights to our identity” (p. 188). This state of affairs seems no less true today. Witness the continued dominance of the methodological tradition modeled after the natural sciences and the rapidly growing embrace of neuroscience by psychology departments, along with the increasing resources being diverted to it. One is hard-pressed to find any departments promoting a humanistic, existential, phenomenological, narrative, or depth psychology or encouraging students to read broadly, or at all, in the humanities in search of understanding themselves and the human condition.

Korn (1985) went on to allege that this preoccupation with science was inhibiting disciplinary development, antiquating psychology’s methodologies, and excluding vital subject matter from curricula, which prevented the broader education of psychologists and limited them professionally and academically. Korn made explicit that he was not suggesting that psychologists abandon science but rather that they gain an appreciation for their disciplinary heritage in the humanities, its merits, and its potential and to see how psychology could be both science and humanity. We recognize that bridging psychological science and a psychological humanities would be no meager feat and would require much in the making. Nevertheless, this is not cause to deny or dismiss the viability or legitimacy of the psychological humanities in advancing psychological knowledge.

When so much contemporary psychology unfolds in empirical study after study reporting aggregated data and its analysis, it is easy to lose a sense of the individuals studied (and those studying them) as particular persons. And yet it is precisely the understanding of persons that motivates many psychologists to pursue studies and careers in psychology. It is here that we believe that the idea of a psychological humanities can have its greatest impact. Much of the concern of the humanities is not to be general but to be particular—to look closely at human lives and ways of living, to turn them over, to pause over them, over the singular experiences of persons at certain times and places and to walk through some particular landscape and marvel over something unprecedented and unrepeatable. Infusing this concern into psychology is our primary motivation in editing and contributing to this book.

Kathleen L. Slaney, author of Chapter 2, illuminates the value of literary work to psychological understanding by comparing relevant examples with traditional approaches to the study of familial relations, such as those between siblings and their parents. In Chapter 3, Mark F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Message in the Medium: Knowing the Psychological Through Art
• 3 Psychology as Literature: Narrative Knowing and the Project of the Psychological Humanities
• 4 Methods of Life Writing for a Psychology of Persons
• 5 Personhood Through the Lens of Radical-Transformative Agency
• 6 Historical Ontology: Exemplifying a Psychological Humanities of Personhood
• 7 Challenges for a Psychological Humanities
• Index