Research in Analytical Psychology

Empirical Research

Christian Roesler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138694910
• eBook ISBN: 9781315527154
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Research in Analytical Psychology: Empirical Research provides an original overview of empirical research in Analytical Psychology, focusing on quantitative and qualitative methods. This unique collection of chapters from an international range of contributors covers all the major concepts of Analytical Psychology and provides a strong empirical foundation.

The book covers a wide range of concepts and fields, and is presented in five parts. Part I, Epistemological Foundations, looks at psychological empiricism and naturalism. Part II, Fundamental Concepts of Analytical Psychology, presents chapters on complexes, archetypes, dream interpretation, and image. Part III, Trauma, addresses neuroscience, dreams and infant observation research. Part IV, Psychotherapy and Psychotherapeutic Methods examines sandplay, picture interpretation, quality management and training. Finally, Part V, Synchronicity, contains chapters concerning the experience of psychophysical correlations and synchronistic experiences in psychotherapy. Each chapter provides an overview of research in the field and closes with general conclusions, and the book as a whole will enable practitioners to evaluate the empirical status of their concepts and methods and, where necessary, update them. It also presents the necessary material for a re-evaluation of the status of Analytical Psychology within the broader academic field, supporting a move back into the heart of current debates in psychology and psychotherapy.

This book will be essential reading for analytical psychologists in practice and in training, academics and students of Analytical Psychology and post-Jungian ideas, and academics and students of other disciplines seeking to integrate methods from Analytical Psychology into their research. It is complemented by its companion volume, Research in Analytical Psychology: Applications from Scientific, Historical, and Cross-Cultural Research.

Part I

Epistemological foundations

1

Psychological empiricism and naturalism

Philip Kime

In so far as [psycho-analysis] is associated with the ultimate reality of the personality, O, it is baseless. This does not mean that the psycho-analytic method is unscientific, but that the term “science,” as it has been commonly used hitherto to describe an attitude to objects of sense, is not adequate to represent an approach to those realities with which “psycho-analytical science” has to deal.

(Bion, 1970/2004, p. 88)

Introduction

When one considers the idea of research, outside of the mainstream cognitive behavioral models of psychology, one is fundamentally involved with philosophical and specifically epistemological questions which complicate things considerably. The notion of research has a very particular bias in that the primary meaning is one of “research into,” that is, of a target, a realm of investigation separate from the researcher and separate from the decision or desire to perform research. We often pay lip service to other aspects of the idea when we say that, of course, there is research into concepts and ideas, but this is often with a reservation that this is not quite the same thing, which of course it is not since we have no natural disposition – or at least a much more complicated and ambiguous one – to believe that ideas are ontologically separate in the same way as we pre-theoretically conceive of empirical reality to be separate. Dictionary definitions of research tend to emphasize the systematic aspect of investigation, and a systematic approach implies a belief in the systematic organization of the target of the research; this, a subtle, complex vestige of a sympathetic magic whereby one controls and understands by somehow mirroring or copying that which is not yet understood. Sympathetic mirroring of a thing in the structure of the investigation into the thing is part of what it is to believe in a “thing” at all: a sympathy is the first flush of an ontology since it necessitates an alteration in the sympathizer, and the presence of anything which alters us is a primitive and inevitable first ontology. So, the implied subject matter of research and the systematic approach gives us from the very beginning fundamental epistemological and ontological biases. The question is, are these structures adequate for the type of psychology which is called, broadly, “Analytical Psychology”? When we consider psychology as a discipline defined by its subject matter, however one conceives of this, there is little problem in building up a program of empirical research since empiricism indeed is essentially defined by a particular relation to a subject matter to be explored. If, however, as I think we rather should define psychology with respect to its form and the manner in which it engages with its purported subject matter, the subject matter it ostensibly investigates drops out of the definition of the field and we are left with a real problem of how to conceive of the notion of “data.” I will argue that if we commit to the (metaphysical) structure required by empiricism, we will miss out the essential feature of psychology proper: its particular and unique form. This omission will ensure that what passes for psychology will really only be other fields of a more prosaic structure, albeit obscured by psychological vocabulary which in fact contributes nothing essentially psychological. The great seduction of empiricism obscures and damages the subtle structure of psychology proper which cannot rest satisfied with a metaphysical notion of external “data,” no matter how complex the data is said to be.

It is of no help, when considering addressing oneself to a putative empirical Analytical Psychology, to begin with a naïve empiricism since this is questionable even in the most favorable of the physical sciences; any basic text on the philosophy of science will attest to this. Rather one might begin straight away with a more sophisticated model of empiricist ontology such as that developed by Quine since this has been a point of reference in recent relevant work (Atmanspacher, 2014; Atmanspacher & Kronz, 1999). It is necessary to note that there is a significant philosophical lineage from Heidegger through Husserl to Dreyfus’s well-known critique of artificial intelligence, which dismisses the significance of a foundational question to which an “empirical psychology” is part of the answer:

Since that time, many have come to regard it as absurd and wholly obsolete to ask how the subject arrives at knowledge of the so-called “external world.” Heidegger has called the persistence of this question the real “scandal” of philosophy.

(Gadamer, 1962, p. 119)

Scandal or not, in a modern context where a claim to scientific respectability is heavily biased toward the demonstration of a research paradigm and empirical relevance, arguments starting from a point of incommensurability are too easy to dismiss. It is for this reason that it is worthwhile to begin with a model which is simultaneously able to take seriously the idea of empirical research but is also sophisticated enough to allow for something like psychology.

Naturalized epistemology

There is no epistemological sophistication seemingly more relevant to psychology than that presented by Quine, if only for the famous sentence about the practice of traditional epistemology:

But why all this creative reconstruction, all this make-believe? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology?

(Quine, 1968a, p. 75)

At first blush, this seems to be something which the depth psychologist might embrace due to its implied suspicion of arbitrary theorizing, or perhaps intellectualism, but in particular due to the explicit mention of psychology. It seems to advocate praxis, clinical details, and empirical sensibility. The point of a naturalized epistemology is a fundamental suspicion of the normative reconstructions of traditional epistemology leading to a concentration on the processes which actually lead to what we call knowledge. Surely psychology and such a naturalized epistemology have a natural relation, a natural interest in carefully detailing the constructed subtleties and idiosyncrasies in what we claim to know. Indeed this was one of the early (and late) claims of psychoanalysis: it laid bare the strange connective tissue of what we claimed to know and in some way either completed the puzzle or provided the very foundation of the epistemological picture in an ostensibly naturalized manner based on clinical observations. The well-aired suspicions regarding the naturalized credentials of Freud’s initial theories notwithstanding, we can be certain that the initial impulse of depth psychology can be characterized as one of descriptive rather than normative epistemics; Freud was used to defend his views by unapologetically affirming that his theory was simply supported by what actually was the case in the consulting room. More sophisticated later theorists such as Bion even went so far as to suggest that the primary phenomenon being worked upon in psychoanalysis was epistemic, the so-called K (Knowledge) link (Bion, 1963).

Thus far we seem to be in a position to advocate naturalized epistemology as a suitable framework in which we can situate Analytical Psychology research. However, this is untenable since the “naturalized” in “naturalized epistemology” derives from the “natural” in “natural science.” This is explicit in Quine but often forgotten. Natural science for Quine means empirical science, and psychology for Quine is a part of natural science. A naturalized epistemology is an epistemology characterized by a thoroughgoing empiricism where the essential explanandum is “The relation between the meager input and the torrential output” (Quine, 1968a, p. 83) – that is, how we come to build such tremendous models of knowledge given only the “meager” input of the senses. It is clear from this glimpse of the underbelly of a naturalized epistemology that there are fundamental and serious problems with adopting such an epistemological model in Analytical Psychology. This is due in large part to the concept of “archetype” since, ignoring the inappropriate reifications which gather around this idea, it indicates a structuring principle which shapes the sense input far beyond any measure which could reasonably qualify as “meager.” We are really in no position, since Kant, to so easily divide the world into “raw” sense data and its post-perceived manipulations, at least in epistemology. Of course Quine has a very famous opinion about this in terms of his attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction which critically sophisticated his empiricism (Quine, 1951). However, the sophistication is to do with the flexibility of scope Quine sees in applying the refutations of experimentation rather than any attack on the empiricist foundations themselves.

The relevant sophistication in Quine’s empiricism comes via Duhem (1906/1954) – the well-known thesis of epistemic holism:

Holism in this moderate sense is an obvious but vital correction of the naive conception of scientific sentences as endowed each with its own separable empirical content.

(Quine, 1990, p. 16)

That is, empiricism would not require that every noun in our psychological vocabulary – “self,” “archetype,” “complex,” and so forth – should somehow be connected to a part of the world, giving such terms their reference and thereby meaningful content. Indeed, not even statements expressed as sentences which contain such terms have isolatable empirical content, and this rules out simplistic physical reduction to brain states, for example. Rather, the empirical content of a discipline and thereby the very purpose of research in the discipline is a function of the points at which the theory as a whole touches upon the empirical world. It is this holism which makes Quine’s model so useful as a starting point for discussing the empirical content of psychology since it models at the level of meta-theory the justified suspicion of crude versions of materialism which would map every term to a physical state and thereby offer an effectively syntactic method of eliminating psychology altogether.

There are difficulties however, in that points of contact with empirical reality are not so easy to identify in psychology:

In softer science, from psychology and economics through sociology to history (I use “science” broadly), checkpoints are sparser and sparser, to the point where their absence becomes rather the rule than the exception.

(Quine, 1995, p. 49)

Here the “checkpoints” are the “observation categoricals,” the points where the theory states something that could possibly conflict with empirical reality, and it is these which provide the touchstones of empiricism for Quine. However sparse or rare these checkpoints might be, they are the foundation of knowledge, and when completely absent relegate a subject to the realms of fiction or groundless metaphysics. This is very important, as it is an insight more colloquially and ubiquitously embraced by many in Analytical Psychology that despite the seeming abstract nature of the concepts involved, there is a hope that these “checkpoints” do exist and provide an empirical touchstone which allows meaningful research and a place in the pantheon of scientific endeavor. I shall argue in this chapter that the nature of psychology proper is that the character of such checkpoints is unique in psychology, and that their empirical nature, when extant, is fundamentally contingent and therefore provides no basis for an empirical attitude.

Research and ontology

Research requires an object, and this induces a pre-theoretical ontology since what you are researching is to some extent what you think there is. Quine formalized this in his maxims regarding quantification and ontology, that ontology is given by the values of the variables one is prepared to quantify over. When researching into X, one is generally apt to quantify over variables whose value is X. For example, “complexes have a core which can be described using emotionally toned adjectives,” or “there is a finite classification of core dream symbols,” or even “the Self is a self-organising system of reflexive relations” are all statements of potential research areas in Analytical Psychology that quantify respectively over variables taking as values “complex,” “dream symbol,” and “Self.” There is much to be said for the idea that therefore, such things are ontological commitments, regardless of whether one tries to defuse the issue by simply stating that they are not. We must at least thank Quine for teaching us that basing the ontology of a research paradigm on mere statements of ontological commitment is far too naïve.¹

An empirical basis for any subject requires two things. First, we need an accepted ontology, no matter whether it is finite or infinite or whether it consists of entities concrete (e.g., particles) or abstract (e.g., numbers or complexes). Second, we need some method of converting all unempirical talk into empirical talk in terms of our accepted ontology. The most well-known conversion takes the form of a reduction into our accepted ontology; we might wish to eliminate all ontological commitment from a theory which is not commitment to members of the accepted ontology. To take a crude example from the philosophy of mind, we might wish to reduce all talk of beliefs or ideas to talk of neurons firing in particular patterns at particular times, and this would be an ontological reduction from something which we feel uneasy talking about to something about which we feel confident.

There has, of course, been enormous controversy in the philosophy of mind about what might be an acceptable ontology and how one might go about construing mentalistic discourse in terms of such an ontology. Without becoming embroiled in the particulars of the debate, let us keep an eye on the general requirements in respect of theoretical ontological commitment. Quine helpfully codified the abstract structure of the ontological element in all such debates into his notion of a “proxy function,” which is a mapping of elements of the ontology of one theory into elements of a theory having a different ontology (Quine, 1968b, pp. 55–62; Quine, 1966, pp. 214–220; Quine, 1990, pp. 31–33; Quine, 1995, pp. 72–73). Such a proxy function need not be one-to-one and can indeed be many-to-one, and in this case it counts as ontologically reductive. Proxy functions tell us something important about the nature of what is essential in a theory; they tell us that “what justifies the reduction of one system of objects to another is preservation of relevant structure” (Quine, 1966, p. 214). This is very important, as it means that when we recast a theory and its ontological commitments into another theoretical model by way of proxy functions, what we aim to preserve is structure.² The famous Quinean notion of “ontological relativity” depends on proxy functions because given particular and often typically essential assumptions about the composition of a theory, it is possible to prove that one can always define such a proxy function, and therefore that the ontological commitment of a theory is not fixed and uniquely implicated but rather relative to a complex and pragmatically invisible theoretical background which determines the particular shape of the proxy function. Since the proxy function changes exactly that which determines ontological commitment (for Quine, quantification over free variables), ontology itself is ineradicably relative.

We employ this notion of a “proxy function” in Analytical Psychology when we treat a patient through a medium such as dreams, active imagination, or myths. These variations are seen as a proxy for the psychology of the patient and allow a latitude unavailable to a “direct” approach – this is indeed a central tenet of this form of psychology. We take these “proxy” phenomena as types of maps or structures which somehow “fit” the psychology of a patient and provide a language perhaps more appropriate, coherent, or effective in treatment. I believe Quine to be essentially correct when he emphasizes structure as the essential feature of theory. It is the shape of the theory, that is, the geometry of the relations between things in the theory, that is the theory; the particular things related are not the point, neither are they stable when one re-maps the theory to the world using a proxy function which preserves the structure. Now, there is a little subterfuge here in this excursion into Quine’s philosophy of science due to the presence of an underlying assumption which pervades his work, as it does every empiricist, no matter how sophisticated. The assumption is that the notion of “empirical content” is non-empty, meaning that a restriction on proxy functions is that all theories are ontologically committed to at least some things that are real referents of their variables. The assumption, put another way, is that a proxy function cannot map from a theory with empirical content to one without empirical content. This is in fact what defines the physical sciences, that their structure is limited to some empirical touchstone even though this touchstone might change, indeed sometimes drastically so.

It is this assumption that I reject of psychology. What defines psychology proper is that i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: empirical research in Analytical Psychology
• Part I Epistemological foundations
• Part II Fundamental concepts of Analytical Psychology
• Part III Trauma
• Part IV Psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic methods
• Part V Synchronicity
• Index