Global Pandemics and Epistemic Crises in Psychology

A Socio-Philosophical Approach

Martin Dege, Irene Strasser, Martin Dege, Irene Strasser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367702793
• eBook ISBN: 9781000410273
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Using COVID-19 as a base, this groundbreaking book brings together several renowned scholars to explore the concept of crisis, and how this global event has shaped the discipline of psychology. It engages directly with the challenges that psychology continues to face when theorizing societal issues of gender, race, class, history, and culture, while not disregarding "lived" experiences.

This edited volume offers a set of pathways to rethink psychology beyond its current scope and history to become more apt to the conditions, needs, and demands of the 21st century. The book explores topics like resilience, interpersonal relationships, mistrust in the government, and access to healthcare. Dividing the book into three distinct sections, the contributors first examine the current crisis within psychology, then go on to explore how psychology theorizes the subject and the other in a social world of perpetual political, economic, cultural, and social crises, and lastly consider the role of crises in the creation of new theorizing.

This is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of theoretical and philosophical psychology, social psychology, community psychology, and developmental psychology.

1

Psychology in Crisis – An Introduction

Martin Dege and Irene Strasser

In his reflection on the crisis of the European sciences, Edmund Husserl states that “the history of psychology is actually only a history of crises” (Husserl, 1935–37/1954/1970, p. 203). Almost a century later, the state of ‘crisis’ is still all too familiar in the discipline of psychology. Ever since the inauguration of the discipline with the first experimental laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig in 1879, crises have been constant companions. What is more, the laboratory itself was, at least in part, a reaction to a crisis: Wundt had a medical degree from the University of Heidelberg and had studied with Hermann von Helmholtz, who, at the time, was interested in physiology and perception. Wundt’s appointment in Leipzig was in the philosophy department, however, and came without laboratory space, in contrast to the common practice for appointments in physiology. Facing a state of crisis with little resources to continue his research, Wundt at first self-financed his laboratory, and it was not listed in the university catalog until 1883 (Bringmann & Tweney, 1980). Wundt was not hired in Leipzig to become the founder of a new discipline, quite the contrary: He came to the position at a comparatively late stage in his career, and he certainly was not the only candidate considered for the job (Titchener, 1921; Rieber, 1980). Indeed, the Wundt’ian success story and the founding myth of a discipline with the inauguration of a laboratory would have never unfolded without the intellectual crises that preceded these events.

In many ways, the crisis of a lost revolution in 1848/49 in Germany was key at this point: The democratic forces that had lost the battle on the stage of politics continued their struggle in academia with the emergence of the scientific materialists (Rabinbach, 1990). The discussions that followed, together with the publication of an increasing number of psychology textbooks, rendered psychology variously part of philosophy, theology, or physiology (Teo, 2007). This debate was largely brought to an end, however, with the publication of Hermann Lotze’s Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (Lotze, 1852). Lotze, who is, maybe somewhat ironically, mostly forgotten outside philosophical circles today, had already argued against vitalism a decade earlier (Lotze, 1843/1885). Beyond academic arguments, Lotze’s institutional power at the time certainly helped to establish the materialistic and physiological variant of psychology as dominant.

Rendering Wundt’s administrative act of opening a laboratory as the birth hour of psychology (rather than Lotze’s opus or any other of the numerous publications of the time) silences the underlying crisis of competing ideas, a crisis that remains unresolved until today. Ideas can be wrestled with. Academics can argue with and against them. The laboratory is a historical fact; it has been engraved into the history of the discipline and is repeated over and over in modern textbooks (Feldman, 2015, p. 16; Funder, 2015, p. 426; Schacter et al., 2015, p. 13; Weiten, 2013, p. 3; Myers, 2009, p. 2 to name but a few). The debate about the meaning of Wundt’s founding act is expressed in a state of perpetual crisis (Valsiner, 2012, p. 153) as it is diagnosed from differing standpoints. Rudolf Willy criticized a lack of empirical rigor in psychology in a book entitled The Crisis of Psychology published in 1899 already (Willy, 1899; see also Mülberger, 2012). William James, who famously emerged from personal crisis to become the founder of American psychology (Fullinwider, 1975; Leary, 2015) described psychology as a “string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; […] it is only the hope of a science” (James, 1892, p. 468). And two years earlier, he saw “traditional psychology [as talking] like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water.” And he continues to assess that even if “the pails and the pots [were] all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow.” For James, it “is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook” (James, 1890, p. 255). Just about the same time, Wilhelm Dilthey criticized psychology for disintegrating the wholeness of the individual (Dilthey, 1894). The Neo-Kantians continued their debates about psychology’s ‘place’ within academia in an attempt to resolve the discipline’s crisis. Most creative among them was perhaps Paul Natorp, who hoped to place psychology outside all other disciplines as the study of subjectivity (Natorp, 1912/2013; Dege, 2020). Despite and maybe because of such constant criticism and claims of crises, psychology flourished in various directions. Psychoanalysis emerged in Europe, structuralism and behaviorism entered the scene in the United States, reactology became dominant in Russia (Razran, 1958) together with the cultural-historical school that also emerged, and Gestalt psychology rose to fame. In 1914, Lightner Witmer opened the first psychological clinic (McReynolds, 1987) and psychological testing rose to prominence, first with the Binet test (Binet & Simon, 1916) and later on a large scale through Robert Yerkes with the Army Alpha and Beta tests – in a questionable attempt to support the American war efforts (Yoakum & Yerkes, 1920).

Such pluralization within the Anglo-European framework, however, also meant fragmentation and crisis. In an interesting triad, Hans Driesch, Karl Bühler, and Lev Vygotsky famously diagnosed this crisis of psychology (Driesch, 1926; Bühler, 1927/2000; Vygotsky, 1997); this time one that required axiomatic clarification in order to handle the “embarras de richesse” (Bühler, 1927/2000, p. 19). All three hoped for a unifying scheme in psychology. In the case of Driesch, it was equipotentiality and a resulting focus on the individual; Bühler attempted to render introspection, behaviorism, and interpretive psychology as different aspects of the same psyche; while Vygotsky hoped to unify psychology under the banner of dialectical materialism (see also Valsiner, 2012, p. 155ff; Wieser, 2020). In the United States, Kurt Lewin’s student, Junius Brown, argued for a psychology based on Marxist ideas as well, in the hopes to resolve not just the crisis in psychology but the “definite crisis” he identified in economy and culture (Brown, 1936, p. 199). After World War II, American psychology rose to dominance in many parts of the world (Pickren, 2007). The behaviorist stance, in the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ (Bruner, 1990), was updated under the influence of newly emerging technologies and cybernetic fantasies (Wiener & Schadé, 1965) to what is now known as cognitive psychology. Various critical psychologies have emerged to counter this so-called mainstream, many of which attempted to lay new foundations (Holzkamp, 1983; see also Dege, 2015) or, alternatively, write their own historical narrative (Riegel, 1978; Sarbin, 1986; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Valsiner, 2014; Gergen, 1999). These developments on the margins of psychology have created their own discursive arenas and innovated both practice and theory. Yet, as Valsiner (2012, p. 164) argues, this outsider role of ‘crisis talk’ paradoxically institutionally supports the mainstream it criticizes.

It is often argued that all the ‘crisis talk’ stems from a lack of unity in psychology. Yet, as Kurt Danziger and others show convincingly, there is a form of unity in psychology, a unity to be found in its method, which is the study of variables (Danziger, 1997, p. 158ff; Holzkamp, 2013; Michell, 1997). If it is method only that unites the discipline, there must also be a certain conceptual emptiness (Schiff, 2017), one in which, as Wittgenstein once put it, “problem and method pass one another by” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, p. 486(§371)). This ‘passing by’ has become even more visible in recent years in what has been termed the ‘replication crisis’ (Pashler & Wagenmakers, 2012). Given this diagnosis, it seems apparent that psychologists need to reflect upon the history of the discipline and rethink psychological theorizing from that perspective. The chapters in Part I of this book exemplify how this can be achieved.

Beyond the institutional crises in psychology, crisis is also an immanent concept in psychological theorizing. Erik Erikson (1950) describes eight stages in his model of psychosocial crises, later amended, supposedly by Joan Erikson (Erikson & Erikson, 1997), with a ninth stage as a more thorough confrontation with the human struggle between integrity and despair and towards gerotranscendence (see also Bugajska, 2016). Erikson wanted to extend Sigmund Freud’s work on psychosexual development (Freud, 1905/1962) to encompass the entire life cycle. In his depiction, development occurs whenever we emerge from crises to successfully move on to the next stage. Erikson himself admitted that his stage model is an approximation, that not every person runs into these crises consecutively. Yet, there is a certain developmental trajectory left in his thinking, a normative idea that we effectively emerge from crises in a better state than before. In many ways, Erikson’s theory is a mirror of the psychology of his time, reflecting the emphasis on linear development, biological distinctiveness of women and men, and an androcentic bias (Sorell & Montgomery, 2001) with Western-white-male-middle-class development as an implicit, yet prototypical ideal.

‘Crisis’ as a concept in psychology is regularly described as a time of intense difficulty, danger, or threat to personal livelihood and mental health. Crises are, thus, emotional or mental health crises, and, as such, within the domain of the applied fields: crisis intervention, suicide prevention, and, more generally, clinical psychology. In this vein, psychological research often relies on everyday concepts of crisis and normalizes those by inducting them into the great halls of psychological literature. The so-called ‘midlife crisis,’ for example, is probably the most popular construct associated with middle adulthood (Freund & Ritter, 2009). The concept originates in Elliot Jaques’s Death and the mid-life crisis (Jaques, 1965) and Levinson et al.’s (1978) The Seasons of a Man’s Life. Again, the concept resembles the state of psychological theorizing on a more general level: There is only very little empirical evidence that supports the existence of a ‘midlife crisis,’ most of which has anecdotal character. Even more so, there is no convincing theoretical argument that renders middle-aged adults as more prone to life crises (Freund & Ritter, 2009). The individual experience of crises that might, however, very well be experienced as ‘midlife crisis’ disappear within this discussion of the existence or nonexistence of a construct.

Beyond particular theories, psychological theorizing is often bound to ideas of universality and normativity, and an implicit negation of diversity. ‘Crisis’ in this framework becomes an ‘exception’ in a normative order, an extraordinary threat to the equilibrium (Dege & Strasser, 2019). Crises are there so individuals can overcome them, better yet avoid them in the first place. That human beings change over the course of their lives is well understood in psychology. This change is, however, still tentatively explained with fixed concepts and a notion of ‘having’ or ‘reaching’ something, of overcoming tensions, ambiguity, and uncertainty. A more dialectical and relational understanding of ‘crisis,’ as for example in the works of Klaus Riegel (1976) would go beyond concepts of ‘trigger’ and ‘resolution’ and argue that tensions and ambiguity are human development: they reflect the constant failure of coordination in our lives, the breakdowns in synchronization. Tensions and moments of crisis, in this view, are not necessarily signifiers of critical situations, of extraordinary events, quite the contrary, they constitute life (Riegel, 1979). The chapters...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
• List of Contributors
• 1 Psychology in Crisis – An Introduction
• Part I: The Psychology of Crises
• Part II: Crisis and Relationality
• Part III: Theorizing the Political
• Index