Hermeneutic Approaches to Interpretive Research

Dissertations In a Different Key

Philip Cushman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000442151
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This unique and insightful book brings together a collection of impactful essays written by former psychology doctoral students, which feature hermeneutics as a method of qualitative inquiry.

Philip Cushman brings together eleven chapters in which his former students describe their hermeneutic dissertations—how they chose their topics, their approach to research, what they discovered, what it was like emotionally for them, and how the process has influenced them in the years since completion. The contributors explore important contemporary issues like social justice, identity, gender inequality, and the political consequences of psychological theories and offer fresh, critical perspectives rooted in lived experiences. This book showcases the value and importance of hermeneutics, both as a philosophy, and as an orientation for conducting research that aids in critical, culturally respectful, interdisciplinary approaches.

This is illuminating reading for graduate students and scholars curious about the hermeneutic approach to research, particularly those engaged in fields like theoretical psychology, clinical psychology, psychotherapy, mental health, cultural history, and social work.

1
HERMENEUTICS AND THE BLOOMING OF MAVERICKS

An Introduction

Philip Cushman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003140177-1

You won’t see many books like this, written by former psychology doctoral students who completed intellectually complex qualitative dissertations about highly unusual historical and political topics about their field. For this book, eleven of my former students wrote a chapter each about their hermeneutic dissertations; they recount how they chose their particular topics, what methods they used to do their research, what they discovered, what they made of what they found, and how the process affected them intellectually, professionally, and emotionally. They are all practicing psychotherapists, card-carrying professional psychologists—yet they took it upon themselves to carry through on a demanding, intellectually rigorous, painfully honest critique of their chosen field and one of their cherished theories or practices.

They weathered skepticism if not reproach from other professors, worries from administrators, confusion from their peers, and no doubt some complaints from their significant others about the amount of time and intensity such projects demand. And yet they persevered. They chose a topic that they thought was an important one for the field and were determined to frame it in a hermeneutic perspective that had come to mean a great deal to them. Their results were intriguing, pointing the way to crucial reforms in American psychology and the country as a whole. Working with them was not always easy (I’m sure they would say the same about working with me), but it was most rewarding and meaningful. I think that living through the process of a hermeneutic research project helped us all become better therapists and teachers, better friends, and better people. For my part, I came to enjoy them and know them well. In fact, for their insightfulness, their courage, their tenacity, and their good-heartedness, I have come to care deeply for them. Teaching hermeneutically has been for me a source of pride and much joy.

The Story Behind the Beginning

In 1988, Ed Sampson handed me a reprint of his recently published American Psychologist article, “The Debate on Individualism: Indigenous Psychologies of the Individual and Their Role in Personal and Societal Functioning” (Sampson, 1988). It was an article that over time came to mean a great deal to me, one that among other things inspired me to write and seek publication for my first American Psychologist article “Why the Self Is Empty” (Cushman, 1990) and to teach in a lovingly subversive way—some fruits of which you can see in this book. Ed and I first met in 1981, when I began a Ph.D. program in psychology. Ed became a teacher of mine, then a friend, and years later a dear friend.

When Ed gave me the 1988 reprint, he and his wife Marya were about to set off on a trip to China, which was one of the early American trips allowed after the thaw in East–West relations. At the top of the first page (with apologies to Chairman Mao, who in 1956 announced a new “cultural revolution” in China by the slogan “Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom”), Ed wrote “May a Thousand Mavericks Bloom” and signed his name with a flourish.

The inscription was at once a funny and deeply meaningful gesture. To this day, I still have that reprint. We didn’t talk about it then, but I think we both knew what it meant. Ed was an intellectual revolutionary, which is perhaps a strange turn of phrase to use about someone who taught and at times was a dean in university psychology departments throughout his working life. In my opinion, his written work constituted one of the great intellectual and political challenges to the discipline of psychology in the second half of the 20th century. His 1977 article “Psychology and the American Ideal” (Sampson, 1977) shook mainstream psychology to its core, as did his 1978 article “Scientific Paradigms and Social Values: Wanted—A Scientific Revolution” (Sampson, 1978). And I believe his 1981 American Psychologist article “Cognitive Psychology as Ideology” (Sampson, 1981) was one of the most brilliant—and politically relevant—critiques of post-World War II American psychology yet written. He was a masterful professor and an effortlessly charismatic personality; what he taught was profoundly challenging both intellectually and politically to graduate students in the process of entering the field and no doubt especially to their professors. I’ve often heard students and faculty colleagues ask “you want us to criticize the profession we are working so hard to join (or advance) in? Why in the world would we want to do that?” For Ed, that question was never a problem: he was morally committed to exactly that way of being a psychologist.

I could not have realized at the time how important to my teaching Ed’s ideas would become and how meaningful and generative teaching would be for me. Nor could I have allowed myself to imagine how wonderful my own students would turn out to be. And I could not have begun to dream that someday all of us together could produce something as insightful and touching as this book, written by the mavericks Ed inspired but sadly did not live to meet. In retrospect, I now realize this book is the embodiment of Ed’s injunction to me. Many mavericks have bloomed because of the profound influence of my teacher and friend.

I hope this book will encourage and assist the development of mavericks yet to come. God knows we need you. We need people committed to both the discipline of psychology and simultaneously the critique of psychology. We need graduate students who can do the rigorous intellectual work and summon the integrity and courage to undertake dissertations like the ones described in the following chapters. Although Ed did not use the term to describe his work, I think what Ed wrote could be described today as studies in a cultural history of psychology. By adding Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to Ed’s critical vision, I have come to realize that cultural history is what I have written and taught to my students.

It is important to bring Gadamer’s hermeneutics into this conversation although Ed never evinced a great deal of interest in that. I think in part that is because Ed was always quite leery of direct talk about the moral realm—something understandable given the intellectual atmosphere in which he was educated and some of the hypocritical moralism he encountered in his personal history. But through the help of my hermeneutic friends, I came to realize the foundational importance of the hermeneutic emphasis on moral understandings. It is that vision that allows hermeneutics to avoid an extreme relativism and exercise the capacity not only to critique but also to generate ideas about potential solutions to the social problems of our time and place—to build as well as take apart. That, in fact, is one of the major differences between hermeneutics and postmodernism, the other major stream of the intellectual movement called the Interpretive Turn in the humanities and social sciences (see, e.g., Hiley, Bohman, & Shusterman, 1991).

I hope in the chapters that follow you will notice the influence of hermeneutics as well as postmodern critique—of Gadamer as well as Sampson—in the work of my former students. It is the confluence of the two together that makes the mavericks who create the magic. But please do not think that such a combination makes for a simple or easy research project. In fact, just the opposite, as the authors in this book will eagerly tell you. Then again, no one ever said that completing a dissertation would be easy. Inspiring, yes. Even occasionally brilliant, yes. But never easy.

Why the Dreaded A.B.D.

So let’s be honest. Doctoral dissertations are just plain difficult to complete. There are reasons why the final degree that some graduate psychology students achieve is the dreaded A.B.D. (All But Dissertation) degree, because they never finish it. It’s frightening but true: dissertations are hard to start and even harder to finish. If you’re a psychology student just now starting to face the task, or if you’ve been trying to start but really haven’t been able to get going, or if you are a professor whose students are having trouble structuring their research or beginning to write their proposal, it is important to understand why students have trouble jumping in and/or finishing.

Because of the way psychology programs now structure doctoral programs, by the time students have completed most or all of their courses, to one degree or another they often have had their imagination and initiative attenuated. If students get as far as entering the dissertation phase, they’ve done pretty well in the required courses. But it turns out that’s part of the problem. Required courses, especially those in American Psychological Association (APA) accredited programs or programs trying to become APA accredited, are now usually highly structured. There are many rules and procedures, strict requirements, much memorization, and sadly, increasingly little room for student reflection, initiative, imagination, and creativity.

One of the unacknowledged effects of electronic syllabi, required articles or chapters posted online, and electronic grids for the demonstration of competencies is that graduate student learning in psychology has become highly structured and controlled. One of the consequences of control is that initiative and especially imagination get squeezed out of students. After two or three years of teachers and administrators taking responsibility for what students learn and severely limiting how they demonstrate what they have learned, students tend to develop ingrained habits, and then a way of being, that is passive, less curious, more compliant, and performance-oriented.

By the time doctoral students have learned how to get high grades, they have been enculturated into ways of learning and a professional identity that tend to discourage them from developing or pursuing their own interdisciplinary intellectual interests and connecting their political commitments to their professional practices. This is especially true when those interests—and/or the means of pursuing those interests—might diverge from the content, method, or disciplinary political implications preferred in (or required by) their particular department or program. The ability of students to stay curious and creative is seriously dampened by the spoken and unspoken rules that control their learning experiences and ultimately their professional futures. It becomes increasingly difficult to recapture their intellectual curiosity or remember their initial research interests and their passions about the field. Their lives become one long instrumental exercise in getting along without making waves. And in the process, somewhere along the way, their love of learning lessens.

So when it becomes time for students to structure their own research, to choose what they want to devote the next few years to, to know how to narrow a topic to a doable and yet meaningful size, and to identify and shape the best approach for studying it, some are pretty much at a loss. It has been years since they let their imaginations and commitments guide them, and often those muscles have weakened.

Of course, most mainstream doctoral programs are aware of the problem of A.B.D. students. Increasingly, mainstream psychology programs are dedicated to what is called scientism—that is, the belief that the application of a physical science method is the only preferred way to find the truth about all human problems or questions, including what is sometimes referred to in moral philosophy (with apologies to Tocqueville) as habits of the heart. Because of the mainstream allegiance to scientism and due to the anxiety (and distain) usually produced in faculty members when a student deviates from that ideology, often a faculty member’s solution to the problem of confused and floundering students is to guide them into restrictive, previously determined (sometimes boring) topics and rigid, quantitative methods. In other words, the cause becomes the supposed cure. Then, the very instructional style and the content that dampened the intellectual curiosity and initiative of students to begin with is then offered to them in order to save them (and their program) from a fate worse than death, the A.B.D. label.

And so, year after year, cohort after cohort, mainstream psychology tends to turn out doctoral research that is uninteresting, disappointing, or at best a disguised reflection of common sense. Implicitly, we teach our students that professionalism means following orders, but then after requiring that they complete an ongoing, complex research project that requires the exercise of imagination, agency, and creativity in structuring their own learning experience, we are dismayed when they fail. It is ironic, is it not, that we are shocked that they have not mastered skills that we have removed from their curriculum and after we have in a multitude of ways dissuaded or prevented them from learning in a creative and student-centered manner.

I do not mean that faculty members are deliberately setting out to destroy their students’ intellectual curiosity or freedom—not at all. Teachers are by and large good-hearted folks who want the best for their students. They as much as their students are victims of the convergence of political and economic forces that have resulted in psychology’s current situation. They are squeezed on the one side by the ever-tightening university budgets that cause them to be significantly overworked and forced to comply with granting institutions that increasingly reflect neoliberal, instrumental, and procedural worldviews. On the other side, they are motivated by the idealistic motives that moved them to enter the field in the first place. Exacerbating this conflict is the increasing political conservatism in the country that includes an unquestioned valorization of unregulated capitalism, superficial patriotism, and unwavering militarism.

These forces make honest, forthright critique unpopular, if not downright dangerous. Among other symptoms of this squeeze is the pressure to be evermore hyperconcrete, procedural, and behavioral in both research and practice. Therapists, for example, must present themselves as experts in various specialties and practitioners of well-known diagnostic and intervention techniques. The field of academic psychology has gotten intensely mechanistic—faculty must either comply or be replaced. And as time goes by, fewer and fewer teachers are around who can remember a different intellectual world, one of moral alternatives, more flexibility, a more reasonable workload, and less economic pressure.

So the problem is a systemic problem, an overdetermined product of many forces that are entrenched through a network of interlocking procedures (see Cushman, 2019, pp. 240–247) that, seemingly benign individually, become pernicious when viewed in their entirety. Faculty are as much victims as students are—in fact, in some ways more so, because they are forced to be purveyors and enforcers of the very theories and procedures they and their students are being controlled by.

Fortunately, and much to their credit, our doctoral students somehow have survived in our highly structured environment with at least some of their curiosity and energy still intact, or at least slumbering but still able to be awakened. Most of our students usually enter our field with passion, commitment, and hope. And despite our best attempts at forcing upon them the proceduralism, surveillance techniques, and soulless academic competencies that are now the backbone of doctoral studies (see, e.g., Kaslow et al., 2007), still it turns out they have some curiosity and intellectual integrity left. With half a chance, they will learn to draw upon that wellspring of energy, but we have to give them that chance.

How? In a better world, instead of forcing students into a learning style of compliance, memorization, and true believership, we could give them a chance by helping them, course by course, learn about the limitations of and alternatives to scientism. By doing so, we would encourage them to develop their own interests and research projects, learn about alternative research processes, and especially craft their own questions. But even if the curriculum cannot provide the encouragement and guidance to think creatively, still students are capable of transcending a strictly scientistic research approach, if only they can be given a chance to find their own path and the means to pursue it.

Some professors—for instance, those who are members of Division 24 of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• 1 Hermeneutics and the Blooming of Mavericks: An Introduction
• Part I Critiques of Texts and Practices
• Part II Philosophical Explorations
• Part III Applying Hermeneutic Theory to Psychological Practices
• Index