Psychology as a Person-Centered Science Versus Psychology as an Ancillary Core Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Discipline
E. Taylor, PhD, Professor in the College of Psychology and Humanistic Studies Saybrook University 3/1/11
“Psychology as a Core Science (STEM) Discipline” (2010), was a report of the American Psychological Association’s 2009 Presidential Task Force on the Future of Psychology, originally commissioned by James H. Bray, PhD, who was APA President in 1909. Its task-force included professors of psychology from Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Houston. It was essentially an advocacy piece, defining psychology as an accepted science within branches of the US Government, while demonstrating that at the same time it is systematically denied funding as a STEM science in the areas of research, teaching, applications, and access to Government sponsored student scholarships. Meanwhile, the report chronicles how psychology is not properly perceived as a legitimate science by the public at large either. Conjectures are presented for psychology’s low esteem as a science, particularly related to the core sciences, as well as technology, engineering, and mathematics. Solutions are then fielded for a remedy to this situation, based largely not on data but on more propaganda and mass advertising for the superiority of psychology as the science of behavior.i
I am reminded what my Father once said about the famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow: “Aha! Mine opposition hath written a book!” Here, with the Bray Commission’s Report, is copious fodder by the Prosecution, dropped into the lap of the Defense. Personally, as a defender of psychology as a person-centered science rather than a reductionistic and positivist one, I find the document rich in contradictions that inadvertently answer many of the very questions it poses without realizing it. My own antidote to the problem of how psychology is perceived as a science is for psychology to set its own house in order first, which the report clearly shows it has not yet done, before it tries to present itself as a science to the greater scientific community. But more on that later.
A first point to note is that the taskforce attempted to address the inconsistent representation of psychology as a Core STEM discipline. Under “A Statement of the Problem,” they maintained that “the failure to group psychology with other Core Stem disciplines ignores a critical component—the human being—within scientific and technological approaches to pressing questions of national interest.” I should point out here that the goal of reductionist, objectivist, and empirically measurable science and that of a person-centered science are identical. Each defines the human being in a different way, however. The objectivists refer to the measurement of human capitol, suggesting
1 that the person is, from a scientific standpoint, just another organism to be measured, equivalent to a mouse, rat, cat, chimp or dolphin or any other organism up and down the phylogenetic scale. Humanistic psychologists who are dedicated to psychology as a person-centered science, however, maintain that, implicitly following James, there is no science anywhere that does not involve someone’s personal consciousness somewhere. Traditionally the Humanistic movement has subscribed to the differentiation between the natural and human sciences. William James’s radical empiricism, a call for a radical reconstruction of the presuppositions upon which reductionistic, experimental psychology continues to be based, argued for an intersubjective relation between the subject and the object. Inheritors of the Jamesean legacy were the personality-social psychologists of the 1930s and 40s (Taylor, 1994). They argued for psychology as a science of the whole person, not a definition of the person based on the rational ordering of sense data alone. Not accidently they were the God fathers and God-Mothers of the Humanistic Movement of the 1950s and 60s (Taylor, 1988). This set the stage for the existential, humanistic, phenomenological, and transpersonal psychologists today to argue for a person-centered science—the inextricable effect of the experimenter on the outcome of what he or she studies, even by the alleged methods of hyper-objectification (Coulson & Rogers, 1968).ii
True, general science does not recognize the presence of the experimenter on the outcome of the scientific observation or on the overall experiment; in fact, it believes it has sufficiently controlled for it with the double blind, randomized, placebo controlled experiment. Evidence from quantum theory since the 1920s, however, and even in clinical studies of the unconscious within psychology, has always suggested otherwise. But experimental psychology today, which touted itself in the late 1890s as patterning itself after physics and the natural sciences, never evolved to maturity because it could not accommodate its hidden epistemology to the quantum revolution in the 1920s. Experimental psychology, still based on a Newtonian, Cartesian, and Kantian definition of reality in the late 19th century has tried to maintain control of the definition of experimental science even up to today, even though it has kept psychology as a science in diapers. Meanwhile, the numbers of the experimental reductionists are dwindling even within the Divisions of the American Psychological Association.
Nevertheless, the Taskforce, obviously representing this fading tradition, repeatedly in its Report continues to define psychology as the science of behavior. On p. 3 it says “The ultimate goal of STEM initiatives is to keep the United States at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation. Human behavior is critical to the success of such endeavors, and psychology is the science of behavior and its perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and motivational underpinnings.” On p. 6 it says “Psychology is the science of behavior and its underlying processes.” They repeat it on the same page to underline that psychology is scientific now in their argument because it uses instruments. On p. 7 they tout “A growing body of research shows that social experiences across the lifespan, including prenatal environmental exposures, mother–infant interactions, social interactions, and social stress can change the way in which genes are expressed in brain cells, which in turn changes behavior.” They parade out that behavior and cognition are also treated mathematically, though they admit this is only in a few cases. On p. 8 they
2 claim that behavior is the great integrating factor: “With its focus on human behavior, learning, and interaction and coordination, psychologists can facilitate communication among members of multidisciplinary teams, address the most effective ways of disseminating scientific knowledge, and evaluate the impact and utilization of new scientific and technological interventions.” These are subjunctive imperatives, however, and do not refer to actual evidence.
The most egregious admission comes when the Taskforce tried to explain why funding sources from National Science do not recognize psychology as a Core STEM science:
The nature of the focus of research in psychology--human behavior--can also lead people to question the scientific foundation of psychology. Most people already believe that they are experts in human behavior. When students learn basic principles of human behavior, they are rarely surprised, even when confronted with contradictory claims (e.g., people with high self-esteem are more or are less susceptible to flattery; Bolt, 2001). The tendency for people to view the discipline of psychology as intuitive and “nonscientific” makes it easier for policy-makers not to consider the training of psychologists as part of a STEM enhancement agenda. (p. 12)
Investigators involved in psychology as a person-centered science, on the other hand, believe that just these statements by the reductionists about what they really represent are what plays against them as a real science, because their commitment is only by their own admission to behavior, and psychology certainly represents much more. The reductionists want to say that only they are in possession of the real by eliminating emotion, intuition, or personal experience, and the phenomenological impact of meaning, except where it is reduced to operational definitions of behavior and then hyper- objectified.
Overall, the experimental reductionists arguing for a place on the ladder of the core sciences and the general acknowledgement as a science but denial of STEM funds stands in stark contrast to their other psychological colleagues who are less enamored with cognitive behaviorism and the reductionistic positivism it brings with it, The reductionists offer only their own hubris and contempt for all definitions of psychological science other then their own. They state that clinicians are merely “applied science,” and the experiential world of the person they do not even define as psychology. So the science they offer the STEM community seems to justify the STEM community’s response in return--that psychology is a second rate science at best because of a disorder within its own house that it has not yet settled. We intend that this is the more serious problem, and not solved by ignoring it and then only offering some scientific evidence for not knowing much beyond behavior.
3 A Suggestion
The traditions of Existential-Humanistic Phenomenological, and Transpersonal psychology looks all the same to the experimentalists. An example would be Martin Seligman’s contention that, because of its emphasis on sensitivity training groups, meditation, and subjectivity, Humanistic psychology has no scientific research tradition, when Carl Rogers was awarded the American Psychological Association’s first Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology Award in 1957. The Positive Psychologists have, rather, appropriated from the Humanistic psychologists who preceded them without attribution and then denied that they had any place as a legitimate science.iii
However, these lines of influence can be more clearly understood according to the hypothesis of the three steams that define the history of psychology—The Experimental, the Clinical, and the Experiential. Standard courses in the history of psychology teach only the history of the experimental laboratory tradition. Everything else is reinterpreted as a mere corollary. Further, the dictum according to the experimentalists, the APA, and the insurance carriers, is that nothing can occur in the clinic that has not first been vetted in the laboratory. If there is no prior empirical evidence for an intervention, then it cannot be used in therapy, nor does it qualify for insurance reimbursement.
By restricting psychology to only that which can be measured, research psychologists generally count themselves out on dynamic theories of the unconscious. As a result, depth psychology to the experimentalists is not real psychology. While the experimentalists have historically attempted to set themselves above clinicians—‘we do science; they apply it’—the true historical reality of the relationship is that the experimental and clinical psychologies each have their own separate lineage, their own separate origins, their own separate methods, their own separate literature, their own separate key texts, and their own heroes and heroines. While the experimentalists derive their origin myth from the founding of Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 (Boring, 1950, but not 1929), the clinical tradition grew out of a medical environment that emphasized clinical bedside teaching and functional rather then organic explanations for mental symptoms. These developments preceded Lightner Witmer’s claim that he was the first to coin the term ‘clinical psychology,” by which he only meant School Psychology, in 1896. Rather than Wundt’s laboratory, the clinical tradition emanates from the French Experimental Psychology of the Subconscious, as Binet called it.
While clinical psychology emerged out of the tradition of bedside teaching in medicine, the subject matter of depth psychology tended to involve a model of psychopathology, where dynamic methods could be applied to alleviate symptoms of both physical and psychological influence. From a philosophical standpoint, however, the inner subjective world of the individual was being approached by the method of symbolism, which demonstrated that an experiential and more phenomenological approach could reveal a person’s inner world beyond the psychopathic and possibly be the key to understanding creativity, character development, transcendence, the individual’s search for meaning, and what it is that is of ultimate concern to the person.
4 These elements can be found in an unweeded condition in the experiential tradition of folk psychology, but also provide the subject matter emphasized by the Humanistic tradition in the construction of a person-centered science that is experientially oriented. The possible solution to the Hard Problem in the neurosciences, for instance,--the relation between the brain and the mind—may be found along these lines in the form of the phenomenology of the science-making process itself.iv This means that a breakthrough beyond the 19th century experimental psychology still practiced today may be to include the scientist in the outcome of what it is that he or she studies. This would be a significant contribution to the basic STEM sciences that only a more phenomenologically oriented science could provide.
So, my position is that if there is more than one definition of psychology in common currency, therefore there must be more than one history of psychology. The hypothesis of the three streams moves psychology back to a more realistic view of what psychology represents—it is as much an art as a science. The failure of the experimentalists is that they do not even have their own house in order by their failure to reconcile their epistemology with the clinical and experiential traditions. Instead they pretend that they are the only legitimate kind of scientific psychology. To bring a greater emphasis of a person-centered science to bear on the way general science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are actually conducted then psychology would indeed have something to contribute at the core of the basic science establishment. The report of Past President Bray’s Task Force, however, does not consider such a possibility.
End Notes:
i Presidential Task Force (2010). Psychology as a Core Science (STEM) Discipline. Report of the American Psychological Association’s 2009 Presidential Task Force on the Future of Psychology. Washington, DC: APA. Commissioned by Douglas Bray. ii See Taylor, E. I., The Case for a Uniquely American Jamesian Tradition in Psychology. In Margaret Donnelly (ed). Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James. (APA Centennial William James Lectures). (pp. 3‐28)Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. 1992; and Taylor, E.I. "What is man, Psychologist, that thou art so unmindful of him?": Henry A, Murray on the historical relation between classical personality theory and humanistic psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Summer 2000. 40:3, 29‐42. For more on a person‐centered science, see Coulson, WR & Rogers, CR (Eds)(1968). Man and the science of man. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company.
iii A special issue of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology was devoted to this issue. See Taylor, E. I. Positive psychology versus Humanistic psychology: A reply to Prof. Seligman. Journal of Humanistic Psychology: Special Issue, 41;1, Winter, 2001, 13‐29.
5 ivSee Taylor, E.I. (2010). William James on an Intuitive, Phenomenologically Oriented Psychology in the Immediate Moment: The True Foundation for a Science of Consciousness? Special issue on Consciousness in the Neurosciences, History of the Human Sciences. July. 23, 3: pp. 119‐130. Also, Taylor, E.I. (2010). William James and the humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution: An outrageous hypothesis, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 50: 410429.
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