Copyright © 2012 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmit- ted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—! e State University of New Jersey, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8042. www.transactionpub.com ! is book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012013891 ISBN: 978-1-4128-4949-4 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Self-observation in the social sciences / Joshua W. Clegg, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-4949-4 1. Introspection. 2. Self-perception. 3. Observation ( Psychology) I. Clegg, Joshua W. BF316.S45 2013 150.72—dc23 2012013891 Contents Foreword, by Jaan Valsiner Part I. Introduction 1 1 Developing an Adequate ! eory of Self-Observation, Joshua W. Clegg 3 Part II. ! e History of Scientifi c Self-Observation 23 2. ! e History of Introspection Revisited, Adrian C. Brock 25 3. A Brief History of Self-Report in American Psychology, Jacy L. Young 45 4. Introspection and the Myth of Methodological Behaviorism, Alan Costall 67 Part III. Contemporary Self-Observation: ! eory and Practice 81 5. Language in Self-Observation, Brady Wagoner 83 6. Confronting the Challenges of Observing Inner Experience: ! e Descriptive Experience Sampling Method, Christopher L. Heavey 103 7. Multimodal Introspection ! eory, Stephen Gould 121 Part IV. Self-Observation in the Phenomenological Traditions 145 8. A Conceptual History of Self-Observation in the Phenomenological Tradition: Brentano, Husserl, and Heidegger, Edwin E. Gantt and Jeff rey L. " ayne 147 9. A Phenomenologically Informed ! eory of Self-Observation: Intra-spection as Hermeneutic Reduction on the Self, Samuel D. Downs 173 10. ! e Practice of Self-Observation in the Phenomenological Traditions, Svend Brinkmann 195 Part V. Self-Observation in the Narrative Traditions 221 11. A Practice of Self-Observation in Narrative Psychology, Andrew McCarron 223 1 2 . S e l f - O b s e r v a t i o n ! eory in the Narrative Tradition: Rescuing the Possibility of Self-Understanding, Mark Freeman 239 13. Self-Observation in Ethnographic Writing, Alessandra Fasulo 259 Part VI. Conclusions 275 14. ! e Inferential Context of Self-Observation, Joshua W. Clegg 277 List of Contributors 285 Index 289 Foreword Breaking a Social Taboo: Introspection Restored ! ere is no doubt— introspection as a method needs to be restored to its central place among all the methods that are aimed at studying human psychology . ! is is a simple necessity to maintain the specifi c nature of psychology as a science in its own rights—rather than re- duce it “downwards” (to physiology or to functional neuroanatomy) or “upwards” (to treating human beings as “texts” in the socio-narrative traditions). ! is new book that Joshua Clegg has assembled is a con- structive continuation of his fi rst treatise in 2009— " e Observation of Human Systems: Lessons from the History of Anti-reductionistic Empirical Psychology (Clegg 2009). ! e lessons of 2009 have led to a positive new methodological program by 2012—one of the clear and prominent restoration of introspection as the primus inter pares in human psychology. However, that restoration of the misunderstood, discredited, and feared method is not a return to where that method was in the beginning of the twentieth century. It comes to us a hun- dred years later with a new twist—the explicit focus on the social context of both the introspecting Observer and the Experimenter. ! e present volume stands at the intersection of the history of holis- tic approaches in psychology (Diriwächter and Valsiner 2008) and its emerging new dynamic ways of constructing methods (Abbey and Surgan 2012). A Science in Trouble: Where Psychology Lost Its Scientifi c Soul Psychology has—from its beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—been ambivalent as to its primary object of investigation—the psyche (Rosa 2007). It has gone through various fashions of denying that object—and replacing it with others— “ behavior,” “cognition,” and even “positive psychology.” Diff erent “-isms ” vii Self-Observation in the Social Sciences have dominated the minds of psychologists—from behavior ism t o cognitiv ism to evolution ism and sociocultural ism . Who knows what fashion—labeled by an -ism —comes next, but what is clear is that invention and proliferation of such “schools of thought” distances psychology’s research enterprise precisely from what science needs to do—to study its object phenomena. If a psychologist claims “I take a X- ist (or Y- ian , e.g., ‘vygotskian’) perspective on Z” one can guarantee that Z will be pushed into a framework of an orthodox belief system, rather than kept as the source for innovative understanding. ! e -isms fi xate the perspective taken—rather than enable its fl exible move. ! ey try to standardize science, while scientifi c discovery necessarily runs ahead of any eff ort toward its fi xation. Categorization units of thought systems—“schools” in science or “systems” in psychology—may be useful for didactic purposes in teaching beginning undergraduates to navigate through the grand confusion of psychological perspectives. Yet, such systematization fails to capture the essence of science—to always be striving toward the horizons that we do not know yet. Science is not about sure knowledge that we can proudly present to outsiders, but a discovery process (Valsiner 2012b, viii) of something less than knowledge (of the past) and not yet knowledge (in the present—see Polanyi 1962, 135). Psychological evidence does not come in neatly sealed packages. Knowledge is not a consumer product—with dates of usability in- stitutionally printed on the packages. ! us, any science operates on the outer frontier of knowledge—rather than “collects data” by established procedures—“standardized methods.” ! e latter are in vogue in psychology. In tandem with socially obligatory quantifi ca- tion of psychological phenomena into data—an operation proven to be fallacious (Michell 1999)—psychology has generated a vast fl ow of empirical artifacts that do not stand the test of time, or reality. Phe- nomena in psychology have remained lost—as my friend and former colleague Bob Cairns once eloquently pointed out (Cairns 1986). Psy- chology—striving to show its allegiance with what is supposed to be a science—becomes highly eff ective in that social game. ! e result of such success in social recognition is the failure in providing solutions to deep, basic, human problems—that range from the deep privacy of sexuality to the hyperinfl ated public discourses about genocides, peace, democracy, and those heroic villains of the stock market that are easy to blame for any economic problem. viii Foreword ! e Root of the Problem: Forgetting that the Human Psyche Creates Forms Human lives are not reducible to their constituent elements. Human beings create aff ective and cognitive complexes with the help of which they live. Wherever we look we are surrounded by dynamic structures—in music (Langer 1953), in paintings (Kandinsky 1979) and photographs (Barthes 1982), and in the ornaments that surround us (Valsiner 2008). ! ese structures undergo constant transformation—as human beings actively change them to act forward —toward their futures— into their worlds. In such coping with uncertainty—while acting toward my future-to-become-my present—I do not precisely know how to act best. Redundancy—acting both by parallel ways to reach the same goal, or creating a hierarchical “command and mean- ing center” for my action—are ways to cope with such uncertainty. Human beings create, execute, and abandon multilevel action plans that include both tools for acting and refl ection upon that process of acting. ! e human psyche creates its own hierarchical order. Hence it is at least mildly ironic that psychology over the twentieth century has successfully lost from focus the consideration of hierarchi- cal Gestalts that transform as they are being used by their construc- tors. ! e relevant phenomena of human psyche have been replaced by counting of elementary constituents as if these could be treated separately from the whole within which they function. It was Lev Vygotsky—a young literary scholar turned into a psy- chologist—who warned about the need for psychology to fi nd its own unit of analysis, if it were to become an autonomous science. As Vygotsky claimed: Psychology, as it desires to study complex wholes . needs to change the methods of analysis into elements by the analytic method that reveals the parts of the unit [literally: breaks the whole into linked units— metod . analiza, . razchleniayushego na edinitsy ] . I t h a s to fi nd the further undividable, surviving features that are character- istic of the given whole as a unity— units within which in mutually opposing ways these features are represented [Russian: edinitsy, v kotorykh v protivopolozhnom vide predstavleny eti svoistva ] .1 (Vygotsky 1999, 13) Putting in to practice Vygotsky’s suggestion would have required psychology in the twentieth century to become dialectical—which could not happen after the discipline was caught between the ix Self-Observation in the Social Sciences warring sides of Naturwissenschaften and Geisterwissenschaften i n i t s nineteenth-century German context (Valsiner 2012a). Movement in the Reverse Direction: Anxiety of Distrust ! e loss of complexity of phenomena in psychology has been on the rise in the twentieth century—psychology’s methodology has failed by being developed in a direction of precise tools that do not fi t the phenomena any more (Toomela 2007, 2011).