Toward A Psychology of Persons

William E. Smythe

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134807451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This closely integrated collection of essays constitutes a wide-ranging and comprehensive attempt to understand persons within psychology--a long-lost enterprise. The volume was inspired by the observation that contemporary psychology has become increasingly depersonalized in its conceptions and its methodology, and has thereby lost touch with its traditional subject matter of human individuality and the nature of persons. This development now threatens the integrity of psychology as a discipline. Using both a critical and constructive approach, the various contributors share two common objectives:
*to explore the roots of depersonalization in modern psychology through systematic criticism of contemporary functionalist and neo-functionalist approaches;
*to articulate some alternative holistic-interpretive and historical approaches to the psychology of persons. Despite these common objectives, the chapters reflect a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches, including cognitive science and neuroscience, discursive psychology, hermeneutics, social constructionism, semiotics, rhetorical analysis, and psychological aesthetics. These essays do not converge on a unified psychology of persons, but they do serve to reopen a form of discourse that has long been absent from mainstream psychology. This volume emerged from the deliberations of the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychologists (WCTP)--a group of scholars primarily from Western Canadian universities with shared interests in the history and theory of psychology. From its founding in 1989 to the present, the WCTP has been actively engaged in promoting and contributing to the development of theoretical psychology. Over the past half dozen years, scholars have greatly benefitted from the close collaboration and collegial support that participation in the WCTP makes possible. The annual meetings provide an opportunity for them to catch up on each other's work and also to pool their expertise to work on topics of shared interest.

PART I

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON

CHAPTER 1

Sumus Ergo Sum: The Ontology of Self and How Descartes Got it Wrong

Charles W. Tolman

University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia

Sie reden immer von Selbstverwirklichung. Ichfinde das schwierig. Ich habe noch nie daran gedacht, mich selbst zu verwirklichen, offen gestanden. Weil ich gar nicht wüβte, wasich selbst bin. Ich werde doch durch das Leben gebildet, durch das, was ich tun muβ, und durch die Menschen, mit denen ich zusammen bin.¹

—Marion Gräfin von Dönhoff (Die Zeit, 1994, p. 5)

self. 1. An obsolescent technical term for a person, but a person thought of as incorporeal and essentially conscious. Sometimes the self is simply identified with Plato’s concept of soul. But Descartes, arguing in the Discourse that the “I” of his “I think, therefore I am” is essentially a thinking substance, presents a substance theory of the self….Most contemporary philosophers would bypass the whole issue, urging that experiences can only be identified as the experiences of flesh-and-blood people.

—Flew (1979, p. 322)

It may be obsolescent in philosophy, but psychologists still prefer to speak of self rather than of person, and, as I attempt to show, they also still lean toward incorporeal substances of the Platonic or Cartesian variety, while having great difficulty in coming to grips with flesh-and-blood people, all of which, I think, significantly contributes to the problem of depersonalization.

When speaking of the self, it is important to inquire about the nature of the object to which one is referring. One needs to ask what kind of self it is that he or she has in mind or that is necessarily implied by his or her usage. Three treatments of the concept of self in recent academic and popular psychology are examined.

THE SELF INSIDE

Where is the self? Traditionally, it has been spoken of as deep inside the person where it may be equated with the mind or soul, or treated more abstractly as a concept or set of beliefs in the mind. Katherine Mansfield provides us with a literary, biographical example. She died of tuberculosis at 35 years of age in 1923. A year earlier, she wrote the following entry in her journal:

A bad day….horrible pains and so on, and weakness. I could do nothing. The weakness was not only physical. I must heal my Self before I will be well….This must be done alone and at once. It is at the root of my not getting better. My mind is not controlled, (cited in Sontag, 1979, p. 46)

Her husband and collaborator, John Middleton Murry, later wrote that Mansfield:

had come to the conviction that her bodily health depended upon her spiritual condition. Her mind was henceforth preoccupied with discovering some way to “cure her soul;” and she eventually resolved, to my regret, to abandon her treatment and to live as though her grave physical illness were incidental, and even, so far as she could, as though it were nonexistent, (cited in Sontag, 1979, p. 46)

The references here to soul, spirit, mind, and self (which Mansfield wrote with a capital S) treat it as distinct from and in control of the body. The self’s mind is the controller of the body. When the self loses control (i.e., becomes sick), the body goes out of control, becoming weak and physically ill. Moreover, strengthening the self is its own lonely responsibility. It can only turn to itself to make itself well and strong again. If one were to inquire as to the location of this self, one would unquestionably be referred to a space internal to the body. Self appears to be the spiritual center of which the body is merely a physical, outer, surrounding manifestation.

For two distinctly more academic examples, we can consider Weiten’s (1992) introductory textbook, Psychology: Themes and variations. Its second edition was published recently and is generally considered to be authoritative, or at least representative.² There was no entry in the index for self alone, but there were 23 hyphenated entries ranging from self-actualization to self-stimulation. I did not expect anything from entries like self-help groups, self-modification, and self-report inventories. One on self-control looked interesting, but proved to be concerned with the application of behavior modification techniques for oneself (which I will ignore for now, although it is interesting for, among other things, the way in which it enlists the individual in his or her own control over others). Most of the remaining entries were concentrated in the chapter on personality. Indeed, they were entirely identified with three theories.

The first was Bandura’s social learning theory. Here, there was a discussion of self-efficacy, defined as “one’s belief about one’s ability to perform behaviors that should lead to expected outcomes” (Weiten, 1992, p. 438). Such beliefs influence the challenges we tackle and how well we perform, but nothing was said of how such beliefs are formed.

Bandura’s theory is classified as a behavioral perspective. It is distinguished from the humanistic perspective, which is represented here by Rogers’ person-centered theory. Readers are told:

Rogers viewed personality structure in terms of just one construct. He called this construct the self, although it’s more widely known today as the self-concept. A self-concept is a collection of beliefs about one’s own nature, unique qualities, and typical behavior. Your self-concept is your own picture of yourself. (Weiten, 1992, p. 441)

It is mentioned that unconditional parental affection encourages a strong self-concept and conditional affection has the opposite effect. Our self-concept is important because we tend to behave in ways that are consistent with it; that is, it bears a causal and explanatory relation to our behavior.

The second humanistic theory was Maslow’s theory of self-actualization. One reads that “Maslow’s key contribution to personality theory was his description of the self-actualizing person as an example of the healthy personality” (Weiten, 1992, p. 442). Moreover, people are driven by a need for self-actualization: “What a man can be, he must be” (Maslow, 1970, p. 46). Self-actualizing people, we are told, are those who have “exceptionally healthy personalities, marked by continued personal growth” (Weiten, 1992, p. 443).

The chapter on personality also spoke of the “person-situation” controversy, focusing on the role of Walter Mischel. The debate was sparked over the issue of where the most important determinants of behavior lie. Behind this controversy was a long history in American psychology of theories of personality as a collection of traits. These were challenged by the view that it was not the person or trait variables that best predicted (and thus, explained) the behavior of individuals, but the environmental situations in which they found themselves. Of course, to insist exclusively on one or the other—person or situation—soon proved too abstract and a compromise, eclectic position emerged called interactionism. The point that is important for our present ontological concern is that all participants in this debate were in agreement on the definition of a trait as something situated within the person; at issue was its relative importance in the prediction and control of behavior.

In the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, Reber (1985) offered the following definition of trait (with which, in most details, Weiten and Mischel would surely agree):

Generally, [a trait is] any enduring characteristic of a person that can serve an explanatory role in accounting for the observed regularities and consistencies in behavior. This is the proper use of the term; it is incorrect and misleading to use it for the regularities themselves. The point is that a trait is a theoretical entity, a hypothesized, underlying component of the individual that is used to explain that person’s behavioral consistencies and the differences between the behavioral consistencies of different persons, (p. 782)

Of course it is known that many trait theorists have in fact preferred the “regularities themselves” and leaned heavily on an operational definition as a way of avoiding what they thought to be metaphysical understandings of personality. Yet, the “underlying component of the individual” is always implied, even when not admitted, and it is always “used to explain.”

The debate itself emphasizes this “underlying component” of traits. It is a manifestation of the traditional tension between internal and external causes. As mentioned, by assuming such a dualism, proponents of trait theory, as well as their opponents, the situationists, were eventually forced into an interactionism. This label is, in my view, not ontologically insignificant.

At least two observations can be made about these accounts of self and personality. First, the theories cited, however they are classified, are very much alike. The self or its equivalent is treated as a middle term, an internal something that mediates between external input and behavior. It appears as a set of beliefs, a concept, a source of need, and not infrequently as something incorporeal. It is something that, from inside us, determines and explains (usually causally) our actions and our physical and social relations. It is characterized by its strength and health and, as is perhaps most clear in Maslow’s version—the self is often thought of as being responsible for its own health, especially when facing difficult times.

Second, this scientific concept of self is virtually identical to that of Katherine Mansfield. It is not really a scientific concept of self at all— that is, a concept deriving from scientific investigation and reflection— but a scientized version of a popular ideological concept of self. It is the ontology of this self that needs to be examined.³

CARTESIANISM

The ontology of self that has dominated both popular thinking, such as Katherine Mansfield’s, and most official psychologies, such as those described by Weiten, for the last four centuries found its clearest articulation in the works of René Descartes. The entry on Descartes in Flew (1979) made a significant observation:

“Cartesian dualism,” as Descartes’ conception has come to be known, has exerted a profound an influence on the philosophy of mind as has his method of doubt on the theory of knowledge. A great deal of work in our own century has been devoted to trying to avoid Descartes’ absolute division between the mental and the physical. But unless and until the phenomenon of consciousness and its relation to physics is better understood, the Cartesian picture is unlikely entirely to lose its hold on the imagination, (p. 92)

Of course, psychology has contributed precious little in this century to a general understanding of “consciousness and its relation to physics,” which is perhaps better expressed as the conscious person in relation to the physical, embodied, flesh-and-blood person in the world.

Let me specify the Cartesian view a little more closely. For Descartes, the self (the ego, the essential person) was not the body, but something with a location inside the body. It was the stuff, a substance, that is different from the body’s matter: It was res cogitans—unextended and free, thinking substance—as opposed to res extensa—extended and determined substance. From its position within the physical body, it was related to the world by causal relations.⁴ These three characteristics—location, distinct substance, and mechanical causality—define the general Cartesian ontology of the self.

Psychology in this century, particularly North American, mainstream psychology, has, through all its apparent transformations, effectively preserved this ontology, as we might already suspect from the examples found in Weiten’s textbook. John B. Watson provided us with a stunning example of how easily the ontology persists even in systems that pretend explicitly to reject it. Watson was obviously troubled by metaphysical dualism and thought he could do away with it by throwing out questions about mind and consciousness altogether and by insisting on the restriction of scientific attention to publicly observable stimulus inputs and response outputs.

Yet even with this insistence on observability, he could not avoid assuming a middle term as a vaguely formed, neutral transmitter of stimulus energy. It was just this neutrality of the transmitter that led him to the extreme environmentalism expressed in his much quoted claim:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. (Watson, 1930, p. 104)

The persistence of Cartesianism in Watson’s behaviorism was clearly identified by Edna Heidbreder (1933):

There is still another difficulty, and a more serious one, that grows out of the behaviorists’ attitude toward the mind-body problem: the inability to state precisely what is meant by the rejection of consciousness. Sometimes behaviorism seems to deny flatly that conscious events occur, to assert that anyone who believes in them is the victim of an illusion. But sometimes it seems to say that the question of whether or not conscious events occur is beside the main issue—that they may or may not exist, but that if they do, they are essentially unamenable to scientific investigation, and that they can, therefore, have no place in a scientific psychology. By adopting the second alternative, the behaviorist can keep his science wholly free of consciousness; but in doing so he commits himself to a dualism and an indeterminism that run counter to the basic principles of his thinking. If he admits that there is something in the human make-up that is essentially—not merely temporarily and in the absence of technique—inaccessible to scientific inquiry he asserts a duality in human nature by saying that human activity is of two different sorts, one of which is subject to scientific investigation and one of which is beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. But this admission is all that the most ardent advocate of freewill needs. With a component, however minute, of the human make-up that science can never know, he has at his disposal something not subject to the laws of science, something which the scientist cannot predict and control. And this is an outcome which the behaviorist obviously did not intend, (p. 280)

Heidbreder (1933) went on to point out that if Watson takes the path of denying consciousness outright, then:

He finds it extremely difficult to explain what he means by some of his terms. When he says that thinking is merely a matter of language mechanisms, or emotion an affair of visceral and glandular responses, he is at a loss to tell where he gets the terms “thinking” and “emotion.” He cannot get them from his own awareness of his own inner speech or disturbed heart-beat, for, by hypothesis, such awareness is impossible, (p. 281)

In short, despite his protests to the contrary, Watson was himself stuck with res cogitans or something suspiciously like it—that is, a de facto substance or property dualism.⁵

Virtually all mainstream psychologies that came after Watson’s behaviorism (and many that preceded it) could be shown to have exactly the same problem. If the middle term is filled with psychodynamics, engrams, cell assemblies, or information-processing mode...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I THE CONCEPT OF PERSON
• PART II AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS OF PERSONHOOD
• PART III CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE PERSON
• Author Index
• Subject Index