A Question of “Relevance”
It was early 2005 in Cape Town, South Africa. I had just submitted a formal request to the Professional Board for Psychology to have my name removed from the professional register. Having completed a year of compulsory community service as a newly qualified clinical psychologist, all that stood between me and my chosen career was the mandatory board examination. The trouble was that 12 months of visiting community health centers in the most impoverished areas of the Western Cape had left me feeling disillusioned about the social value of the profession. It was not for me. So I traveled instead, did some contract research and, by the end of the year, found myself back where I had left off.
I wrote the exam. But after 4 years as a military psychologist, addictions counselor, and university lecturer, the same questions remained. How “relevant” was the “talking cure” in a country with eleven official languages, where 80 % of psychologists could only speak English or Afrikaans—historically, the languages of privilege? How “relevant” could a psychologist hope to be who charged the kind of hourly rate that most South Africans would never be able to afford? And how “relevant” was this discipline—beavering away at the southernmost tip of Africa—that saw little wrong with importing most of its university textbooks from the USA? Rather than deregister for a second time, I thought I had a good enough reason to register for doctoral studies. Soon enough, “relevance” started taking on a life of its own: the answers to my questions would not involve anything close to what I had hoped for, namely, the happy exchange of “irrelevance” for “relevance.” Instead, what emerged from my early readings was the realization that psychologists around the world had been thinking about “relevance”—that is, the relationship of psychology to society—from the very beginning.
Historicizing “Relevance” in Psychology
The dangers of origin diving notwithstanding, this book claims that a history of “relevance” in psychology goes hand in hand with a history of the discipline itself. When American students traveled to Germany to immerse themselves in Wilhelm Wundt’s “New Psychology,” they returned to their homeland in the midst of what historians have termed the “Progressive Era” (Pickren and Rutherford 2010). Between the 1890s and 1920s, the USA underwent a period of rapid modernization that accelerated its development into an educated, urban-industrial society. Pragmatism was the order of the day and, with the nation preoccupied increasingly with the resolution of social problems, returning psychologists had no option but to adapt the German psychology of their training to local contingencies. Being “irrelevant” to American conditions, Wundtian experimental introspection fell foul of William James’ functionalism, which was superseded in turn by John B. Watson’s behaviorism—“a profound reconceptualization that brought [the discipline] more fully in line with the progressivist values of social order, control, and management” (Pickren and Rutherford 2010, p. 57). Indeed, the American insistence on “a useful psychology” (Pickren and Rutherford 2010, p. 84) informed an indigenizing process, which, driven by achievements in education and industry, resulted in the creation of a local psychology that was as much applied as it was experimental.
Similarly, in Britain, it was the discipline’s ability to orient itself toward urgent social questions that facilitated its gradual expansion (Thomson 2012). In the nineteenth century, psychology in that country had become allied with philosophy rather than physiology with the result that, by the start of the twentieth century, it had yet to establish its scientific credentials. The disciplinary profile was a far cry from what obtained in Germany and the USA—given the dearth of laboratories and university positions—while the lack of theoretical unity further compromised the pursuit of scientific eminence. But in the first decades of the twentieth century, influenced in part by emerging trends in anthropology, British psychologists began focusing their attention on social issues. This development, along with the growing prominence of the Labor Party, the soul searching that followed the devastations of the Great War, and the relative underdevelopment of the social sciences in general, presented psychologists with an opportunity to showcase the public value of the discipline (Thomson 2012). As in the American example, the discipline did not develop on account of its scientific standing but because it was able to demonstrate its “social relevance.”
To be sure, the debate about “relevance” has dogged psychologists for most of their history, becoming at various points a focal topic of discussion. At the end of World War One, many psychologists adopted the view that the optimal development of the discipline necessitated the prioritization of social problems (Rosnow 1981). The sentiment was hardly unanimous when one considers the ax-grinding of the 1920s between Edwin Boring and Lewis Terman, but in the wake of the Great War, “[m]obilization had invigorated the social ideals of service and efficiency and had stimulated the postwar demand for what was precipitately called psychotechnology” (O’Donnell 1979, p. 290).1 The Great Depression only deepened the sensitivity of scientists to social issues, with the 1936 founding of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) in part a reaction against the perceived “irrelevance” of a psychological science that, until then, had failed to deliver on what the American Psychological Association’s second president, George Trumbull Ladd, had imagined for the discipline—“that it is able and destined to contribute greatly to the welfare of mankind” (Ladd 1894, p. 19). The outbreak of the Second World War consolidated this sensitivity still further as social psychologists sought to address key wartime concerns such as personnel deployment, soldier morale, eating habits, and the like (Burr 2003; Rosnow 1981).
By the early 1960s, however, the mood was decidedly different. Basic research was on the rise once more—in large part the result of governmental support—while obligationist rhetoric was dismissed as anti-intellectual (Rosnow 1981). For William McGuire, the elevation of application-based research above theory-driven investigation was “as inelegant as trying to push a piece of cooked spaghetti across the table from the back end” (McGuire 1965, p. 139), whereas science for its own sake offered an almost ineffable joy to such purists. But in the latter years of that decade of political upheaval, a succession of crises in psychological experimentation intersected with a renewed spirit of social activism to inaugurate “the age of relevance in social psychology” (Rosnow 1981, p. 78). In his work on subject artifacts, for example, Martin Orne (1962) noted that experimental findings could have less to do with the manipulation of experimental variables than with the demand characteristics of the experimental situation; the implications for reproducibility and ecological validity were obvious. Working in the opposite direction, Robert Rosenthal (1966) demonstrated how experimental outcomes could be influenced in a variety of ways by the investigator. Diana Baumrind (1964) objected to the treatment of subjects in Stanley Milgram’s obedience study and claimed that it was impossible for behavioral psychologists to justify their actions. These contributions succeeded in reframing the experimental setting as a social space like any other, with all of the accompanying moral dilemmas. More than that, by questioning the real-world applicability of social psychological theory, they set the scene for what was to come: a blistering attack on the “relevance” of psychology that spread like wildfire across the worldwide psychological community.
Understanding “Relevance” in South African Psychology
When viewed from an international perspective, the debate about “relevance” can be said to have reached its zenith over the course of the 1970s. Yet, the problematics that were raised in relation to psychological theory, practice, and research continued to resonate in developing contexts, with South Africa proving no exception. In the final years of apartheid rule, critical psychologists slammed the discipline’s indifference to the human rights abuses of the day, accusing it of lacking “relevance,” but after 22 years of democracy, questions persist about the “relevance” of psychology for the lives of the majority of South Africans. Claims of professional “irrelevance” refer variously to the skewed racial demographics of the country’s registered psychologists and counselors (Pillay and Siyothula 2008), the lack of qualified professionals who speak indigenous African languages (Ahmed and Pillay 2004), biased selection criteria for admission into professional training programs (Stevens 2001), and the uneven racial composition of selection panels (Mayekiso et al. 2004).
Academic psychology is deemed, also, to have fallen short on the “relevance” index. The argument made repeatedly is that psychological theories remain beholden to Euro-American models of human functioning (e.g. Holdstock 2000)—the more radical version stating that the paradigmatic inclinations of psychology are in keeping with “the worldview of the coloniser” (Ahmed and Pillay 2004, p. 631). Others object to what they imagine as the implied alternative, namely, the reification of culture, the relegation of class, and the revival of an apartheid-era discourse of cultural difference (Long 2013). Even on the research front, one encounters allegations of continued disinterest in the sociopolitical affairs of the country—as in, for example, an analysis of papers published in the South African Journal of Psychology (SAJP) between 2007 and mid-2012, according to which a mere 2 % of articles dealt with the issue of “race” (Macleod and Howell 2013).
To be sure, South African psychologists over the years have understood “relevance” to mean different things, complicating the task of definition (Biesheuvel 1991; Dawes 1986). One articulation—social relevance—expresses the view that the discipline must contribute to human welfare by ensuring the psychological well-being of the citizenry (Nell 1990). According to another version, cultural relevance holds that psychology must embrace Afrocentrism in order to meet the mental health needs of the country’s black African majority (Holdstock 1981a). A third reading—market relevance—encourages psychological research and practice that address the imperatives of state and industry. By contrast, a fourth strand—known as theoretical relevance—observes that a fragmenting discipline’s lack...