Book Review: Re-envisioning Psychology. Moral Dimensions of Theory and Practice

* Re-envisioning Psychology. Moral Dimensions of Theory and Practice Frank C. Richardson, Blaine J. Flowers and Charles B. Guignon, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999 ix + 347 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

The present volume is an examination of the philosophical foundations of contemporary research psychology and psychotherapy. The authors' basic "contention is that liberal individualism in some form is the disguised ideology of much modern psychology and psychotherapy" (p. 52). The critique offered here, which takes place on several fronts (theoretical, ideological and ethical), draws inspiration from Charles Taylor's development of Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology of existence (Da-sein) and from Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics. Once again, a probing investigation of one of the basic themes of modern life, psychology, is indebted to Heidegger's work! The authors recall that, according to Heidegger, as self-interpreting beings, we humans are ontologically distinct from other inanimate things in the world and qualitatively different from them. We constitute the world in which we search for meaning, including our own meaning as investigators. "Our aim in this book is to employ hermeneutic ontology to elucidate this engaged human realm as a basis for reinterpreting psychology" (p. 13) as a "hermeneutic social science" (p. 221)

Re-envisioning Psychology contains neat summaries of the major forces in modern psychology (including psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavioural theory and existential psychology) and offers a challenge to all of them as forms of utilitarian or expressive individualism (p. 49). For the authors (two of whom are "practising psychologists and social scientists," the other a philosopher), contemporary psychology, especially psychotherapy, is at an impasse because of its commitment to individualism. In this book, the authors offer suggestions "about how to rethink psychology" (p. 21) in a new key. They write that since the topic of psychology is the lived world of meaningful action, psychological investigation must be recognised for what it is; namely, as a "morally motivated activity of concerned citizenry who want to improve the life of their community and nation, rather than as the austere work of disengaged, neutral observers" (p. 304). In fact, all "social science is a form of morally grounded social practice" (pp. 164 and 277 ff.) and all psychology is "cultural psychology" (p. 19). In short, psychology is "an important form of public philosophy" (p. 172). This ought to be evident, they believe, since "psychological research is not conducted in a moral vacuum. Rather, it appears to be a fundamentally moral enterprise designed to improve human welfare" (p. 172).

The authors argue that the purported objectivity of scientific research in psychology harbours a "liberal instrumentalist ideology" (p. 154). Two extended examples of such an implicit ideology at work: recent studies of aggression by cognitive theorists and contemporary research into marital relations. The authors also take to task the claims to therapeutic neutrality of classical psychoanalysis, including the revisionist forms of psychoanalysis developed by Heinz Kohut and Roy Schafer, and discover the same unacknowledged individualistic world view that they found among experimental psychologists. Following Philip Cushman, they hold that "the main problem for modern psychotherapy is that it tends to perpetuate the problem in the cure" (p. 107), primarily because the unacknowledged assumptions that guide psychotherapy work against the very project of clinical treatment as it is defined by its practitioners. The crucial underlying prejudice of psychotherapy is its "excessive stress on individual emotional fulfilment and instrumental action" (p. 168), which forces psychotherapists to encourage in their patients the very behaviour that has produced psychological distress in them and brought them for psychotherapy. This prejudice can be traced to the individualistic ethos that the authors decry.

We are shown that, contrary to the claims of the battalions of researchers currently at work, there is nothing for experimental psychology to provide psychology: "the assumptions of scientific methodologism are generally out of place in the human sciences because, for the most part, we already have what we need to discover the truth about humans" (p. 235). The authors explain that our being always already immersed and implicated in a world provides us with a pre-understanding of our situation which is the basic source of our knowledge about ourselves. The data produced by variable-controlled laboratory and other experimental investigations of human beings (conceived of as highly complex machines) are de trop. The current "chaotic situation" (p. 298) of modern psychology, including its identity crisis about whether psychology is a social science or a natural science (it is neither), may be laid to the misguided belief that reducing human action to quantifiable data expressed in numerical terms (p. 287) is even possible, let alone productive of meaningful descriptions of human experience. In the end, interpretations, not mathematically expressed truths, are all we have to guide us as human beings and as psychologists.

If, then, objective data are worthless or even impossible in psychology (given what it studies), what shall guide us in understanding human experience? In the concluding section of Re-envisioning Psychology, the authors offer seven hermeneutic principles for psychological research and clinical practice which may serve as the basis for weighing alternative interpretations of human action, which is all we can do. First, "a given reading of behaviour must be consistent with the facts as we know them" (p. 299). Second, "simpler accounts [of behaviour] are still to be preferred" to "a more complex interpretation" (p. 300). On the other hand, however, "portrayals of a phenomenon that capture its essential embeddedness in a historical lifeworld, while inherently more complex, are superior to narrow characterisations" (p. 300). Fourth criterion "requires that our interpretations go beyond good observation and admirable elegance and capture the meaning of the behaviour to the actor" (p. 300), not the researcher. Fifth, "[a]n interpretation can be judged superior to another reading when it makes sense of observations that did not fit within previously available accounts" as it endeavours to make clear "what was previously obscure, mystifying, or contradictory, and explains how these anomalies are intelligible after all" (p. 301). Sixth, "better interpretations will be able not only to account for a set of actions more comprehensively than its predecessor but also to explain why the rival reading went wrong" (p. 301). Last of all, "better interpretations will open up fruitful new aspects of an ongoing inquiry or illuminate previously unrecognised domains of investigation" (p. 302).

Thus the authors suggest substituting "cultivated discernment" for scientific objectivity, which is proper for the natural sciences but which, born of "Cartesian anxiety" (p. 298, quoting Richard Bernstein), is inappropriate for the human sciences. In sum, "[t]he naturalistic approach . . . fails, because every observation is an interpretation—there are no brute data that can help us break out of the [hermeneutic] circle" (p. 303) in which we exist. A hermeneutic ontology of human experience must take its place, if psychology is to be at all credible and useful.

As a review of contemporary psychotherapies and the background of hermeneutics, this is an exceptional contribution. The authors are to be praised for the ease with which they capture the essential doctrines of the multifaceted world of contemporary psychology. At the same time, the hermeneutic ontology they outline may provide us with an important way of understanding the efficacy of existential analysis.

Miles Groth