Epilogue

Abstract

When we look back over the history of dynamic theories of personality, brief and incomplete as this sketch has been, and view it from the standpoint of the theorists themselves, not their detractors’ version of it, we see several decisive trends. First, as we pointed out at the beginning, concepts of the ego, personality, and the self are often used interchangeably when they are historically different and completely unintegrated constructs with their own separate meaning, literature, and theorists. Second, as we also pointed out, attitudes about dynamic theories of personality imply models of consciousness, theories of personality, and techniques of psychotherapy that are always interrelated with each other. Third, the history of psychotherapeutics is still dominated by writers who know only the history of psychoanalysis, giving a distinct Freudo-centric spin on any subject that falls within the purview of depth psychology.

The ultimate in rigor is rigor mortis

E. Taylor

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When we look back over the history of dynamic theories of personality, brief and incomplete as this sketch has been, and view it from the standpoint of the theorists themselves, not their detractors’ version of it, we see several decisive trends. First, as we pointed out at the beginning, concepts of the ego, personality, and the self are often used interchangeably when they are historically different and completely unintegrated constructs with their own separate meaning, literature, and theorists. Second, as we also pointed out, attitudes about dynamic theories of personality imply models of consciousness, theories of personality, and techniques of psychotherapy that are always interrelated with each other. Third, the history of psychotherapeutics is still dominated by writers who know only the history of psychoanalysis, giving a distinct Freudo-centric spin on any subject that falls within the purview of depth psychology.

Fourth, traditional histories of personality theory omit the late 19th-century developments in multiple personality, skip the period of the so-called French-Swiss-English-and-American psychotherapeutic axis, except to mention Charcot without understanding his real milieu; then they ignore the interim era of character and temperament, go right to psychoanalysis, and then speak as if there were no other systems except Freud’s or that Freud somehow “discovered the unconscious.” Adler and Jung continue to be cast as errant disciples of Freud instead of depth psychologists in their own right. Janet is almost always pushed completely out of thepicture.

Meanwhile, interest inventories, trait theory, the calculation of the IQ, and more sophisticated techniques of statistical inference became the main focus of the measurement-oriented reductionists after World War I, particularly from the 1920s onward, creating a psychology compatible with nomothetic reductionism. But these developments also obscured the macropersonality theorists of the 1930s and 1940s, who focused on the single case study, believed that personality was a total gestalt, and understood psychology as a study of the person and not the white rat. This caused a major rift between academic and clinical psychology, pitting tests and measurements and generalizations from animal studies against psychotherapeutics, developmental models, and dynamic theories of both personality and social psychology. To the experimentalists whose epistemology was dominated by behaviorism, any consideration of altered states of consciousness was fed into their contempt for Freud’s theories, specifically the experimentalists’ rejection of the Freudian conception of the unconscious. No other argument then needed to be mounted about possible competing theories, although in the early days of classical depth psychology, Adler and Jung were at least considered.

Meanwhile, an epistemological war began to develop between the dynamic theorists who saw the unconscious as the locus of change within the person and the social theorists who believed that impersonal forces within the group determined individual identity. Psychoanalytic ego psychology, a more social orientation to psychoanalysis, and the culture and personality movement were reactions to this split, while social psychology itself became more radical as organizations were founded such as the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, arguing for a more socialist interpretation of psychology harnessed in service of political change out in culture at large. Traditional histories of personality theory only lightly touch upon the rift between the dynamic and the social theorists, and then instead hurry on to a discussion of the five factor model today, ignoring the rise of existential-humanistic and transpersonal psychology as a major development in the history of psychology, except to possibly mention Maslow, May, and Rogers, but out of context. Humanistic psychology flourished within the academy only into the 1960s. By then it had absorbed existential and phenomenological psychology into its purview and was driving new advances in pastoral counseling and social work as it temporarily took more of a position of influence in mainstream professional psychology. Here, the humanistic impulse passed more visibly out of the academy. Its proliferation out into the psychotherapeutic counterculture was reflected in women’s consciousness raising groups, gestalt therapy workshops, encounter group methods, body work, radical sexual therapy, and interest in altered states ofconsciousness.

The so-called cognitive-behavioral viewpoint has dominated the modern era and defined experimental psychology in the context of the cognitive neurosciences, where any focus on the person has become obscured in discussions of parallel distributive processing models, artificial intelligence, and the mechanisms of synaptic transmission. These concerns have now evolved into discussions by reductionists about the putative relation between the mind and the brain and a new genre of literature referred to as ‘the soft problem,’ since the Hard Problem, the relation between the brain and the mind, cannot be solved by their present epistemology. In the domain of application, the new cognitive psychology has not been able to evolve past a focus such as Prof. Seligman’s cultivation of positive, happy thoughts, one thought at a time, or Daniel Dennett’s behavioristic interpretation of the evolution of consciousness.

Nevertheless, the uniqueness of the individual goes beyond the bounds of the present 19th-century definition of the scientific method in psychology by advocating that the person is much more than the sum of his or her traits. Objectivist methods ruled by a reductionistic and positivist epistemology have classically defined the person in scientific psychology in purely atomistic terms. Alternative ways of understanding personality have historically grown up to fill this gap between measurement and experience, including the traditions of depth psychology. Personality, abnormal, social, and clinical psychology were at first considered soft sciences; that is, they were thought of as the fleshy underbelly of putative real science, such as psychophysics, sensation and perception, learning theory, and mathematical psychology. The soft sciences gathered around themselves other related disciplines such as child psychology and developmental psychology across the life span, and overlapped with sociology, anthropology, and the arts and humanities. Only later were the soft sciences invaded by the empirical reductionists, mainly through tests and measurements, learning, and trait theory.

This has led to a situation where scientific psychology presently suffers from identification with an outmoded, reductionistic, and 19th-century Newtonian definition of the physical sciences, set in a complex labyrinth of myths around the founding of Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, first articulated by E. G. Boring in the 1950 edition of his work, A History of Experimental Psychology. Experimental psychology has continued to identify with the physical sciences in its insistence that the field is a science. However, experimental psychology has failed to keep pace with developments in physics, such as the role of the observer in altering what is observed or the idea that there could be conflicting sets of data, both true, for the same phenomenon, both examples of which are elements of the so-called quantum philosophy.

Such an accommodation to the New Physics would have significantly altered the attitude of experimental psychologists toward the study of the person. Instead, the date psychology stopped maturing as a science patterned after physics can be precisely fixed as September 1927, when the quantum physicist Niels Bohr proposed the idea of complementarity at the international conference in Como, Italy, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the death of Volta. There Bohr outlined the evidence for the conclusion that all atomic structures can be successfully verified as both a wave of light and a particle of matter, but these two incompatible positions, while both can be demonstrated empirically, cannot be reconciled. The result in physics was an accommodation that both could be true simultaneously, which also had the unintended effect of relativizing the objectivist position in science. Experimental psychology did not absorb this lesson, but turned instead to the model of the double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled experiment, the measurement of a single variable in a large-scale sample, and the relativizing of the subject in the experiment, so that a rat, a pigeon, or a person could be equally substituted for each other.

Attempts at the experimental analysis of psychoanalytic concepts, beginning in the 1920s, became a veritable cottage industry among one segment of personality, social, and developmental theorists and have continued unabated up to today. But such efforts have usually been carried on by investigators already predisposed toward acknowledging the reality of the unconscious.

The inability of experimental psychology, based on the rational ordering of sense data alone, to acknowledge the reality of the unconscious remains as the most cogent historical example of scientific psychologists’ inability to move past a Newtonian model of the physical sciences, similarly with the problem of acknowledging a growth-oriented dimension to personality. As a result of this outmoded identification with reductionistic measurement, the study of personality has drifted toward trait theory, a kind of lazy-man’s science, which now has been elevated to the superior standard of what is considered real science inpsychology.

Present day science, however, can only proceed up to the threshold of the known, as defined by the empirical measurement of what can be verified. Beyond that point is the entire domain of human experience in its breadth, depth, and history. This history has chronicled the use of images, symbols, and mythologies, both personal and collective, by human beings to articulate a vision of their personal destiny and their place in the structure and meaning of existence, long before the development of the rationalist tradition in Western science. Let us call it, an idiosyncratic, existential-phenomenological psychology based on mental imagery and intuitive insight, which allows the person to proceed into and out of the subconscious, sometimes daily, on a journey toward self-knowledge and the actualization of one’s unique potential over a lifetime.

Institutions of high culture, such as the apparatus defining scientific research and its mechanism of funding, or clinical practice defined by third party insurance payments based on the measurement of traits, are at present themselves based on objectivist science and are therefore, by definition, more narrow than the breadth and depth of an individuals’ contemporary lived experience.

The neuroscience revolution, however, demands an account of the dynamic relation between experience and understanding, between the brain and the mind. The phenomenology of the science-making process provides an avenue, namely, that with regard to the problem of consciousness, subject and object are intersubjectively intertwined, regardless of the reductionistic and objectivist epistemology that prevails in rhetoric of the experimentalists.

This poses a direct challenge to psychology as exclusively a science. Instead, it implies that psychology is not just a science. It is both an art and a science. The arts and humanities speak to psychology as a reductionistic science through narrative ways of knowing in a way that not only corrects for reductionistic objectivism but also uniquely situates psychology among the sciences. Understood as a phenomenological science, psychology not only reaches into the humanities but also sits at the foundation of science itself. This is because the interpretation of all measurements is always dependent on someone’s individual consciousness somewhere. Such a view widens the purview of psychology as a science while it sets limits on the generalizability of reductionistic positivism by providing an adequate explanation for experiential self-knowledge and a language of interior experience based on intuitive insight. This would open predominantly White, Western, and Protestant views of the person to non-Western ways of defining personality. It would then become evident that depth psychology, as well as existentialism and phenomenology, are our ways in to these alternative epistemologies.

Indigenous Non-Western Conceptions of Personality

Let us return for a moment to the idea that historically in the United States, with the exception of the First Nations people who were here before us, we have largely evolved as a product of a Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Western European, and Anglo-American definition of reality. This is a trajectory that has defined the major religious traditions in the West, produced science as we know it today, declared that our clocks shall be calculated from Greenwich Mean Time, and that our calendar shall be Gregorian. This trajectory has molded the course of our language and shaped our thinking as educated individuals into habitual ways of looking at things. Scientists like to believe that they are dealing only with the truth and that they remain skeptical until they have seen the evidence. Others, they say, deal in mere metaphysics, as scientists believe that only they are in possession of what is real. Thus, it is easy to confuse the scientific method, which helps us to better understand our reality, with the scientific worldview, which is a commitment to a specific belief about the universe, allegedly based on the facts of science. Could it be that, as we have fundamentalism in religion, so we have it as well in science?

We give Copernicus credit for the shift from a heliocentric view that the universe rotates around the person to a geocentric one, where the earth rotates around the sun. Yet, in a very real sense, there must be someone’s consciousness somewhere to witness and chronicle this phenomenon. Phenomenologically, the universe still rotates around the individual, but this is a fact about consciousness, not a statement intelligible to materialistic scientists elaborating on the scientific worldview. Traditional Chinese medicine says that the brain is in the heart. Modern anatomy has quite discounted this claim, but there is also a concept in Buddhism describing a characteristic of the Buddha, called the bodhi–citta, the intelligent mind–heart of the Buddha. This is an attempt to address the problem using the method of symbolism in the transformation of personality—that wisdom is not an intellectual or cognitive activity by itself. It always involves an awakening of the heart and both must be cultivated together, although language makes them appear separate.

We have now reached the pinnacle of our confusion about the relation of the scientific method with the scientific worldview when we ask a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to talk on cosmology, previously the domain of the theologians and philosophers. Stephen Hawking’s statements about the superiority of science seem more to be religious statements about his own personal beliefs, not the truth of all truths for us all. In believing with him, we have essentially reconstructed science as a religion, claiming at the same time that we are unbiased and as true scientists we remain uncontaminated by religion. It would be a rare experimental psychologist who could admit our methods and viewpoint are culture bound, which prevents us from listening to the indigenous psychologies of other cultures. Instead, we believe at the outset that these alternate epistemologies are inferior to the scientific worldview and if there is any merit to them, they must first yield to being assessed by our models and sanitized through our own cultural filters, both scientific andreligious.

Other than a realization that psychological science presents only one of many other competing views of reality just as functional for healthy individuals, the only other way a true change in attitude by culture-bound psychologists to grasp the enormity of the problem might be a cross-cultural exchange of ideas between East and West unprecedented in the history of Western thought. We may say that the alternative reality tradition in Western cultural consciousness has been titrating non-Western ideas to us for 2 millennia. What I am referring to, however, is the opening of a new dialogue between Western scientists and non-Western views of personality and consciousness. This would occur along the lines of an epistemological shift so the context in which individual ideas are understood undergoes a massive realignment. Mundane ideas taken for granted would then have to be all reassessed, in the same manner as practical experience was subjected to numerical quantification in psychology in the opening decades of the 20th century. Everything had to be reassessed anew, as it would again under these new circumstances.

In this regard, we may conjecture about the outlines of a depth psychology to come. Throughout the 20th century, given a solely Western context, collective consciousness has focused on Freudian psychoanalysis. All else was thought to be a mere footnote. Should we experience a cross-cultural exchange of epistemologies of the magnitude I am describing, Freud would have to be reassessed. In my opinion, such a depth psychology of the future would be non-reductionistic, would change our understanding of waking rational consciousness in the evolutionary process, would be able to accommodate a wider range and depth of human experience than we do now, would be seen as foundational to the generation of all scientific knowledge, and at least would look more Jungian than Freudian, although both their names would likely not even be remembered.

No one can assess the current situation, however, and not see plainly that the traditional ways of defining the person in psychology are under assault. It has been one thing through the history of psychology to contest the reality of the self, as the experimentalists have persistently done. It is quite another that a tradition of the person has sprung up, endured, developed into maturity, and, with the humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution now pressing in on us, been vindicated. There is no question, however, that these promulgators of a person-centered science in the past suffered the widespread, public and professional calumny of their detractors.

The Growth-Oriented Dimension of Personality

At the same time, let me say that the culture wars that have invaded the history and philosophy of science in the past quarter of a century have not swerved to address the fundamental basis of the mind/body problem. Instead, in psychology what has evolved is a radical feminist critique of positivism filtered through the lens of race, class, and gender, sometimes, as in the California variety of the movement, tempered with a Western reading of more exotic influences, such as a hint of Buddhist mindfulness. Dominated largely by a deconstructionist epistemology derived from European social criticism, what depth psychology there is in this movement is drawn largely from a feminist interpretation of Freud.

In contrast, the actual history of existential-humanistic and transpersonal psychology has evolved largely in the United States defining psychology as a person-centered science, where personality is considered a total gestalt, and experiential methods of self-realization are recognized as equally legitimate to statistics in generating the basic data of the discipline.

In this vein, as our analysis has suggested, dynamic theories of personality are hardly an anachronism. James showed clearly that a dynamic psychology of the subliminal was a sufficient challenge to reductionistic positivism to warrant a new epistemology for the way experimental psychology and science generally should be conducted. That was his radical empiricism. Though left undeveloped at the time of his death in 1910, with regard to not only science but also human thought in general, Whitehead was profoundly moved enough to declare that radical empiricism was the inauguration of an altogether new stage in philosophy, beyond symbolic logic and analytic methods.

During that same era, on the basis of his own intuition, Freud demanded that psychoanalysis be accepted as a science separate from neurology, psychology, and psychiatry, despite abandonment of his efforts to establish that fact with his Project for a Scientific Psychology. Jung, who historically was allied as much with James as Freud, conceived of analytical psychology as the bridge between science and religion, which permitted a cross-cultural, comparative psychology of mystical states of consciousness and linked psychology as much with the humanities as with the sciences. As we have said, the macropersonality theorists of the 1930s and 1940s understood this link, and, though fighting to maintain their own theoretical survival against the greater weight of the nomothetic psychologists of their own era, partly by drawing on the lineage of the gestalt laboratory psychologists and the cultural anthropologists, they became the god fathers and god mothers of the humanistic movement in psychology. Emanating out of counseling, motivation, and personality theory, humanistic psychology began to flourish with the failure of the unity of science movement driving reductionistic positivism. Humanistic psychology eventually came to also embrace existential-phenomenological psychology, more radical forms of depth psychology, and non-Western epistemologies, and it took on a distinct political tinge, as it simultaneously focused on the person in the body, emotional development, group dynamics, and altered states of consciousness. Intellectually, it was also poised to engage in epistemological critique of reductionistic positivism and the statistical definition of the person in mainstream psychology.

Unable to bear the weight of these forces all at once, humanistic psychology first bifurcated into the humanists and those interested in spiritual states of consciousness. It then further fractionated into those studying meditation and altered states of consciousness, those practicing experiential bodywork and group dynamics, and those pursuing a radical political psychology of social transformation that has come to be dominated by the ideology of race, class, and gender. Becoming absorbed into the psychotherapeutic counterculture, the humanistic movement in psychology moved out of academia over into the clinic, before being appropriated out in the wider culture by the folk-psychologists.

Meanwhile, the last place that interdisciplinary communication was thought possible began in the 1950s between physics and biology around the problem of consciousness. This eventually spawned the neuroscience revolution, which has cut across the boundaries of the traditional reductionistic disciplines, and is now drawing the greatest amount of research funding to the interface between molecular genetics, immunology, neurology, endocrinology, and experimental psychiatry. In this process, it has invaded psychology and appropriated the cognitivists’ domain of sensation and perception, brain neuropsychology, psychophysiology, and learning theory, leaving the rest as kind of cannibalized shell.

The major research question of the neuroscience revolution circles around the biology of consciousness in search of a solution to the Hard Problem—that is, the relationship between the brain and the mind, between our objective understanding of reality and our direct experience of it.¹ This search has generated certain humanistic implications beyond the reductionistic epistemology that started the neuroscience revolution in the first place.

What are some of the humanistic implications of the neuroscience movement? These might include the role of the experimenter in the outcome of the study; the epistemological frame of reference under which the experiment is carried out; the theoretical persuasion of the experimenter; the focus on an individual’s unique experience and momentary state of consciousness; and the ability to conceive of the person in terms other than the Western analytic model.

The Uniqueness of Each Person

Despite all that is said in empirical science and organized religion, the individual stands alone under the eye of eternity, or whatever higher power serves that function for different individuals. We come into the world as unique and irreplaceable. And while we always come in the context of the union of a male and a female, and therefore have a familial and social context, regardless of different definitions of the genders, no one else can take our place and be born for us, have just the reactions and make just the choices that each of us uniquely make, have the same experiences, love whom we have loved, hate whom we hate, pass on exactly the same genes, and in the end die instead for us. We do all these things singularly, in our uniqueness. We may trace our biological evolution with our DNA in the genes of our parents with some precision, but we still do not know the extent of how much of who we are is passed from generation to generation through the overlap of cognitive learning, or how much comes to us from the vast universe within from some collective pool of our psychic humanity.

In this regard, our uniqueness posses two problems for psychological science. Namely, we do not presently have a scientific psychology that accounts for the uniqueness of the individual. Our predilection is toward the average, toward the generalization, and toward the norms of the group. Likewise, we pit the individual against the collective, when all the new evidence points toward an intersubjective reality. We as much as create our reality as participate in it, but we have no science sophisticated enough to broach this possibility in anything except the most vague terms.

Further, intersubjectivity requires that we identify the primary presuppositions of the investigator and his or her particular philosophical outlook before we take the results and conclusion of the experiment at face value. The epistemology of the experimenter defines the epistemology of the experiment and its outcome. Psychology more accurately then becomes as much an art as a science, and its purview becomes clear, that it is first and foremost a science that is person centered(see Fig. 12.1)

Fig. 12.1

Psychology: a phenomenologically oriented science of immediate experience whose central focus as a person-centered science is the study of the individual and his or her life-space at many different levels of complexity through a variety of different methods Adapted from Strange, J. R., & Taylor, E. I. (1972). A theory of integrative levels useful in teaching psychology. Position paper. Department of Psychology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas Texas.

Here, a person-centered science acknowledges the powerful effect of genetics and temperament on defining the person. But that is not all there is to the story. One must also consider the changing psychophysiology of the person over the life span; the role of learned behaviors in shaping particular personality styles; the individual’s unique cognitive style; the individual’s unconscious habits, attitudes, and memories, including the impact of the physical, psychological, and social environment; their dynamic repressions and sublimations; and their entire interior life world—including their existential and phenomenological states of consciousness in the immediate moment, ranging from the psychopathic to the transcendent, with waking consciousness somewhere in between. Finally, there is the state of consciousness of the observer of the person, so inextricably intertwined in any attempt to define someone else’s personality.²

In such a person-centered science, the locus of control would not pass from the experimenter to the subject, because in reality the nature of the interaction is intersubjective. What such a psychology would look like would then mean a transformation of how psychology is defined today. The psychologist might still conduct research leading to the manipulation, prediction, and control of someone else’s thoughts and behavior through models verified by statistical analysis, but the scientist would also have to concede to a more artistic approach to the understanding of interior experience, and in this sense, psychology as a science would become more observational. As an art, the individual and not the experimenter has at hand the method of symbolism in order to correct one’s thinking, navigate the realms of the unconscious, and effect healing through psychogenesis as well as the voluntary control of internal states. Moreover, in the method of symbolism, we also have the harnessing of values, and the ability to make moral choices between right and wrong, a decision that always resides within the person alone. Through such encounters, the individual is empowered at the core. Reductionistic science cannot go there and moreover does not even belong in that domain, except perhaps to send a phenomenological observer. It may have to begin by approaching subjective experience from the periphery, but as it does, science begins to evolve into something else other than its traditional form.

Psychology as Epistemology

Finally, a history of dynamic theories of personality points to the need for a more sophisticated definition of psychology in the academy. Beyond the mere rational ordering of sense data alone, the scientist must be required to take the more subjective dimensions of human experience into account, particularly those drawing from his or her own emotional as well as intuitive nature. The logician and philosopher of science, Charles Sanders Pierce, has already laid the foundation for this work in his discussion of abduction, the use of intuition in the formulation, testing, and interpretation of hypotheses. Similarly, human science scholars have analyzed the extra-scientific factors in the science-making process and determined through their hermeneutic methods that normative science is gender biased, culture bound, and controlled, not by the neutral standards of objective, value-free research, but by a hidden and entrenched power elite with an agenda focused on perpetuating itself.

Expanding the sources of knowledge available to the scientific psychologist necessarily will broaden the definition and purview of personality in psychology. Such a new psychology, if we listen more closely to psychologists from William James and the macropersonality theorists to Amedeo Giorgi and neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela, would be much more phenomenological in character, and, consequently, in scope more like astronomy, geography, or oceanography, which are largely observational and permit one time unrepeatable events.

Meanwhile, the implications for psychology as a discipline go far beyond its present identity as a social science in the hierarchy of the sciences. Rather than being thought of as a derivative of the natural sciences, a more phenomenologically oriented psychology could be seen as foundational to all the sciences, since there can be no science anywhere without some consciousness somewhere to articulate it.

For such a transformed psychology, the person remains at once both focused and vast. The individual, at the center, remains incomparable in his or her uniqueness, like no other who has ever existed, yet at his or her farther reaches, within the capacity of each one’s experience, the person is infinite. We may say of the person as Pascal has reminded us:

“Persona est circulus cuius centrum est ubique, cuis circumferentia vero nusquam.”³

What we require is not a psychology perpetuated mainly for the sake of science, but a science equal to the mystery of the person.

Notes

• 1. Flanagan, O. (2008). The really hard problem: Meaning in a material world. Cambridge: MIT Press.

• 2. To say that such an inordinate focus on the individual misses the social dynamic is to completely misunderstand the existential state of consciousness within the person, in which all perceptions of the external world are based. To the social theorists, existentialism is a mere idea. To the existentialist, it is a central, interior experience. From this vantage point, there is no social group without there first being individuals. Phenomenal consciousness is inextricably intertwined with the external material world of objects and with other living beings. The social is comprehended through the individual.

• 3. Borges, H. L. (1999). Pascal’s sphere. In E. Weinberger (Ed.) (E. Allen, S. J. Levine, & E. Weinberger, Trans.), Selected non-fictions. New York: Viking, p. 352.