The Story of Psychology (128 page)

Psychology, furthermore, is rife with what Jerome Kagan has called “unstable ideas”—concepts and theoretical statements that do not refer to fixed and unchanging realities but are subjective and variable. Unlike the phenomena in physics, which are events in the physical world, many of those in psychology concern the
meanings
of certain events to human beings; two psychologists using the same term may be speaking of quite different things, especially at different periods of time and in different sociocultural settings.

Some years ago, Kagan, looking back at his earlier writings, said, “I realized, to my embarrassment, that I had assumed fixed meanings for ideas like maturation, memory, and continuity of mood and habit.” But with the perspective of years, he could see that the meanings of those and many other ideas in psychology vary according to how a researcher gathers evidence. One defines and studies fear as a set of biological events, another as the inner experiences of his subjects when they are feeling afraid. But the two sets of data are not coterminous; often the biological signs are missing in a person feeling fear and the emotion is absent in a person exhibiting its biological signs. The truth of supposedly scientific statements about fear depends on what one means by the term.
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The same is true of so central a subject in psychology as emotion: As we have seen, emotion has been defined and redefined, decade by decade, since the time of William James, and despite the accumulation of a plethora of data, the question of the nature of emotion is still being explored by probing analytical discourses.

Again unlike physics, psychology has many laws that hold good only within the culture where the observations were made. In recent years psychologists have become interested in the cross-cultural validity of the laws of their science and have identified a number that appear to be universal, including some of Piaget’s observations on stage development, the sequence in which children acquire the components of language,
the spontaneous human tendency toward categorization, the tendency toward social loafing, and others. But they have also found that many other laws of developmental phenomena hold good only where they were deduced or in culturally similar settings. Among these are the definitions and development of masculinity, femininity, love, and jealousy; the tendency to conform to the majority and to obey authorities; the use of logic in reasoning; and the development of feelings of kinship and belonging.
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None of this means that psychology is not a science. But it is not a coherent science with a coherent and comprehensive theory; it is an intellectual and scientific jumble sale.

Forty-odd years ago, when the cognitive revolution was breaking out of the confines of behaviorism, the profusion of possibilities was, at first sight, stimulating and exhilarating, but on closer inspection proved to be bewildering and troubling. One psychologist, David L. Krantz of Lake Forest College, has described how psychology appeared to him initially and later:

That’s how it looked to him four decades ago, when he and many other psychologists were troubled by the diversity and discontinuity of their field. And they continued to be troubled for years. One commentator predicted only sixteen years ago in
American Psychologist
that within the next fifty years the major fields of psychology would split off, achieve separate identities, and establish their own departments in universities, and that psychology would be viewed in perspective as a temporary phase in the development of the multiple behavioral sciences.
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Other theorists were both less and yet more optimistic, holding that no unifying theory was possible and that none was needed. Sigmund Koch, who spent many years looking at the larger issues of the field, concluded over
two decades ago that “the noncohesiveness of psychology [should] finally be acknowledged by replacing it with some such locution as ‘the psychological studies.’ ”
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But others have long argued that some new conception, theory, or metaphor will be, and must be, found to unite the semiautonomous specialties of psychology; they see a desperate need for “grand unifying principles” that will prevent disintegrative fractionation.
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They feel sure that a new and unifying metaphor or conception is bound to appear. Yet how little consensus there currently is about what those principles might be we can gather from listening to big-theory suggestions by two of the most respected senior psychologists of our time.

First, the eminent cognitive psychologist Albert Bandura: He has long espoused and continues to develop a broad and pervasive “agentic theory” that encompasses virtually all of human behavior. Bandura holds that the emergence of the human ability to symbolize the world (in language and signs) gave us the power to become agents of our own lives, not just passive products of the forces and influences acting upon us. “Psychology is the one discipline that uniquely encompasses the complex interplay among biological, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and sociostructural determinants of human functioning… The exercise of individual and collective agency is contributing increasingly, in virtually every sphere of life, to human development, adaptation, and change.”
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Second, the Nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel: He says, “Understanding the human mind in biological terms has emerged as the central challenge for science in the 21st century.” Biology, with its vast new armamentarium of knowledge and methodology, has “turned its attention to its loftiest goal: understanding the biological nature of the human mind.” Future historians, looking back, will see that “the most valuable insights into the human mind…did not come from the disciplines traditionally concerned with mind—philosophy, psychology, or psychoanalysis. Instead they came from a merger of these disciplines with the biology of the brain…”
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There could hardly be a greater difference of opinion as to what kind of psychological Theory of Everything is about to emerge. But while nothing we have seen in this history since the onset of the cognitive revolution indicates that such a theory is imminent, in practical terms much that we have seen points to the very opposite of fractionation and noncohesiveness. Admittedly, many psychologists are working on ever-smaller, more specialized subjects—but a great deal of current research is multidisciplinary, and researchers, in pursuing almost any topic worthy
of inquiry, will now draw on the insights and enrichment of cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, computation theory, the infrastructure findings of neuroscience, and so on. As Michael Gazzaniga, the eminent cognitive neuroscientist and 2006 president of the APA recently wrote,

For forty years, and especially for the last twenty, what has been taking place has been a disorderly integration, a loose, untidy interweaving, a semifusion, of the many dissimilar sciences within the broad realm of psychology. It may well be that no Theory of Everything will appear that neatly explains both the actions of neurotransmitters and the mental processes of writing a poem, both the configurations of neural networks and the course of true love. A Theory of Everything was possible in psychology when we knew very little; it may never be so again. And maybe we don’t really need one.

Even if the fear that psychology will break apart into shards of disconnected subdisciplines is belied by the developments of recent years, one important schism did take place almost two decades ago, the organizational split between academician-scientists and clinician-practitioners.

Schisms between academic and applied psychologists were nothing new in the APA, the professional organization that had long represented psychology in the United States. The association was founded in 1892 as a learned society whose members were primarily teachers and researchers. From the beginning, applied psychologists were looked down on and rarely elected to important offices; their values and goals were considered venal, commercial, unscientific, and, in a word, grubby. John B. Watson was cast out of academia because of sexual scandal, but the APA ignored him for decades not for that reason but because he sold his skills to the advertising world.

Clinicians in particular were considered by academicians a lesser
breed. At the 1917 APA convention, a small group of aggrieved clinicians—there were only a handful in the APA at the time—feeling that their interests were being ignored, decided to found their own society, the American Association of Clinical Psychologists. It grew, and the APA took action. It created a clinical section of its own, announced that it would accept all members of the AACP as members of the APA, and revised its bylaws, stating that its purpose was to advance psychology as a science and as a profession. The ploy worked: The renegades came home and the AACP was dissolved.

Similar events recurred as the number of clinical psychologists and applied psychologists in the APA grew. Each time the discontented formed another organization of their own, the APA made further changes in its structure to keep them in or bring them back. But genuinely harmonizing the interests, outlooks, and values of academics and clinicians was all but impossible. In
American Psychologist
in 1984, a psychologist, borrowing a concept from C. P. Snow, wrote sorrowfully of “psychology’s two cultures,” mutually uncomprehending, hostile, and alien.

What brought the matter to critical mass was money. During the 1970s third-party payments for clinical services had been available through health insurance, but by the 1980s that source of payment began to shrink as a result of Reagan administration policies and the growth of health maintenance organizations. The clinicians in the APA—by this time nearing a majority—demanded that the organization step up lobbying and publicity on their behalf. This alarmed the academics. They feared that the APA, historically a scientific organization, was becoming a professional association with monetary and political goals, and would soon be dominated by the practitioners.

During the mid-1980s the board of directors of the APA sought to avert mass defections of the scientists by devising plans of reorganization to protect their interests, but all were rejected by the APA’s council of representatives. With a crisis imminent, a patchwork reorganization plan, satisfactory to neither side, was approved by the council, submitted to the membership in 1988—and rejected by an almost two-to-one margin.

That was the decisive event. At the APA’s 1988 convention in Atlanta, a group of former presidents of the association and eminent academics, among them Albert Bandura, Kenneth Clark, Jerome Kagan, George Miller, and Martin Seligman, caucused in a hotel room and, in a spirit of defiance and rebellion, announced the formation of a new organization,
the American Psychological Society, for academic and science-oriented psychologists. In the ensuing weeks hundreds of scientists resigned from the APA to join the APS, and hundreds more joined but retained their APA memberships. Within a year, the APS had 6,500 members and now has nearly 12,000 full members and over 5,000 student members. It is and always will be far smaller than the APA, which currently has nearly eight times that many members, but it is thriving. To more sharply distinguish itself and its purpose from the APA, the APS, while preserving its acronym, recently changed its name from the American Psychological Society to the Association for Psychological Science.

Today, like divorced parents who have worked out a modus vivendi for the sake of the children, the APA and the APS no longer publicly attack each other. Representatives of the two groups have occasionally had discussions aimed at finding ways to cooperate when possible. The APA even offered, some years ago, to publish the new APS journal,
Psychological Science
(today the APS publishes four journals), and although the APS chose another publisher, it sent a letter of appreciation to the APA. The two organizations compete in trying to attract graduate students and new doctorate holders, but today many APS members think it wise to belong to both groups. Present indications are that the APS will continue to grow and to serve the scientific community. The APA, also growing every year, will have an ever-larger percentage of clinician-professionals but continue to have a sizable minority of academician-scientists, publish journals for them, and represent their interests in Washington and elsewhere.

If all this is confusing, how could it be otherwise? In psychology nothing is simple, nothing is clear; the field nicely mirrors the untidy, complex human mind that it studies.