Psychology and Experience

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Psychology and Experience

If personal experience is the basic raw material for psychology, why do all the major psychologies of the past century marginalise or deny it? In this thoughtprovoking new book Benjamin Bradley shows how our everyday experiences need to be at the core of the scientific discipline. He calls for a move away from attempts to reconcile the many contrasting and often opposing theories and philosophies of contemporary psychology, and instead puts forward a scholarly and exciting new vision for psychology which focuses on the ‘here-and-now’ and the importance of others as equals in teaching and research. He encourages the reader to reconsider the very basis of our understanding of what experience is. This uniquely inspiring and practical text will prove an invaluable resource for all those interested in teaching, learning and researching about the mind. Benjamin Bradley is Professor and Sub-Dean of Psychology at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales. He has published extensively in the areas of developmental and social psychology and is the author of Visions of Infancy: A Critical Introduction to Child Psychology, which has been translated into French, Spanish and Italian.

Psychology and Experience By

Benjamin Bradley

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521812641 © Benjamin Bradley 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2005 isbn-13 isbn-10

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Dedicated to the memory of my brilliant and much-missed father-in-law Bill Selby (1924–2003) and the indefatiguable intelligence of my mother, Joan Sylvester Bradley (1917–2002)

All experiences are true. Plato, c. 378 BC, ‘Theaetetus’, p. 873

Contents

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements 1 Introduction

page viii ix x 1

2 Learning from experience

17

3 From here to synchrony

46

4 What to make of coincidence

66

5 The topography of intersubjective space

81

6 The two axes of psychological explanation

113

7 Pictures of psychical change

133

8 Research among equals

155

9 Validating the curriculum

186

10 Conclusion List of references Index

205 215 238

vii

Illustrations

FIGURES

1 The past determines the significance of the present (and future) 2 The present determines how we understand past and future 3 The two axes of linguistic analysis

page 46 47 57

PLATE

1 Ann plays footsie with Joe while Mona looks on

viii

104

Preface

This book has had a long genesis. An early draft was completed in 1994, focusing on psychology’s language. 1994 also saw my first attempts to democratise the dynamics of language within the classes I taught, often with surprising and inspiring results, thanks to the quality of my students in North Queensland. On the strength of these experiments, I proposed to write a new kind of textbook for psychology, using an experience-based pedagogy. Publishers responded cautiously to this idea. They could see that students might well favour an experience-based approach. But they argued a different kind of book needed to precede such a textbook, making the case for rethinking the place of experience in psychology. The book’s history makes sense of its form. I set out by debating the discipline’s pedagogy, arguing the need for both students and teachers to be aware of the ‘here and now’ of collective classroom experience. The next five chapters go on to examine in detail the psychological research and theory that cast light on the ‘here and now’, arguing immediate experience to be constituted through a synchronic field of intersubjectivity. I show that this argument has a powerful bearing on how psychologists approach explanation and understand change. Chapters 8 and 9 then return to practical questions, demonstrating how the conceptual framework worked out in the book makes good sense of research and reframes the curriculum in psychology. Overall the book aims to provide grounds for a just, reflective and informed empiricism that reinforces the discipline’s status as the strategic science of enlightenment and emancipation, an idea familiar to its founders.

ix

Acknowledgements

I am particularly grateful to the students who have shared with me the excitement of working out these ideas. I also thank my friends for their continued interest in what I have been doing. I owe Wendy Hollway a great deal for her generosity in reading the penultimate draft and for her insightful commentary both on what I had written and and on my difficulties in writing it. As she will see I hope, her comments have had a big impact on the final version. Thank you Wendy. My greatest debt is to Jane Selby, who has not only read many versions of this book with great perceptiveness but has by turns inspired by her own work and intellectual courage, challenged, cheered, fed, backed up and despaired of my progress towards publishing these chapters – and, throughout, has managed to live with me and love me, for all of which I am undyingly thankful. I have been lucky in knowing many psychologists and intellectuals who have inspired, taught or helped me. The authors of Changing the Subject form one such group, especially Wendy Hollway, Cathy Urwin and Valerie Walkerdine. Standing high on the same list are Colwyn Trevarthen, Bill Kessen, Shep White, Edwin Ardener, Bernie Kaplan, Ken and Mary Gergen, Jill Morawski, John Morss, Martin Richards, Joseph Koerner, Niamh Stephenson, Anna Gibbs, John Shotter, Carol Gilligan, Peter Raggatt, Mike Smithson, Mike Summerfield, the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, the Centre for Cultural Research into Risk (at Charles Sturt University, 1999–2002) and CHEIRON. I am also grateful for the support the universities who have employed me have given me to do the work contained in this book – although it is an odd world in which universities that support intellectual labour earn one’s gratitude. I give thanks for the inspiration of four people whom I have never met, Erasmus Darwin, Frances Yates, the extraordinary William James and Katherine Pandora (whose excellent history of American psychology in the 1930s gave me a fillip just when I needed it). I am sad that neither of my parents, Peter and Joan Sylvester Bradley, have lived to see this book published. I would love to know what my father, a paleontologist and a great enthusiast for big x

Acknowledgements

xi

ideas, would have had to say about it. Finally I would like to say a big thank you to my son Peter, whose fate it has been to grow up fathered by a psychologist preoccupied with writing about synchrony, but who has borne this fate with patience, love and good humour.

1

Introduction

The famous sentence of Socrates ‘Know thyself ’, so celebrated by writers of antiquity, and said by them to have descended from Heaven, however wise it may be, seems to be rather of a selfish nature; and the author of it might have added ‘Know also other people.’ (Erasmus Darwin, 1803, The Temple of Nature or the Origin of Society, p. 124)

A long glittering history buoys the idea that science is best based on experience. This idea is what inspires historians to claim modern psychology was born in the laboratories of the late 1800s. The very word empirical means ‘based on experience’, and it was the introduction of rigorous empirical methods that is most widely held to have delivered psychology from the primeval ooze of armchair speculation. But over time, as a direct consequence of psychology’s success, the uses of the word experience have multiplied. Like any other empirical science, the word’s first meaning was that psychologists’ findings should be based on experience in the form of carefully collected first-hand evidence which, given the same circumstances, we could all ourselves experience and confirm. But experience is not just the foundation of psychology’s method. It is also the main object of psychological research. Just as rocks and fossils are what geologists study, experience is what psychologists study. Their investigations cover everything from the parameters of pattern recognition and how rats’ learn from electric shocks to the cognitive basis for visual illusions and why new mothers get depressed. This research has spawned a host of new ways to understand what underpins experience. The more psychologists find out about the complicated ways in which people construct their experiences of the world, the harder it is to import without question traditional ‘empirical’ procedures – which assume that observed events simply and directly inscribe their meaning on the scientist’s waiting mind – into the study of the psyche. So we come to a watershed. Should psychology continue to imagine it is a science just like any other science? Is experience still best equated with expert observations made in the so-called here and now of an experiment? Or 1

2

Psychology and Experience

must we rethink the discipline’s foundations in the light of the new knowledge psychology itself has gathered? To conceive psychology in the light of its own discoveries about the worlds we live in and create is to envision a more independently psychological psychology than one moulded on physics or physiology. Such a psychology would still hold fast to the idea that it must set out from experience and so stay true to the empirical traditions that we take from forebears like Bacon, Newton and Charles Darwin. But you cannot have a truly experience-based study of the mind unless you have carefully considered what experience is. So it becomes important to query the assumption that our processing of the here and now is veridical and straightforward. Perhaps experience is reconstituted, not primal? In which case experience can no longer be an absolute, identical with the living present, so pure and simple as to be able to furnish without further ado the bedrock of certain knowledge. We must undertake an inquiry into the constitution of experience before we launch psychology or indeed any empirical science. Such is my argument, an argument that builds upon a large and growing body of modern scholarship, from experiments on the physiology of perception to sophisticated philosophies of science and language.1 Over the past three decades, debates within and beyond the social sciences have raised serious questions about the ways science has analysed psychical events and social life. But the topic of experience has largely escaped critical attention within the citadels of mental science. Critics have challenged psychology’s aims, its methods, its language, its self-identity as a science, its basis in biology, the way it is taught, its politics and the value of its contribution to social life. These challenges have in large part bypassed psychologists themselves, however, for they do not seem to impugn psychology’s basis in experience directly, but by aspersion. Most psychologists are jealous of their status as scientists. The need to preserve this status is the reason psychology is set up how it is: the salience it gives to inferential statistics, its impersonal literary style, its laboratory-based pedagogy, its close ties to neurophysiology, its aspiration to neutrality regarding values, its separation between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’. So when critics slight psychology’s scientific assumptions on ideological or philosophical grounds, psychologists are not impressed. Despite all the criticism, bodies of professional psychology espouse the same two aims as they have always done: to 1

E.g. ‘That the present in general is not primal but, rather, reconstituted, that it is not the absolute, wholly living form which constitutes experience, that there is no purity of the living present, such is the theme, formidable for metaphysics’, which Derrida (1967 /1981, p. 160) would have psychology pursue.

Introduction

3

advance as a science and so advance the common good. And the aims are still given in just that order. The first thing psychology must do is ensure the scientific solidity of its results. Only then will it have grounds upon which to promote human welfare. This book does not damn psychology’s aims. It reverses them. Ordered as they conventionally are, psychology’s aims conflict. This hobbles psychologists’ capacity to promote human welfare. As science, psychology strives to be value-free. In the words of a famous presidential address to the American Psychological Association, ‘there is nothing in the definition of psychology that dedicates our science to the solution of social problems’ (Miller, 1969, p. 1063). But a discipline that is committed to advance the common good cannot at the same time be a discipline that takes no responsibility for social problems. The promotion of human welfare is not possible unless one first undertakes an analysis which identifies what aspects of current social arrangements militate against the common good. And to conduct such an analysis, one must be committed to certain values such as equity and justice. Not surprisingly, given this contradiction between its two main aims, psychologists who review their discipline’s contribution to the promotion of human welfare do not like what they see. Many, including Miller, fear that psychology has done more to undermine human welfare than promote it. A psychology whose primary rationale is to promote social justice need not throw away its scientific aspirations. Indeed, the things it studies will be more rigorously arrived at. Hence, its methods of solution will be more scientific than ever. Mental test, experiment, survey, observation and interview will have their place, albeit in a larger ethical venture. The gain in rigour we get from reversing psychology’s priorities means that, in the process, we get a new and stronger rationale for making the science experience-based. Our current rationale puts terms like truth, objectivity and falsifiability into an argument made familiar by the justification of empirical methods in physics and biology. If they are to stand any chance of being true, so the argument goes, psychology’s findings must be based on publicly reproducible, systematically acquired, firsthand, replicable evidence. This is what it means to be objective. If you want to determine what is the best shape for a new supersonic airliner, you do not simply discuss the problem in abstract. You make scaled models of all the different possibilities, take them up in a balloon and then drop each model in turn, carefully observing how they fare on their glide down to earth.2 Judged by this same standard, good psychology is 2

This is what was done when Concorde was being designed. The scaled models are on display in the Fleet Air Arm Museum, RNAS Yeovilton, south of Bath in the UK.

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Psychology and Experience

objective psychology, whatever the topic under investigation. Accordingly, it would be quite possible to conduct an ‘excellent’ psychological study of torture which experimentally varied different means of giving pain, thereby establishing objectively and even-handedly the quickest way to extract confessions.3 From a purely empirical viewpoint, the design of this study would be no better and no worse than a parallel investigation into the levels of delight given by different kinds of caress. The objection to the study on torture would be ethical and ethics are not party to the usual rationale for empiricism in psychology. Both historically and procedurally, ethical considerations are add-ons. This is a fact borne out by the observations that (a) undergraduate lecturecourses in research methods for psychology deal with ethics parenthetically if at all4 and that (b) many of the ‘classic’ psychological experiments described in today’s introductory textbooks are unethical by today’s standards. Witness for example Stanley Milgram’s (1963) demand that people mete out severe and possibly fatal electric shocks to an ailing man, Harry Harlow’s (1958) study of baby monkeys deprived of maternal care, Philip Zimbardo’s (1971) imprisonment of students to the point of mental breakdown and Solomon Asch’s (1955) systematic deceit of the people helping him to study conformity.5 The justification of empiricism in psychology takes as its shibboleth the need for certain knowledge. The same rationale makes a virtue of psychology being value-neutral – because, as soon as values come in, so do those multitudinous forms of uncertainty (or ‘subjectivity’) that are mediated by culture, politics and personal whim. This goes for content too. The usual rationale for basing psychology on experience aims only to define how psychologists should obtain knowledge, not what specifically we should investigate: anything will do. As such it appeals to a philosophy that regards the only valid source of knowledge as being experience 3 4

5

See Geuter (1992) and Lifton (1986) on psychology under the Nazis. Ethics are typically dealt with in a special course a year or two after students have been introduced to research methods. Such courses have only been re-introduced into psychology over the last twenty years or so. (Ethics was a key part of psychological training before psychology split itself off from philosophy in the late 1800s). Ethical procedures in psychology are literally parenthetical: they ‘bracket’ the experiment, informed consent before, debriefing after. Meanwhile, within the brackets, the experiment continues much as it has always done, from long before ethics became a matter for concern. For a long time, experimental psychologists gave little thought to ethics in their inquiries (e.g. Elms, 1975). Nowadays the situation has changed to the extent that students are taught about ethics, but these are still not seen as central to the methodology of the discipline, being more a kind of pre-emptive prophylaxis against potential litigation. Thus ethics are typically bound up in a legalistic ‘code of conduct’, a set of procedures which supplement but do not change the real business of research.

Introduction

5

devoid of significant personal content. This rationale in terms of truth may work well in the natural sciences. But it does not go far enough for psychology, for a variety of reasons. One is that it glosses over whose experience is to provide the basis for psychology. In physics and biology it seems obvious that, when we say experience is to be our only source of knowledge, it is the scientist’s experience we are talking about. Stars, atoms and ants live on such a vastly different scale from we scientists as to have viewpoints beyond our sphere of influence. In psychology, however, there is no natural degree of separation between the mental world of the psychologist and the worlds of those we study. There is no inbuilt justification for we psychologists to look down on our subjects as from the cold heights of eternity and ubiquity. To the extent that psychology assumes superiority, it lays itself open to challenge. Most obviously, insofar as psychology is a form of public action that stands to affect public policies, a superior pose contravenes a fundamental principle of human justice, the principle of equal respect: ‘justice requires equal consideration to be given to the interests of all those affected by public actions and policies’ (Holmes and Lindley, 1989, p. 45). For psychologists, in standing above the perspectives of the people we study and treating them like swarms of flies, frame the conceptual universe of our studies in our own terms, and so do not enter into others’ perspectives. It is this assumed distance between observer and observed that has allowed our predecessors to judge the merits of research purely in methodological terms, whatever its effects on the people they studied. A psychology whose rationale is in terms of justice rather than truth will proceed quite differently. It will seek to preserve others’ rights to freedom of speech and equal respect and so will take care not to suppress their points of view. A psychology based on justice will balance analysis of the expert’s own finely filtered experience of ‘the data’ with exploration of others’ experience of their worlds. Indeed, the examination of others’ experience is imperative in a fair and democratic psychology. Hence we arrive at the need for an experience-based (empirical) psychology on ethical rather than epistemological grounds.6 Fukuyama (1992) argues that ‘the end of history’ will only come when the ideals of mutual recognition and democracy have been fulfilled in society. Psychology still has far to grow because there are still good reasons to continue to work for the promotion of justice and democracy 6

As argued in Chapters 8 and 10, this ethical justification for empiricism undercuts the relativistic epistemological arguments against empiricism advanced by social constructionists like Gergen and Gergen (2000; cf. Haraway, 1988).

6

Psychology and Experience

both within and beyond psychology. Indeed, it is precisely the impulse to fight oppression and promote justice that sustains both the renewal of research methods in psychology and criticism of the discipline’s aims. Gergen (1999, p. 4) damns the traditional ‘enlightenment’ assumptions of science because they ‘generate oppression’.Walkerdine (1993) and Burman (1994) oppose standard approaches to mental development because they are unjust to women, to the working class, to cultural minorities and to people living outside the West. Rose (1999) ends his book on the spurious freedoms of modernity with a plea for a different kind of (real) freedom. Even Lyotard’s (1984, pp. 66–7) seminal ‘postmodern’ critique of the ‘grand narratives’ of science and progress ends by sketching ‘the outline of a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown’. The motivation of all these critics of psychology is the pursuit of justice. The idea of making psychology fairer in its processes and assumptions is hardly new. In 1972 Rom Harre´ and Paul Secord published a book proposing that psychologists needed radically to revise their assumptions about the passivity of their ‘subjects’ as compared to themselves. In particular, they argued for a greater appreciation of others’ agency and hence a rethink of what psychologists understood by causality. Shotter (1975) advanced a similar theme, launching a strong critique of the mechanistic image of human being peddled by behaviourists and cognitive scientists. See for example the section entitled ‘I can move my finger’. Since then, Shotter has gone on to elaborate his critique along lines drawn centuries ago by Vico, someone who championed the idea that what is most important in the human sciences is not unanchored theoretical knowledge but that sense of the common good acquired through living in community.7 Underpinning these calls for change was a pressure for greater democracy in the practice of psychology. Psychologists should not attribute capacities to themselves that they were not prepared to see in others. They should show greater respect for their informants. This case has been made in many ways and has a history that stretches back to Gordon Allport and Lois and Gardner Murphy who argued in the 1930s against abridging the study of personal and social experience to fit scientific conventions, urging instead ‘that scientific practice be recast in an attempt to capture larger and more complex dimensions of experience’ (Pandora, 1997, p. 4). Beyond Allport and the Murphys lies one of their inspirations, William James (1909a, p. 125), ‘flat on his belly in the middle of experience’. James consistently opposed any psychology that

7

See Shotter (1984, 1993b, 1998, 2003).

Introduction

7

put the geometric abstractions of physics in the place of the teeming Gothic jungle of everyday realities. While the case for a more just psychology may be old, the recipe is yet to be devised for the pudding whose eating will prove that case. This book begins by demonstrating that the current curriculum for psychology, which has a conventional ‘technical-rational’ scientific basis, does not equip students as adequately as it should for the work they end up doing when they graduate. Nor does it equip teachers to understand the dynamics of the classroom in a psychological rather than an authoritarian way. In fact, I will argue that all areas of psychological practice can potentially be clarified and made more effective by reflecting on the place of experience in what we do, from research through pedagogy to politics. The primary aim of the book is not to provide a manual for practice, however. It is to examine the constitution of experience with a view to rethinking what the psyche is. The first step in this examination is to distinguish between two senses of experience. The first sense refers to those key events in the past which have made me what I am. ‘Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes’ quipped Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde, 1891). This kind of experience accumulates over time, teaches us lessons and so has effects by shaping our responses to the world. This is the formative or diachronic (i.e. ‘through time’) sense of experience: experience is something set in the past that acts as a cause to mould our current behaviour, which is its effect. The second sense of ‘experience’ is what is happening in the here and now. Anything that counts as experience in the formative sense must first have been processed in the present. Hence immediate experience is the primary sense, so far as psychology is concerned. Anyone who is alive is always in the midst of experiencing events in a complex way, though much of what I will call immediate experience is filtered out and forgotten almost as soon as it has registered. Much of my immediate experience is also hard to access for others because it has to do with invisible atemporal matters, things I imagine, remember or desire. The here and now is often very hard to pin down in words precisely because it is so personal and so ephemeral. You wake up full of the drama and atmosphere of the dream you have just left, but by the time you have stumbled out of bed, little remains to tell at breakfast. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of this kind of experience therefore is through the work of artists who have made it their business to capture life as it is lived ‘on the pulses’, as for example in books like Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. There we find that human beings are constantly at work trying to make meaning of what is going on around and ‘within’ them, a process that mixes memory, desire, anticipation, relations with others, cultural

8

Psychology and Experience

patterns, bodily feelings, sights, smells and sounds. It is this experiential complexity that makes up ‘the tough, vital, throbbing everyday realities with which our immediate life is concerned’ (Murphy, 1960, p. 13). Argument of the book The issue that first pricked me into writing this book was practical. How should psychology best be taught? After experimenting with various pedagogies, I was drawn to John Dewey’s argument that learning should start from students’ lived experience, particularly as it is currently available to them in the classroom. At first this seemed to align me with those phenomenologists, existentialists and humanists who urge psychologists to take the individual’s conscious experience as the key to mental science. But I could not agree that, once one has described what someone else says their experience is, that is the end of the matter. Students’ experience is a good basis for learning because it instils the rudiments of democracy in the classroom process and gives what students are learning immediate relevance to their personal lives. But it is only a starting-point, as what we call our experience is never an irreducible, uncontestable datum but rather an invitation to the analysis of how it is expressed, to whom, the relevance of cultural influences, the conscious and unconscious thoughtprocesses involved, its relation to previous experiences, to relevant theories of experience and so on. For Dewey, experience is the doorway to inquiry not the end of the quest. In contrast to this, phenomenological psychologists typically understand the individual person as being the sole point of origin for the meaning of experience: ‘in order to reveal the many meanings of an event, we must come to see clearly the experiences of the participants, whose intentions and perceptions are the event’s meanings’ (Keen, 1975, p. 33). Lived experience ‘in its full openness’ is held out as the sole shibboleth of interpretive adequacy (ibid., p. 39). This humanistic appeal to individual experience as be-all and end-all of psychological interest is one of the things this book aims to render untenable. If phenomenologists were right, an experience-based pedagogy would end up by just producing a taxonomy which, however valuable it might be, can furnish only the ground floor of scientific understanding. The point of experience-based pedagogy and experience-based research is to use experience as the launch-pad for a journey of discovery about the psyche, something which is often more a matter of interpretation than of firsthand evidence. Hence the need for an investigation of how experience opens up on to the psyche. Hence the project of this book. Such a project is important because the study of mental life waxes central to an ever-widening circle of professional trainings and academic

Introduction

9

pursuits, both at university and at school. Besides psychology itself, issues relating to the psyche now figure in the curriculum of medicine, education, occupational therapy, nursing, marketing and most of the human services. At the same time psychological questions are being recognised as the key to debates in neurology, politics, social theory, law, cultural studies and the humanities. This makes debate about how psychology is best taught and researched crucial to the reproduction of culture and society. The book’s argument builds as follows. In the interests of justice, the best place to start learning about the psyche is from others’ experiences. But experiences are always complicated and never primal. Hence we cannot adopt holus-bolus the conventional assumptions about experience, whether these be empiricist or phenomenological. Rather we need to examine the kind of space within which personal experiences and actions are constructed. This space has two cardinal features. First, it is synchronic or atemporal: its form does not depend primarily on then!now causal relations but on the ‘simultaneity’ of meanings within which it and we are situated. These simultaneities are collectively maintained, a fact which implies a second feature of psychical space: that meanings are not private possessions but shared between people. Hence to say that psychical space is synchronic is also to say that it is supraindividual or intersubjective. The idea that all psychical events primarily take place in a synchronic space that is constituted intersubjectively is worked out in Chapter 3. Discussion of its implications fill the remainder of the book. So let us pause briefly to consider what it means to say psychical space is primarily synchronic and intersubjective. Take for example a class I recently ran using a technique called ‘collective biography’ (elaborated in the next chapter). The class was in a series called ‘current issues in psychology’. This one focused on current approaches to emotion. True to my principles of learning about psychology from others’ experience, I proposed that my fifteen students together selected one from the six ‘basic’ emotions distinguished by Ekman and Friesen (1978) – sadness, happiness, fear, surprise, disgust, anger. Each would then write down an experience that gave distinctive meaning to that emotion for them, with a view to then sharing their experiences one by one with the rest of the class. This invitation provoked a lively discussion about which emotion to pick. One woman whom I will call Netta stated a strong preference for discussing a positive emotion, as she did not want to delve into analysis of the areas that might open up in talk of things like anger or fear. Respecting her view and aware of its relevance to Seligman’s (2002) recent proposal for a new ‘positive psychology’, the class agreed to target happiness. The experience

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Psychology and Experience

Netta went on to relate was of her wedding-day seven years previously. She described her excited anticipation prior to the Big Day, the care she lavished on her plans and preparations, their luck with the weather, the overflowing love she felt for her husband during the ceremony and particularly the moment when she stood poised to go away on her honeymoon, standing symbolically at the gate of the gardens in which her wedding reception had taken place, looking out at the Canberra hills, hand in hand with her man while her family, friends and well-wishers stood behind her. As other students spoke about their own experiences of happiness, Netta paled. Three picked experiences which had autonomy as theme. One told of how fulfilled she felt when, after her marriage broke up, she learnt she had won admission to university as a mature student. Another described the sense of freedom she had on the day she moved into a new flat after the demise of a long relationship. A third, a divorced mother, talked of getting a well-paid job after a long period of housebound child-care. Now distraught, Netta told us how she felt that these pictures of independence made her fear that her fellow students saw her as living in a fool’s paradise in imagining that marriage was ever a sure path to contentment. If we take Netta’s story diachronically, without regard for the context in which it was told, we see her happiness as gaining ‘formative’ meaning by virtue of its place in a sequence of events that made up an important strand of her own personal history. For example: dreams of marriage as a young girl ! doubts about her attractiveness as a teenager ! watching and waiting ! meeting the perfect man ! excitement ! engagement ! even more excitement ! her wedding day ! happy ever after. View it synchronically, however, and a very different set of issues becomes relevant. Amongst these might be both Netta’s place in the intersubjective dynamics of the class which served as her audience and larger contemporaneous cultural patterns and myths, including, perhaps, the unfamiliarly democratic speech-situation I set up in the classroom; her initial unwillingness to discuss stressful topics, prompted perhaps by feelings of being different from or at odds with her classmates; her assumption that her wedding was, in contrast, a safe if not triumphant topic upon which to dwell; her sense that her classmates’ stories were directed at her; her participation in a widespread cultural mythology of ‘happy families’ and the co-existence of this structure of feeling with counter-structures sustaining experiences of marriage as claustrophobic, with women constantly having to negotiate the contradictions of family versus career; plus the real prevalence of divorce and relational break down in modern Western societies. In short, her illustration of ‘happiness’ would not now get its sense from its place in a pre-existent quasi-causal history of

Introduction

11

romantic fulfilment but from its dynamic connections to other events, people and patterns of meaning which exist simultaneously, in the same ‘psychical space’ as the telling of her tale. So we become aware that her memory of her wedding, indeed its very selection from all the possible events she might have discussed, did not necessarily ‘emerge’ fully fledged from the past. Instead we would look to see how her story might have been formed by the conditions in which it was told such that a number of intersubjective tensions, which had no concern with historical fidelity, shaped what Netta felt, thought and said. The idea that thought, speech and action are primarily structured through an atemporal topography of intersubjective space radically revises the ways psychologists must think both about how they understand the psyche and about their own practice. Psychological thinking is generally cast in the then!now form of causal explanation. This diachronic format underpins the distinction between dependent and independent variables in experimental research, developmental explanation, learning theory, the claims of evolutionary psychology and trait-based psychometric concepts of personality, IQ, etc. As a result psychological explanations tend to downplay meaningful relations between patterns of current events in favour of accentuating the links between a given current event and its presumed precursors in the past. In fact, as any one who has been trained to interpret correlational tests knows, events that occur together are not supposed to be susceptible of psychological explanation unless a causal connection can be proved, otherwise being written off as ‘coincidences’. Chapter 4 argues that coincidences are essential to understanding the meaning of human behaviour. A great deal of social structure has the effect of synchronizing human actions into meaningful wholes that constitute complex patterns of simultaneity. Indeed, the synchronization of individuals’ behaviours in a common psychical space is fundamental to any form of social commerce as is shown by reflection on the dynamics of conversation, music or dance. It is the human co-production of psychical space that makes intersubjectivity such a critical consideration in psychological inquiry. Three points come together here: about the theoretical necessity for intersubjectivity, its ubiquity and the need to research its defining characteristics (see Chapter 5). First, any survey of social theory proves the necessity for a concept which can think social structure together with individual mental action. Without such a concept, the existence of the shared forms of life which are synonymous with social organization will remain inexplicable. Whether we think about sex, class, race, art, war, fashion, ideology, religion, sport, ritual, socialization, individuation or language, a psycho-social substrate must exist that allows patterns of

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Psychology and Experience

antagonism and coordination to create and sustain the phenomena that social theorists theorise. Thus a concept of intersubjectivity is implicit in every social theory, and explicit in some (e.g. Habermas). Yet, such is the abstractness and individualism of psychological explanation, that even the existence of intersubjectivity remains a minority interest. However, recent research in the study of the coordination of movement points the way to a new biological framework for the understanding of human synchronization. Look and you will see such synchronization everywhere, and synchronization betokens intersubjectivity. This is my second point. A wealth of examples could be rung in, from the repetitive play of identities within family systems to defences against anxiety in organisations to the intersubjective underpinning of psychological research to communicative interaction between babies. Chapter 5 reviews studies that cast light on the varied characteristics of human intersubjectivity. These include the genesis of subjectivity through language and the shape of intersubjectivity in groups and institutions. Research on infants has proven particularly instructive, with studies of infants in one-on-one ‘conversations’ with adults and in all-infant groups indicating some of the complex forms of interconnectedness that sustain the psychical universe. I am especially interested in demonstrations of intersubjectivity in psychological experiments, for these are tightly controlled events in which the greatest efforts have been made to exclude all aspects of subjectivity on behalf of the experimenter(s), thereby precluding any possibility of intersubjectivity. Despite experimentalists’ best efforts, however, the analysis of so-called ‘artifacts’ demonstrates the central place of subject–subject relations in the production of all experimental results, arguing the inadequacy of any method of psychological inquiry that does not recognise the central importance of intersubjectivity in producing results. As my constant references to laboratory-based observational and experimental research show, my argument does not imply abandonment of psychology’s well-tried methods and techniques of research. Findings from these methods are indispensable to psychological inquiry. It is their interpretation that needs reworking. Stress on synchrony, synchronization and intersubjectivity forces us to recognise that there are two axes of psychological explanation, not one, as conventionally imagined. To date, psychological explanation has been posed as predominantly ‘genetic’ or diachronic in form: events now are seen as ‘effects’ to be explained in terms of past events or ‘causes’, as if according to natural law. Giving priority to the synchronic over the diachronic suggests a two-phase explanatory strategy for psychology. This strategy has long been advocated by thinkers wishing to avoid the so-called ‘genetic fallacy’. Writers like Wilhelm Wundt, James Mark Baldwin, William James, Ferdinand de

Introduction

13

Saussure, Susanne Langer and Kurt Lewin insist it is an error to allow ‘how come’ to supplant ‘what’ questions in any field of explanation. In disciplines like geology, physics, chemistry and biology a long descriptive phase has preceded and continues alongside attempts to explain how the ‘what’ of the discipline came to be the way it is. Wherever we look in science, so-called ‘genetic explanation’ (i.e. diachronic cause!effect explanation of the genesis of a thing) is only a help to understanding if we already have a synchronic account of how that thing is coordinated with the other things and events which give it meaning. This argument could be illustrated from a wide range of disciplines, linguistic, literary, evolutionary, medical and physical. Chapter 6 takes one: genetics. There are many eminent scientists who have claimed that the complete map of the genes produced in the Human Genome Project is tantamount to a complete explanation of human nature because we now know all the building blocks that make humans human. Yet we know very little about gene-expression. All the cells in the body have an identical set of genes (with just a few exceptions: gametes, red blood cells, cells containing DNA that has recently mutated). So the explanation for what different cells do cannot be ‘in the genes’. They are rather to be found in an entirely other kind of explanation (sometimes called epigenetic) that has to do with the synchronic relationships between a given gene, other genes, the shape of the chromosomes they are in, the composition of the cytoplasm in the cell of which the target gene forms part, the state of the surrounding tissues and its link with other cells in the body where it resides, the overall state of this body and that body’s place in the larger ecology of the world to which it belongs. Hence an adequate genetics needs to be ‘ample enough to include our whole selves, and the social world in which we are made and which we help to make, not in the disciplinary imperialism that sees ever broader compass for genetic control, but rather in the attempt to reach far enough to describe . . . what kind of world those genes ‘‘go on inside of’’ ’ (Oyama, 1993, p. 492). With epigenetics as a model, Chapter 6 explores how the same necessity for two complementary explanatory frameworks, diachronic and synchronic, applies in psychology. Suppose we accept psychologists need to theorise the synchronic space within which psychical events occur before they seek to understand links between these events and what preceded them. What does this mean for how we understand psychical alteration? At the moment, the concept of change is muddled up by psychologists with the concept of time (Morss, 1992): change is ‘what happens when time passes’, not ‘what constitutes a significant reorganization of form’ (Thompson, 1961). Hence we have got a developmental psychology where development is traditionally

14

Psychology and Experience

pictured as a climb up a ladder of stages from birth to maturity, such that stage-progression and age-progression are tacitly taken to be synonymous. Yet, within an intersubjective space, change must be conceived independently from mere passage of time. Change has to do with alterations in the ‘internal’ organization of the semantic space within which it occurs. ‘Development’ has a sense more akin to that used in the discussion of musical compositions than in evolutionary discussions. Change thus involves alterations in the values of all the elements constituting a meaningful whole (or ‘simultaneity’). Change in X therefore includes (crucially, so far as methodology is concerned) the perceptions of the observer who perceives ‘X has changed’. This analysis forces us to disentangle as separate empirical questions the taxonomy of psychical alteration from how such alterations variously relate to the perception and passage of time (see Chapter 7). Chapter 8 applies principles of democracy, synchrony and intersubjectivity to research. Psychologists should no longer imagine they stand outside the domain they study. Researchers are inherently a part of what they investigate – as experimental artifacts prove. This requires a greatly heightened level of critical thinking or ‘reflexivity’ about the ways that researchers insert themselves into the research process. Such reflexivity is now a common preoccupation in psychology, being often seen as posing a choice between ‘monologic’ versus ‘dialogic’ approaches to investigating others. The monologic approach sets the psychologist sublimely above those they investigate, a position in danger of blinding the investigator to the mental life of others or of reducing them to sports of his or her theoretical imagination. This elevated position may block any recognition of intersubjectivity between researcher and researched. The dialogic approach, in contrast, recognises that what the psychologist thinks important both constitutes and is constituted by the mental life of those she or he studies. Hence the first question in research concerns the topography of the intersubjective field that researcher and researched have co-produced. It is this field that will generate the insights that the researcher comes to record as findings. There is now an increasing number of researchers who interpret what they find as bearing, not on the mind in general, but on the intersubjective field they have helped to create or polarise by their research intervention. Examples come from cross-cultural research, action research, interview research and the observation of children. The upshot of rethinking research in this way is that the significance of its results is constrained by its intersubjective circumstances. Once placed within an intersubjective framework, the kind of universality sought in psychological research can no longer be guaranteed by statistical probability coefficients. It must rather be of a kind that relies

Introduction

15

on metaphorical linkage between the circumstances that sustained the project in the first place and those in which the consumer of research now sits. Inquiries that set out from others’ perceptions of reality, rather than excluding them, dramatically enlarge psychology’s field of knowledge and relevance to everyday concerns. This is a pressing need, for psychologists have long shown a certain deafness to the needs of those they might help ( James, 1899). Carol Gilligan (1994, p. 19) asks how it was possible for thousands upon thousands of psychotherapists and psychologists over the century preceding the 1970s to spend countless hours treating, observing, assessing and analysing women, men and children in difficulties and ‘still not know about the incidence of incest or the prevalence of domestic violence, now deemed epidemic in U.S. society by the conservative American Medical Association’? Clearly, psychologists habitually listened out for something other than the experiences of the people they were trying to investigate and help. Long-standing preoccupation with objective methods does not save us from disconnection from the realities which others live.8 The shape of these realities only began to emerge when women in consciousness-raising groups felt able to share their personal experiences in settings where they could interact as equals with others who had ears to hear.9 In psychology, equality of respect is not just a virtue in its own right. It is a precondition for mapping the psychical universe. Chapter 9 revisits debate about the design of the curriculum in psychology. I propose that a valid curriculum is one that does not just have internal coherence but produces graduates who are ready for the kinds of challenge that face them when they enter the workforce. I suggest a more democratic experience-based pedagogy is the best starting-point for gaining understanding of the variety of findings, methodologies and debates that characterise psychology today. I outline how such a pedagogy might reorganise the standard syllabus of psychology to promote a greater depth of critical thinking and more worldly validity for the knowledge students gain. Once the experience upon which empirical psychology is based is recognised to exist primarily in a synchronically organised intersubjective space, the theory, methods and practice of the discipline require careful rethinking. Much of this rethinking is already underway, motivated by an impulse toward greater democracy in the discipline and by a widespread sense that psychology can be a powerful force for the promotion of social justice. The idea that the psyche is primarily a synchronic organisation is 8

9

A similar argument can be made about other settings: psychologists’ failure to ‘notice’ the deprivations of US blacks (Gordon, 1973), or the effects of the ‘assimilation policy’ on Aboriginal families in Australia (Bradley, 1999). Compare J.S. Mill in Pateman (1989, p. 129); Habermas (1970).

16

Psychology and Experience

not new. See for example the work of Kurt Lewin. But it has been given little attention by post-war theorists until the past few years, when studies of infant communication, of ‘coincidence detectors’ in the brain and of semantics have converged to bring it back to attention. Elsewhere thinking about pedagogy, experimental artifacts and interview-based research has underlined the need to conceive psychological practice as collectively or intersubjectively based. Equally significant are the political implications of the framework I advance for psychology. By reasserting psychologists’ intimate connection to the world which thrusts its problems upon them, the discipline rediscovers its strategic centrality to the political process that was envisioned by its enlightened founders. Rather than standing back from responsibility for social problems like Pontius Pilate washing his hands before the multitude, psychology becomes as fundamental to the democratic process and the pursuit of justice as democracy and justice are central to the prosecution of psychology.

2

Learning from experience

An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance. ( John Dewey, 1966a, Democracy and Education, p. 144)

Learning from experience sounds circular. What is there to learn from if not experience? Thin air? Even book-learning relies on one’s having read, that is ‘experienced’, the book. Learning about something by reading a book however, particularly a textbook, or listening to a lecture or scanning the web, is liable to yield a far skimpier sort of understanding than living that thing at first hand. You may know a lot of facts about suicide or about war, but unless you or someone dear to you has fought in a war or been in life-threatening despair, your knowledge is going to miss out on a whole dimension available to those who have ‘been there, done that’. And that dimension is peculiarly central to the discipline of psychology. For experience, life as it is made up of events lived at first hand, is the stock in trade of psychology. It is what first attracts us to the discipline. And the kinds of problem psychologists’ work confronts them with are problems that have to do with the ways people experience their worlds. Psychological problems are problems because they make living difficult. Experience must hence be the ultimate proving-ground for the fruitfulness of all our conjectures. Sexual passion, violence, bullying, anxiety, depression, boredom at work, addiction, post-traumatic stress, paranoia, they all have to do with the ways that individuals or groups take in their surroundings. And it is far from a simple matter to change these patterns of experience. Indeed, some of them appear so immovable that we conclude they are ‘hard-wired’ from birth. Despite repeated lessons from experience, we make the same mistakes again and again, whether it be forgetting a name, drinking too much, driving too fast, losing one’s temper, provoking others, missing heaven-sent opportunities or getting in bed with the wrong guy. Repetition-compulsion, stupidity, weakness of will, call it what you may, a moment’s reflection shows that learning from experience is anything but a foregone conclusion. Hard as it is, however, learning from experience has to be core business for any one who wants to study psychology. For, unlike most sciences, 17

18

Psychology and Experience

students of psychology almost always start with considerable first-hand knowledge of the topics they study. Memory, language, perception, cognition, development, emotion: we have all spent years remembering, talking, looking, thinking, growing up, expressing or disguising our feelings. Hence anything we learn through formal study must illuminate, modify, contradict or confirm a pre-existent basis of experiences. The argument that how we teach psychologists should set out from the experiences our students bring into the classroom is particularly strong in psychology therefore. The argument is strong anyway. It has been made in various ways. One of the best known is Dewey’s. Dewey believed that an experience-based education is fundamental if we are to equip students to breast the swiftly-changing currents of modern societies, particularly if we wish those societies to remain democratic. He observed that the social environment of students young or old is constituted by the current actions and habits of thinking and feeling of their peers, their teachers and themselves, in the here and now of the classroom: ‘to ignore the directive influence of this present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate the educational function’ (Dewey, 1966a, p. 73). Dewey’s belief in the primacy of the present from both a psychological and an educational viewpoint is central to the argument of this book. If the future is bound to be different from the past, he said, what learners need to gather is a method of processing their current experience which allows them to understand and gain control over it, whatever that experience might be. Simply recycling knowledge gathered in the past will furnish students with poor grounds for dealing with the new and unforeseeable that faces anyone in a changing world. What students need to acquire is effective means of critically processing their own and others’ experience in the present act of living, not old chestnuts and hand-me-downs. ‘The mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past’ (ibid., p. 75). Hence we get Dewey’s (1966b, p. 54) definition of education as a continuous reconstruction of experience where ‘the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing’. The idea that students learn to practice by analysing their own experience is also fundamental to the hermeneutic model of inquiry (Palmer, 1969). According to this model, we deepen our understanding by having our preconceptions challenged. More precisely, we learn about others by becoming attuned to the effects they produce in us as well as the effects we have on them. This viewpoint has led to the practice of including within the training of psychoanalysts and other psychotherapists, not just

Learning from experience

19

coaching in practice, but a full-blown psychoanalysis of the trainee. This practice is important in the training of all psychologists. The idea is that, until students are aware of their own take on the world, they will not be able to deal effectively with the interpersonal challenges thrown up by helping others. They will confuse others’ issues with their own and may not be able to distinguish between the counter-transference (intersubjective insights which hold clues about the other; see Chapter 8) and their own ‘buttons’ or transference-reactions which are ‘pushed by’ – but do not necessarily inform us about – others. So it is especially important in psychology and its cognate disciplines like social work, occupational therapy and psychiatric nursing that students are given work which is likely to challenge and illuminate their own experience. This means that, more than elsewhere, students must learn to know themselves and the ‘planks’ their own baggage intrudes into their perceptions of others. Thus, what Dewey (1966b, p. 47) says of all students, is particularly true of students in psychology: To prepare him [sic] for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be told ready to his command, that his judgement may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual’s own powers, tastes, and interests – save that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms.

Despite the force of these arguments, experience-based learning is generally not today’s model for educating English-speaking psychologists. This chapter compares the current framework for psychological education with one that sets out from students’ experiences, whatever the topic being studied. It concludes that, if individual experience were to be put in the foreground of psychology’s pedagogy, teachers and students would need a way of understanding experience that is far more sophisticated than that which currently supports notions of empiricism in experimental psychology. It is this new conceptual backdrop that this book tries to elaborate. Psychological education today Psychology is both science and profession. As science it aims to accumulate knowledge through research. As profession it aims to sell services for the betterment of others and thereby advance the common good. The vast majority of psychology’s graduates get jobs as practitioners whose prime focus is not research. Hence one might have thought that the

20

Psychology and Experience

curriculum and pedagogy of psychology would give priority to ensuring undergraduates complete programmes of study that properly prepare them for practising their discipline in the workforce. This is particularly important given the interpersonal difficulties intrinsic to the kinds of work that new psychology graduates often do: be school counsellors, work in jails with violent criminals or sex-offenders, assess inmates of mental hospitals, serve personnel departments of high-pressure companies or help vulnerable children and fractured families as clinicians in private practice. Yet it is not unknown for professional bodies of psychology explicitly to discourage the hands-on training of students in professional practice at an undergraduate level.1 This means that, in countries like Australia where two out of three psychology graduates do not go directly on to do any formal postgraduate qualifications in psychology, the bulk of psychology graduates go out into the workforce with no hands-on preparation for the kinds of job they get.2 This is in marked contrast to other professionals such as nurses, teachers, occupational therapists or doctors, a large portion of whose essential training consists in supervised practice. The view must be put that such a deliberate non-preparation of psychologists for their work-life is not only inefficient but unethical, being neither in students’ best interests nor those of the general public who seek their services. Hence the need for a fundamental rethink of the typical undergraduate syllabus in psychology. This chapter aims to determine the necessary parameters for such a review. It will be obvious from what I have said about Dewey that the general framework for my argument – that psychological education needs to be grounded, at least as a first step, in the experiences of students – will hardly seem novel to educators in professions other than psychology. Thus in architecture, business schools, education faculties and the health professions there have been twenty years of debate on the relative merits of the two models I compare here. One is dubbed ‘technical-rational’, an approach which separates theory from practice. It assumes professional competence consists in the application of theories and techniques derived from theories. ‘Knowledge that’, preferably in the form of findings from

1

2

My specific references in this chapter will be primarily to the APS Accreditation Guidelines (Australian Psychological Society, 2002). See pp. 17, 20. But the APS is hardly an originator of this theory-first approach. In fact the APS has done its best to model psychological education in Australia on the curricula developed by its sister-bodies in the northern hemisphere, particularly the American Psychological Association (APA). Hence I believe my comments can be generalised, particularly to any nation where the scientist-practitioner model is seen as defining best practice. Virtually all four-year-graduates register (provisionally) for work as soon as they graduate, even when simultaneously enrolling for higher degrees (Jeff Patrick’s data, pers. com.).

Learning from experience

21

experimental research, is presumed to be the key to solving problems of practice. In this view professional expertise can largely be gained in vacuo. The alternative view sees practice as professional artistry, a reflective knowing-in-action that is not a solving problems ‘by the book’, being best shown where practitioners successfully deal with situations that are novel. In this view, professional training is best undertaken in situ (Scho¨n, 1987). One of my rationales for writing this book is to provide materials for a debate about the relative merits of these two approaches to the discipline’s curriculum, a debate that has largely passed psychology by. It seems there is just no alternative to the science-first model. Hence the professional bodies that accredit undergraduate qualifications typically decree that professional training ‘should be based on’ the technicalrational model (APS, 2002, pp. 24ff), and that is that. Though uttered in the name of science and with the idea that only if students are ‘scientific’ will they ‘think critically’, such a dictat runs directly against the founding principle of science: its cultivation of, and respect for, the principle of unfettered free inquiry. So I hope, simply by making the case that there is a debate to be had about the place of experience in psychological education, to encourage critical thinking in the discipline by removing the apparent embargo on open discussion of our approach to training. That said, the influence of the technical-rational view of psychology is so deeply entrenched in its curriculum that I can only begin to sketch the ramifications implied by considering how an alternative ‘reflective practitioner’ view might change our ideas about what it is to train psychologists. These ramifications affect both the content and the process of educating psychologists. It is easier to talk about process than content, because the most venerable ‘core’ topics in the subject themselves reify key assumptions of the technical-rational view. For example, Jean Lave (1993, p. 13) argues that, from the point of view of everyday experience, what psychologists call ‘learning’ and ‘cognition’ fundamentally misrepresent human beings’ immersion in their situations: ‘These terms imply that humans engage first and foremost in the reproduction of given knowledge rather than in the production of knowledgeability as a flexible process of engagement with the world’. As I go on to argue in Chapter 9, related debates can be entered into regarding every ‘core’ area of the psychology syllabus. Hence I propose that if students of psychology are genuinely to develop a critical understanding of their subject, they cannot escape the decontextualised technical-rational approach to the content of the discipline. But this knowledge should be counter-posed to their own tacit theories of the topics covered as these are contained in their own ways of experiencing and practising in their worlds. Given the recent history of the discipline,

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Psychology and Experience

we are as yet in no position to predict how such reflection on situated action relates to the abstract knowledge which has hitherto been identified as the special preserve of scientific psychology. In a decade or two, this position may change. Meanwhile, there is a considerable body of ‘alternative’ knowledge that has been generated on the margins of the mainstream and which can be recruited to draw out this dialogue about psychology’s traditional subject-matter, once students’ experiences have proved its need (as Chapter 9 will later illustrate). The dominance of technical-rationality in the syllabus of psychology It is difficult to divorce the current shape of the syllabus in psychology from anxieties over the discipline’s status. Psychologists, in common with other professional groups, aspire to a privileged position in society. Their professional bodies are often run like closed shops to which the passport is an accredited degree. Indeed, in many countries it is illegal to call yourself a psychologist unless you have done such a degree. So the teaching of psychology in universities has become crucial to establishing the discipline’s prestige. In order to promote its case both within and beyond the university, psychology has availed itself of what Scho¨n (1987, p. 8) calls the justification of ‘technical-rationality’ used by a variety of professions in like contexts: Their normative curriculum . . . embodies the idea that practical competence becomes professional when its instrumental problem-solving is grounded in systematic, preferably scientific knowledge. So the normative professional curriculum presents first the relevant basic science, then the relevant applied science, and finally, a practicum in which students are presumed to learn to apply research-based knowledge to the problems of everyday practice.

It is this technical-rational curriculum which creates the hierarchy of knowledge defined long ago by Veblen (1918): (1) Basic science (2) Applied science (3) Technical skills of day-to-day practice The greater one’s proximity to basic science, the higher one’s academic status. Hence ‘the relative status of the various professions is largely correlated with the extent to which they are able to present themselves as rigorous practitioners of a science-based professional knowledge and embody in their schools a version of the normative professional curriculum’ (Scho¨n, 1987, p. 9). In this vein, Ian John (1998; cf. Hetherington, 1983) describes the never-ending struggle psychologists face in order to

Learning from experience

23

maintain their epistemic authority over competing professions like social work, counselling, psychiatric nursing and occupational therapy, professions which are then denigrated as having ‘lesser professional credentials’ (Wilson, 1996, p. 157). While psychologists are properly rigorous, the knowledge-claims of these competitors are portrayed as ‘based on unsubstantiated speculation, unanalysed experience, intuition or art’ (APS, 1996, p. 2). Unlike other scientists, psychologists have to fight for epistemic authority on two fronts. Not only do they need to establish in the eyes of other disciplines that they have privileged access to a valuable body of authoritative and incontrovertible scientific knowledge. They also need to establish epistemic authority over common sense. For, unlike the esoteric knowledge-claims of a biochemist or geologist, psychologists’ knowledge-claims have to do with matters that impinge directly on how people might, or should, conduct their lives, such as bringing up children, rehabilitating offenders, organizing the workplace, and managing sexuality. Their knowledge-claims are therefore likely to command wide public interest and to be at odds with competing claims promoted by a miscellany of other political, religious, and special interest groups. (John, 1998, p. 157)

Thus one of the first moves in the majority of introductory texts used in psychology is to call into question the students’ ‘own personal answers’ to psychological questions (Weiten, 1998, p. 22). Weiten tells us that, though we are all ‘amateur psychologists’, our common-sense knowledge is ‘vague and ambiguous’ and has ‘different meanings, depending on the person’ unlike ‘empirical’ knowledge which is based on ‘direct observation’: ‘Thus, many ‘‘truisms’’ about behaviour that come to be widely believed are simply myths. All this is not to say that science has an exclusive copyright on truth. However, the scientific approach does tend to yield more accurate and dependable information than casual analyses and armchair speculation do’ (ibid., p. 42). This strategy is not a new ploy but goes back to the dawn of the modern discipline. Jill Morawski (1992, pp. 166ff) describes how, from books like Scripture’s (1897) The New Psychology onwards, scientific psychology has been premised on the creation of two opposed subject-positions. The first is that of the psychologist, painted as a masterful, competent, critical, accurate and ambitious observer. The other is that of ‘uncultivated observers’, ridiculously prone to ‘the vagaries of the human mind’, being swayed by passion, prejudice, opinion and ‘dangerous illusion’, remembering favourable events but forgetting unfavourable ones, associating changes in the weather with changes in the moon, having been duped by a ‘whole race of prophets and quacks’ (ibid., p. 3).

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Psychology and Experience

The denigration of ordinary experience is only a preliminary skirmish in the battle to establish psychologists’ epistemic authority, however. Historically a far more important move was the promulgation of the so-called Boulder or scientist-practitioner model of professional practice (Raimy, 1950). As John (1998) describes, this model was devised after the second world war to bridge a damaging credibility gap between academics’ solid proficiency in the laboratory-based study of topics like animal learning and their unproven qualifications for lucrative contracts from the US government to provide psychological services that met the needs of veterans returning from the 1939–45 war: A single scientific method, it was maintained, was appropriate for all possible areas of psychological inquiry and was the glue that held the psychological enterprise together and linked it to more prestigious sciences. This demanded, in the training of practitioners, an emphasis on scientific method (which came to be interpreted almost exclusively in terms of experimental design and inferential statistics), and so enabled academic psychologists, the exponents and selfdeclared custodians of these procedures, to position themselves as the arbiters of psychological knowledge-claims of any kind. (ibid., p. 157)

Although this model was first set up to direct the training of clinical psychologists, it has since taken on a much wider function, justifying all psychological practice as scientific. Conversely, whenever applied psychology or psychological practice are mentioned in the psychological syllabus, it becomes necessary to add the rider: ‘applied material should be based on the scientist-professional model’ (APS, 2002, p. 24). Given that the scientist-practitioner model defines the discipline’s approach to practice, it is not surprising that the psychological syllabus sticks closely to Scho¨n’s technical-rational hierarchy of knowledge. In the first three years of psychological education ‘the emphasis should be on providing a training in the core discipline of psychology and not providing a training in one or more specialist areas of the discipline’ (ibid., p. 21). Practical work is identified solely with doing research, something that should mainly take place in ‘laboratory sessions’. Thus Haslam and McGarty’s (1998) practical-sounding text called Doing Psychology is a book that deals exclusively with research methods and statistics. In the fourth ‘honours’ year the main piece of work is a research project and dissertation, for which ‘no method is more definitive than a wellexecuted experiment’ (Westen, 1999, p. 50). The emphasis of the other material covered in the fourth-year programme ‘should be on providing an education in the core of the discipline of psychology at an advanced theoretical level, while also offering some opportunity for coverage of applied topics’. But, we are immediately warned, ‘the emphasis of the program is not to provide a training in one or more of the areas of applied

Learning from experience

25

specialization within the discipline’ (APS, 2002, p. 24). Such ‘specialized’ training only takes place in the fifth and sixth years (which is only done by a small minority of graduates): The primary objective of the fifth and sixth year . . . should be to provide a training in the professional practice of psychology. This training should be based on the scientist-professional model. Taking account of the nature of the discipline and its applications to professional practice, the training in psychology should include full coverage and mastery of the general knowledge and skills required by psychological practitioners as well as knowledge of the area of specialization in which the program is taught. (ibid., p. 26; emphasis added)

This is the pay-off for the hard slog of studying basic science. After completing four years of highly competitive abstract study in the ‘core areas’ of the discipline (which rarely include any practicum), the concerned student at last gets a chance to do what most wanted to do from the start of their studies: learn how to help people. But they only get this reward if they have done well enough as theorist-researchers to enroll to do a Masters degree (they need to have come near the top of their class). And they will only take up the option of doing further training if they have maintained an academic ambition (and the necessary financial resources) as, otherwise, they will want to step into the workforce without further qualification. Typically more than nine out of every ten students who enroll in first-year Psychology may fall by the wayside before they can qualify to practise. Only a handful out of every hundred get to do a postgraduate degree.3 As Scho¨n (1987, pp. 310–11) comments, a technical-rational approach ensures that ‘in the normative curriculum, a practicum comes last, almost as an afterthought. Its espoused function is to provide an opportunity for practice in applying the theories and techniques taught in the courses that make up the core of the curriculum.’ It is this rationale which justifies the exclusion of practical training from the undergraduate programme. And it is the ‘non-core’ ‘non-basic’ status of practice which also ensures that, when the chosen few belatedly get to do a practicum as postgraduates, they are led to think about their practice as an optional add-on. So what is the alternative?

Arguments for an experience-based pedagogy The standard form of psychology’s curriculum is genetically organised; its structure gives priority to roots and origins. Thus most students are

3

E.g. 2 per cent at the University of Sydney.

26

Psychology and Experience

introduced to the discipline through the doorway of its history,4 its research methods and its biological bases.5 From there they will either move on to the baby-first approach of developmental psychology or to sensation and perception.6 These are presented as the nuts and bolts of the discipline. As they progress through the first year students will learn about other basic building-blocks: learning, memory, cognition, emotion. The whole person only comes into focus at the end of the year, if at all, in classes on personality, psychological disorders and social behaviour.7 The reigning idea is that we must begin with the roots in the past and proceed synthetically if we are ever to understand the complex goings-on of the present. As argued in Chapters 3 and 6, this idea is seriously flawed. By starting with the ‘roots’ we immediately insinuate a vision of mature functioning which is not empirically based and is often incomplete or wrong-headed – as with the vision of mature ‘scientific’ cognition in Piaget’s embryological theory (Lave, 1988; see Chapter 7 below). Furthermore, knowing how something has come into being historically or developmentally cannot tell us what it is. Logically, the opposite is true: only when we know what something is can we begin to understand how it might have come to be that way. This argument forces the Jamesian (James, 1890, ch. 7) conclusion that students of psychology should be introduced to their studies top-down, starting with a survey of the teeming multiplicity of objects and relations that comprise the tropical profusion of everyday experience and proceeding analytically from there. This argument is sometimes dubbed holism: we must begin by describing the whole before we go on to analyse the parts. It is often used

4

5 6

7

As discussed in Chapter 9, the kind of history students are given in Chapter 1 of their introductory textbooks is largely an internalist one of ‘‘relevant ideas’’ stripped of social context. I.e. they begin with the historical origination of the discipline; the methodological origination of its knowledge-base; and the biological origination of ‘the mind’. Since 1879, nearly all psychology textbooks have introduced students to the ‘contents’ of the discipline with a chapter on sensations, as the simplest mental facts, as if then to proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. ‘But this’, warned James (1890, p. 219), ‘is abandoning the empirical method of investigation’ at the outset: ‘No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw . . . The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the fact of thinking itself, and that this must first be taken up and analyzed.’ These data come from a study currently being conducted by Danielle Every and I on the introductory textbooks predominantly used in Australia (Weiten, 1998; Westen, 1999; Myers, 2001). These are all primarily published for the US market.

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by proponents of ‘systems’ approaches to the study of organic beings (von Bertalanffy, 1971). A second argument elaborates the first. The scientist-practitioner model for psychological education is said to be supported by arguments for ‘evidence-based practice’ more fully developed in the training of medical doctors. A popular definition of evidence-based medicine is ‘the conscientious, judicious and explicit use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients’ (Sackett et al., 1996, pp. 71–2). Evidence is usually taken here to mean evidence about risk and probability derived from research that samples large populations. It relates especially to the results of randomised controlled trials and large cohort studies, which are promoted as more valid and reliable than anecdotal reports. Thus we find a recent brochure put out by the APS College of Clinical Psychologists reassuring prospective clients that ‘Clinical Psychologists apply scientific methods and findings to the problems they assess and diagnose . . . treatment is based on carefully evaluated scientific results’ (APS, 1997). As Greenhalgh relates, however, where educating general practitioners is concerned, there is a crucial gap between the generalised truths that come out of population-derived evidence and the kind of knowledge needed to treat individual patients. This gap is both conceptual and practical: In particle physics, the scientific truths (laws) derived from empirical observation about the behaviour of gases fail to hold when applied to single molecules. Similarly (but for different reasons), the ‘truths’ established by the empirical observation of populations in randomised trials and cohort studies cannot be mechanistically applied to individual patients or episodes of illness, whose behaviour is irremediably contextual and (seemingly) idiosyncratic. In large research trials, the individual trial participant’s unique and many-dimensional experience is expressed as (say) a single dot on a scatter plot, to which apply the mathematical tools to produce a story about the sample as a whole. The generalisable truth that we seek to glean from research trials pertains to the sample’s (and, it is hoped, the population’s) story, not the individual trial participants’ stories. (Greenhalgh, 1998, p. 251)

In short, unless we commit what A.N. Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and reify the population story, an understanding of research results that deal in aggregated data and refer to groups cannot help a practitioner know how to deal with any given individual, even if they belong to that group, because ‘the average pattern might not correspond to the actual behaviour of a single member of the statistical group’ (Danziger, 1990, p. 153). John (1998, p. 158; cf. Meehl, 1990) makes the further point that, unlike physics or even medicine, studies relating to the kinds of phenomena psychologists meet with in their practice generally

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report very weak effects which leave as much as 90 per cent of the observed variance in any given study unaccounted for. This weakens yet further the relevance of aggregate data to the individuals psychologists treat. Greenhalgh urges the need for an alternative understanding of practice, one that complements the existing evidence-based approach, but is commensurate with the life-experience of the individuals directly involved ‘at the coal-face’, both patients’ and doctors’ (see Greenhalgh and Hurwitz, 1998). If psychologists theorising practice are to follow medics in the manner they hitherto claim to have done, there are pressing reasons to develop the same kind of complementary approach in the study of psychology. Not surprisingly, given the conceptual gap between aggregate data and individuals’ real-life experience, there is evidence from both psychology and medicine that, even when using the same theoretical framework, practitioners make divergent judgement-calls (Greenhalgh, 1998; John, 1998). The converse is also true. Skilled practitioners often agree about what to do in a given case even when their theoretical justifications differ (Jonsen and Toulmin, 1988). As Greenhalgh (1998, p. 250) says, ‘clinical judgements are usually a far cry from the objective analysis of a set of eminently measurable ‘‘facts’’ ’. Hence evidence from comparisons of professionals with paraprofessionals shows that scientist-practitioner training, and hence familiarity with authorised scientific psychological knowledge, may have little bearing on clinical competence in psychology (Garb, 1989; Dawes, 1996; Wakefield and Kirk, 1996). Success has more to do with the quality of information practitioners can glean from their clients (Casement, 1985; Holmes, 1998). For example, in diagnosing angina, agreement is increased if doctors base their judgements on what patients say about the pains in their chests. It lessens when diagnosis is based solely on the abstracted, ‘hard’ reality of ECG tracings (Sackett et al., 1991). So how are we to characterise good practice? Scho¨n (1987, pp. 22ff) has discussed this question at length. The necessary quality is what he calls ‘professional artistry’, the kind of competence practitioners most notably display ‘in unique, uncertain, and conflicted situations of practice’. He says that there is nothing esoteric about such competence, equating it with the tacit knowing-in-action that we all exhibit every day in countless acts of recognition, judgement and skilled performance. Such competence does not depend on being able to describe what we know how to do or even entertaining in thought the knowledge our actions reveal. Most of us show a capacity immediately to recognise faces we have not seen for months, to ride a bicycle, to play a sport or a musical instrument without being able to say how we do it. This is professional artistry.

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Hunter (1996) has made the additional point that what typifies practical, ethical action in the medical sphere is not solely that there is a gap between scientific evidence and the demands of individual cases but that decisions have to be made where ‘competing maxims’ apply: expert evidence typically conflicts – as it does in psychological debates, like that over the pros and cons of child care (Bradley and Sanson, 1992; Beck, 1997). Greenhalgh (1998, pp. 253ff) illustrates with a case presented by a general practitioner who had diagnosed meningococcal meningitis ‘against the odds’ (he had only seen it once before in approximately 96,000 consultations) on the basis of two very non-specific symptoms and a ‘lucky hunch’. His receptionist ‘got a call from a mother who said her little girl had had diarrhoea and was behaving strangely. I knew the family well, and was sufficiently concerned to break off my Monday morning surgery and visit immediately.’ Greenhalgh (ibid., p. 253) gives examples of five conflicting maxims that the doctor might have consulted in interpreting this message: a. We cannot commit ourselves completely and immediately to all patients who seek our help. If we did, we would be swamped, and our overall level of service would suffer. b. In suspected meningococcal meningitis, the doctor must act urgently with the utmost priority. To do otherwise would be negligent. c. Diarrhoea in previously well children is generally viral and self limiting. d. Meningococcal meningitis produces a characteristic rash and neck stiffness. e. Meningococcal meningitis presents non-specifically in primary care.8

Clearly all but maxims (b) and possibly (e) would have suggested he ignore the call. Yet he did not and accomplished a feat that few could replicate in their entire careers. Greenhalgh suggests that he must have subconsciously compared the call with thousands of ‘illness scripts’ from children who had become acutely ill over the years and decided that it did not fit – particularly the word ‘strangely’ – with the template ‘nothing much the matter’. How are we to prepare students of psychology to meet this kind of challenge? Following Dewey, Scho¨n (1987) argues that students cannot be taught what they need to know about practice. They must be coached, learning by doing. The student ‘has to see on his [sic] own behalf and in his own way the relations between means and methods employed and results achieved. Nobody else can see it for him and he can’t see just by being ‘‘told’’, although the right kind of telling may guide his seeing and thus help him see what he needs to see’ (Dewey, 1974, p. 151; quoted in 8

Greenhalgh has extracted all five maxims from the professional literature, giving references for each.

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Scho¨n, 1987). The whole point of the argument is that technique is not a matter of following rules but of trying out and evaluating alternative methods of doing. The coach gets the student to reflect on what they do, something that is not possible if the student is not engaged first hand in some sort of practice. Hence ‘working with experience is a central feature of reflective practice’ (Ghaye, 2000, p. 4). Typically a student engaged in practice will get stuck or begin to make errors, and it is not until he or she does experience such a problem that the coach has something to coach. Only then can the student be involved in reflectionon-action that leads to an on-the-spot experiment to change practice, an experiment which is all the more meaningful to the student in that the problem being tackled has been posed by his or her experience. Such moments are called ‘critical incidents’ and they are used by the coach to make the student’s experience public and meaningful. The student’s professional practice thus becomes part of ‘a community of practitioners who share, in Dewey’s term, the traditions of calling’ (Scho¨n, 1987, p. 32). It is for this reason that Scho¨n argues that a reflective practicum needs to be brought into the core of the curriculum and there: establish its own traditions, not only those associated with project types, formats, media, tools, and materials but also those embodying expectations for the interactions of coach and student. Its traditions must include its characteristic language, its repertoire of precedents and exemplars, and its distinctive appreciative system. And the last . . . must include values and norms conducive to reciprocal, public reflection on understandings and feelings usually kept private and tacit . . . it must [also] connect the knowing- and reflection-in-action of competent practitioners to the theories and techniques taught as professional knowledge in academic courses. (ibid., pp. 311–12)

By making such a practicum part of the core of the discipline, the students and coaches are given a means to make their experience public in a community of learning. Questioning the role of the teacher Scho¨n’s contrast between coaches and teachers introduces another dimension into reflection on the way psychology is learnt. This has to do with the kinds of relation that institutions of learning set up between students and staff. Dewey’s (1938, p. 25) argument that, to grow, democratic education must be founded on an ‘organic connection between education and personal experience’, results in a distinction between two types of pedagogy. He calls them conservative-traditional and progressive. In traditional education the subject-matter consists in bodies of information and of skills that have been worked out in the past.

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Therefore the chief business of the school is to transmit these to the coming generation. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. This is what Freire (1972, p. 58) calls the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only so far as receiving, filing and storing deposits. Knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Hence the attitude of teachers becomes one of superiority. The attitude of students must be on the whole one of ‘docility, receptivity and obedience’ (Dewey, 1938, p. 18). And books, especially textbooks, become the chief representatives of the lore and wisdom of the learned. The problems with this model of education are in the relations it sets up between teachers and students and in the devaluing of students’existing knowledge and experience. According to both Dewey and Freire, knowledge is only acquired through making live connections with the activities and interests of the individual student. ‘Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men [and women] pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other’ (Freire, 1972, p. 58). Information must become part of the life-experience of the student if it is to become truly educative. For it is through the responses which others make to the student’s activities that she or he comes to know what these mean in social terms (Dewey, 1966b, p. 45). This means that the teacher must be constantly in communication with the student so that constant regard can be paid to the student’s powers, tastes and interests: ‘Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to pressure from without . . . Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, therefore, the educative process will be haphazard and arbitrary’ (ibid., p. 46). But in the traditional, banking model of schooling, teachers do not explore the needs of their students. The teacher ‘issues communique´s and ‘‘makes deposits’’ which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat’ (Freire, 1972, pp. 45–6). There is little room for creativity or addressing the students’ own experience. It may be of concern to some that the traditional pedagogy thus works against the active criticism and potential improvement of the status quo in psychology, inculcating instead social conformity and passive obedience. Given Dewey’s (1966b, p. 51) belief that the student’s own social activity is the ‘true centre of correlation’ for learning, this enforced passivity is also likely to turn students off further learning: just the result most

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damaging to a society’s ambitions for democratisation and lifelong education. In fact, insofar as means determine ends, students will come away from a ‘banking’ educational system with the view that learning is an authoritarian process where superiors impose on inferiors rather than a two-way co-production which requires sensitive listening to the other on both sides of the expert–lay divide. Of course, the image of learning as directed solely by the teacher’s power to inculcate achieves vivid realisation in psychologists’ classic model of learning, the training of rats. In the laboratory, the rat learns from having its supposedly random behaviours ‘shaped’ through strategic electric shocks administered by an all-powerful ‘teacher’. John (1998, p. 159) develops the parallel: The most esteemed method of scientific inquiry is understandably the experiment, but it is not quite so understandable that the social relationship usually associated with this method in psychology should, either implicitly or explicitly, be held up to aspiring practitioners for emulation. A psychological experiment usually takes the form of an encounter between a docile, compliant, and not infrequently coerced subject who does the bidding of a detached and socially distant experimenter. Face-to-face interaction between experimenter and subject . . . is minimised, and in the case of computer-controlled, automated experiments, is often completely eliminated.

Progressive education, on the other hand, promotes a model of democracy in the classroom. According to Freire, its centrepiece is the maintenance of genuine dialogue between teacher and student in which both individuals must at different times teach and learn. Despite the inevitable asymmetries, the student must at times teach the teacher what her or his interests and experiences are and the teacher must listen to learn. And the students must learn the wider meanings of what they do from the teacher’s responses to their actions and expressions. Such democratic social arrangements in the classroom also ‘promote a better quality of human experience, one which is more widely accessible and enjoyed, than do non-democratic and anti-democratic forms of life . . . mutual consultation and convictions reached through persuasion make possible a better quality of experience than can otherwise be provided on any wide scale’ (Dewey, 1938, p. 34). Freire (1972, pp. 57, 64) and Dewey agree that teachers must become partners with their students in a ‘horizontal relationship’ where ‘the point of departure must always be . . . the ‘‘here and now’’, which constitutes the situation in which [all] are submerged’ (ibid., p. 57, my emphasis). Relationship between teachers and students can never be entirely level, however. Staff grade students. Staff are generally older than students. Staff can discipline students. Staff are already full members of a profession that students are still striving to join. Staff are often eminent

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researchers in their own right, which students are not. And usually, staff know more academically about the subject they are teaching than those they teach. Hence listening to others’ experiences can only be the startingpoint for psychological pedagogy and inquiry. Considerable skills are required to segue from students’ experiences to the findings and theories that traditionally comprise psychology’s syllabus. In the first place, even setting up an approximately symmetrical speech-situation in the classroom in which to elicit students’ experiences requires a training in little-known techniques such as collective biography (see section after next). Teachers need to be prepared to ‘level’ about some of their own experiences if a speech-situation is to approach the ideal (Habermas, 1970) – something that departs from the conventional model of professional behaviour. They also need to be able, not just to facilitate, but to detach from and observe, manage and interpret to the class the group dynamics that will emerge in non-authoritarian classrooms. This means that teachers need to have learnt how to manage their own anxieties. Classroom dynamics are typically complex and often confronting. But they are richly informative and so integral to educating students’ awareness of the parts played by self and others in constructing the here and now (see next section). They may bring up significant personal issues for individual students, a fact which requires teachers to be psychologists in practice as well as name – at least in supplying appropriate back-up for students who are troubled by their own experience. But, in the right hands, class-work will also touch on important intellectual debates and evidentiary issues which pave a living path into the discipline’s findings, methods, practices and theories. All this implies that teachers of psychology require training. Traditionally, tertiary teachers have not been systematically taught to teach, largely adapting or recreating their own experience as students. This is changing. Hence the timeliness of debate about what the foci for training should be. Given my argument so far, the most pressing need is to review the dynamics of learning from experience. The dynamics of learning from experience The observation that we do not easily learn from experience argues that there are at least two orientations to the experiences from which we might learn: acceptance and rejection. Rejection might seem too strong a word if we considered only those experiences that we ‘simply forget’. Is this not just a matter of the brain’s lack of space for storage? Yet even the image of a filter raises questions about why certain experiences are filtered out of the psyche almost as soon as we have had them while other lessons stick.

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What is it about the things we absorb that makes them different from those we do not? Or, more precisely, what is the frame of mind which makes an experience unassimilable? That there is such a frame is difficult to deny when we consider multiple failures to learn from experience. The repeat offender. The losing gambler who never quits. The compulsive liar. The big eater whose diets ‘never work’. The star who employs a surgeon to rectify some perceived imperfection in face or body and is unhappy with the results, but then like a moth to the flame, returns again and again to the same surgeon, until his face is so ravaged he must hide behind a veil. The woman who forms a series of relationships with men who do her harm but ‘never learns’. The alcoholic who repeatedly tells himself that ‘just one drink’ cannot hurt. The therapist who feels that a patient ‘will never abandon his pursuit of a course of action which one would think he could not possibly fail to know was futile’ (Bion, 1962, p. 11). Clearly, if there are two orientations to experience, one which obstructs and one which facilitates learning, some understanding of how these orientations differ is crucial to anyone who wants to teach well. According to a theory presented by Bion (ibid.), the principal problems in learning surround the difference between treating others as animate beings rather than as objects.9 Clearly, for psychologists, if one’s thinking is going to be realistic, one needs to be able to hold others in mind as beings who are alive. Yet it is often easier to treat others as things. For example, when we are dealing with concrete objects, our sense-data can bear a measurable relationship to the thing we perceive. If we want to develop a relationship with another person, however, we must go beyond the information available to our senses to build up the knowledge we seek. We must interpret, digest and abstract from what we see and hear before we can get a handle on an other’s psychical qualities. The fact that the target of the mental work required to get to know something about someone else is both invisible and uncertain gives rise to the question ‘How can X know anything about Y?’ This question expresses a doubt that may worry the would-be knower as much as the critic. Hence getting to know arouses and so requires one to deal with one’s own worries and frustrations when learning about others. As such, learning about the psyche may prompt efforts to evade or modify the discomforts it arouses. So Bion arrives at two conceptions of knowing. Knowing in the sense of getting to know is something that we must strive for over time. It cannot just be ‘scanned in’ like the price on a can of beans. A student must be 9

I am grateful to Wendy Hollway for insisting on the importance of Bion’s book for development of this thesis.

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able to tolerate the frustrations of not immediately knowing, of having to seek out, probe and digest the experiences upon which her or his future knowing will be based. Because it is not immediate or automatic, getting to know is something that must be done by each of us personally, such knowing becoming a part of the learner’s personality. At best, such learning is personal development that may be as deeply rewarding as it may be painful or frustrating. It buoys confidence: that one’s knowledge is supported by common sense and that it ‘not only represents the emotional experience from which it is abstracted but represents other realizations, unknown when the abstraction was accomplished’ (ibid., p. 50). This kind of learning is deep in that, through abstraction, what we gain by our learning is made available to our whole psychic economy, playing a part in our moral concerns, our dreams, our fantasies and reveries as well as the deductive thinking through which our new understanding may be appropriately re-applied to future experiences. Learning like this is something for which students can feel genuinely grateful, as a surprised lecturer may find decades down the track when she is reminded by an ex-pupil of that long-ago course where he gained some insight that still illuminates his life. Bion (ibid., p. 11) contrasts this authentic learning from experience, which entails the time-consuming toil of personally ‘getting to know’, with knowledge marked by ‘the need to be rid of the emotional complications of awareness of life and of a relationship with live objects’. This second reductive and supposedly more painless kind of knowing avoids the need for personal concern. It is a product of trying to evade the bothersome process of ‘learning from experience’ by putting in its place a definition of learning as ‘X is possessed of a piece of knowledge called Y’ (ibid., p. 49). If we follow this low road to learning, the field of knowledge becomes a universe populated solely by phenomena that have the characteristics of the inanimate. Here a thing can supposedly be known solely by its physical trace or its label. Such knowing appears to become easier the more the process of perception and judgement can be replaced by machines. Truth is felt to inhere in the record of a brain-scan, audio-tape or scatter-plot. No human judgement is involved. We may even come to feel that the best models for the people we study are machines, whether hydraulic systems or computer programmes. We thereby bar consideration of those aspects of life which cannot be mechanically modelled: emotions, uncertainty, malice, social life, cultural forms, sexual passion. This frame of mind is marked by a determination not to experience anything, something that goes in tandem with an inability to reject or ignore any stimulus. In pathological form, ‘sense-impressions can be seen to have some meaning but the patient feels incapable of knowing what

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that meaning is’ (ibid., p. 18). Hence quantity replaces quality and one loses any deep concern for truth. The relative ease of accumulating information about inanimate objects compared to learning about the world of the living is shown by the successes scientists have had in dealing with things when compared to their successes with people. Much of the recent history of psychology, from behaviourism on through cognitive science, illustrates the human proclivity for treating people as ‘phenomena that have the characteristics of the inanimate’ (ibid., p. 14). For example, behaviourists like Watson (1913) take great delight in arguing that psychology is best conducted without reference to mind, feeling, states of consciousness or mental content. All that should be recorded is physical movements, stimulus and response. This view continues to attract psychologists as the popularity of the doctrine of ‘operational definition’ attests (Koch, 1992). Likewise we have well-funded moves in cognitive science to focus on the brain, a physical entity that produces graphable traces galore, rather than the mind which even psychologists have great difficulty in defining, let alone studying, and for which the brain seems therefore a more than adequate substitute. Or witness the slippage by which what were in the 1920s defined as ‘variables’ solely in statistical terms are now taken as direct reflections of psychological reality. Thus we talk of ‘personality variables’, ‘motivational variables’, ‘cognitive variables’ and the like which supposedly are both psychically real and operate isomorphically with statistical variables: they are unitary, can be measured on a linear scale, have causal rather than semantic relations with each other, are logically independent, etc. Danziger (1997, p. 171) comments, ‘analysis in terms of variables has become a way of eliminating questions of meaning from the explanation of human conduct’. Learning the technology of measurement replaces struggling over interpretation. And even then, those potentially measurable facts which we are capable of studying but feel might be emotionally awkward tend to get marginalised both by observational procedures and theory. For instance, observations of infants are sidelined that might contradict the rosy vision of a normality where living is easy, food is abundant, illness is exceptional, mother is constantly sensitive and available, the baby is fundamentally loving (rather than e.g. anxious), bathed in love and precociously intelligent to boot (Bradley, 1991). This is not to mention the big league of emotionally confronting facts, containing things like the inhuman apathy that colludes with large-scale exploitation, domestic violence, war, avoidable famine and political deceit. Such things simply do not fit the framework of relevance within which psychology traditionally operates.

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Genuine learning from experience depends on the operation of what Bion calls alpha-function. Alpha-function operates on a steady awareness of awkward emotional experiences from which are abstracted ‘alphaelements’. These are rendered storable and so made available to the later conscious and unconscious workings of the mind. Alpha-function is liable to be jammed by strong emotions like hate, greed, anger, fear or envy. Once alpha-function is disabled, emotional experiences produce only beta-elements. These are more like things than words. They have neither the metaphorical resonance nor the functional fruitfulness of alpha-elements. Beta-elements are not so much experiences as undigested facts: their production not being accompanied by any awareness of emotional significance, but rather by the avoidance of such awareness. For example, a weeping wife berates her unfaithful husband whose only response is ‘you’re making a mess of your face’. Bowlby (1969, 1958) counts infant crying as a ‘positive’ attachment-behaviour, because it ‘promotes proximity’ between mother and child. Its ‘negative’ significance as a sign of distress is unacknowledged. This systematic kind of emotional ignorance is serious because, in addition to the obvious disadvantages of not learning from experience, there is a human need for awareness of the significant emotional events that mark our lives, just as there is a need for awareness of the main features in our physical environment. Lack of alpha-function ‘implies a deprivation of truth and truth seems to be essential for psychic health’ (Bion, 1962, p. 56). So, when alpha-function fails, a hunger remains unsatisfied, a hunger that often produces an inexhaustible greed for more and more things of the kind which stand in for genuine emotional experience. In this way, quantity replaces quality in dealings with the world, because judgements about an experience’s quality depend on the kind of emotional awareness that only alpha-function can provide. Bion’s distinction between alpha-function and beta-production is an abstraction which, like any abstraction, can only be convincing to the extent that it gives insight into one’s own emotional world. Such conviction is the parallel in emotional learning to empirical verification in natural science and, if Bion is right, depends upon one’s own capacity for alpha-function: it is alpha-function that fuels both the production of abstractions from emotional experience and the reverse process of concretisation, where abstractions are re-applied to new experiences. Many approaches in psychology refuse qualitatively to interpret potentially emotive data and prefer to quantify instead. With operational definition, behaviourism and computer-modelling as guides, one might say that the keynote of modern psychology has been subversion of alpha-function.

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Bion’s contrast between alpha and beta spills into the process of teaching too. Just as staff in the ‘total institutions’ analysed by Goffman (1990) prefer to know their inmates by number rather than name, so students may easily attend hours of class without ever being more than a cipher to their lecturer. Recently I ran a two-day intensive residential school for thirty third-year students, making it a point to learn every one’s names at the start of the class. To do this I got students to share something about their life-experience with the class and so make their name mean something to me. The students were amazed I made this effort, having attended a swag of similar schools in which most remained anonymous to their teachers. Likewise, multiple-choice exams often reward students who can memorise large arrays of disconnected facts (e.g. about neural anatomy), arrays which seldom become part of the internal world of the student and so get forgotten almost as soon as the exam is over. Students often perform creditably in three years of statistical classes but arrive in their Honours year with scant idea of the meaning of the procedures they have supposedly mastered (John, 1992). They have learnt about trees but not the forest, or as Bion (1962, p. 18) puts it, ‘sense-impressions can be seen to have some meaning but the patient feels incapable of knowing what the meaning is’. If one thinks numerical significance-testing is a way round this difficulty, one needs reminding that not everything that has less than one chance in twenty of happening (p <.05) is psychically significant (Meehl, 1990). There is no statistical way to ensure that a finding which is statistically significant (p <.05) makes sense of experience (i.e. is externally valid).10 Yet many psychologists avoid this issue and so end up working at a level so far removed from the worlds lived in by the people they study that their conclusions can seldom be either confirmed or disconfirmed by ordinary experience. Billig (1998, p. 139) takes the example of an article from the European Journal of Social Psychology whose findings raise the question: ‘if . . . subjects were aware of the possible self-esteem depressing consequences of discriminationcontingent norm violation, why did they discriminate?’ (Hogg and Abrams, 1990, p. 34). He comments that few of us could map such technical language as ‘discrimination-contingent norm violation’ into our emotional awareness. This kind of work can have little fruitful interplay

10

Power analysis which determines the proportion of variance that a finding accounts for certainly helps in this regard. But to say that only those findings are valid which explain a large slice of variance would invite errors of omission (Type II errors) galore. Even powerful results, if couched in unrealistic terms or tested only in laboratories, may make little sense of everyday life (Type I errors).

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with the kinds of event that make up psychical reality. So such findings cannot be verified in the way that learning from experience can. Bion’s theory has particular relevance to group dynamics – and hence the classroom. Bion found that when groups form, or even in one-on-one communication, people who have a defective alpha-function develop in its place a barrier of beta-elements which has the capacity to disable alpha-function in others (including the psychologist). Hence a group may unwittingly fall into a pattern of interaction that avoids the task they are supposedly gathered to do. The distinction between alpha-function and beta-barrier parallels that between ‘work group’ and ‘basic assumption activity’ made in the meticulous observations that stud his essays on Experiences in Groups. These data came from Bion’s employment as a psychiatrist by the British armed forces during the 1939–45 war. His job was to treat mental conditions evoked by combat in service personnel. For reasons of efficiency, Bion chose to treat his patients not one-to-one but in groups of six to eight. As a result he was one of the first psychologists to theorise the unconscious dynamics that emerge in non-directive therapy with groups. Bion documented four kinds of mental activity. What he called ‘workgroup’ activity was rational and task-directed. In his groups, work-group activity would be illustrated by times at which groups focused on one or more individual members’ mental problems and tried to solve them, enlisting Bion’s help as appropriate. But work-group thinking could easily be derailed by ‘basic assumption’ activity. There were three kinds of unconscious dynamic that Bion observed. ‘Dependency groups’ assumed that some ‘leader’, often Bion, had all the answers to their problems and all the other members had to do was wait passively and they would be told by this person how to solve their problems. Groups would go into long silences which Bion felt compelled to fill with speech, even if he had nothing helpful to say. Thus he learnt about this dynamic by being drawn into it so powerfully as to threaten his stance as a dispassionate commentator on the group’s activities. Despite a sense of fraudulence, he would time and again be drawn to act as ‘the one supposed to know’ (Lacan, 1977). Tutorial groups show this dynamic when students look to a lecturer (or another student) to do all the questioning or all the answering, a role that lecturers often dutifully perform as a matter of course, though both lecturer and students may feel dissatisfied by the lack of genuine learning experienced in such groups. A second basic assumption group is the ‘flight-fight’ group, where the task at hand is either avoided in favour of less taxing problems or attacked as impossible. Janis’ (1972) Victims of Groupthink gives as an example his participant observations of a smokers’ self-help group. The purported

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aim of the group was to meet for an hour a week to help twelve adults stop smoking. In the meetings of the first two weeks, however, discussion focused on the impossibility of giving up cigarettes. Member after member told tales of being unable to defeat temptation and hence unable to get through the week without smoking. Then a middle-aged business executive announced that he had spent two weeks cigarette-free. The group’s response to this was to treat him as a leper. He was not congratulated or asked what the secret was. The others swiftly reverted to talking about the impossibility of quitting. Janis remarks that there appeared to be an unspoken agreement within the group that none of them should try too hard to give up cigarettes. Apparently what they were really seeking was the comfort of acceptance for a habit that they did not want to change. The member who succeeded in getting through two weeks smoke-free was therefore scape-goated for flouting the group-norm and so took up smoking again – to the applause of the group! Tutorial groups may function in this escapist fashion when students who need to revise to pass an imminent exam prefer to spend their time attacking the course, the discipline, the ‘swots’ or the lecturer, so silencing anyone who has been revising and destroying the opportunity provided for them to achieve their overt goals. The third kind of diversion a group may employ is based on the ‘pairing’ assumption. Here two or three group members may become animated, seemingly understanding each other with ease and making great leaps in knowledge, while other members bask in a sense of effortless progress and ‘messianic hope’. The implicit belief seems to be that the ‘pair’ will solve all the group’s problems in the very near future, that paradise is dawning. Meanwhile the pair may feel erotically drawn to each other, resulting perhaps in the kind of amorous staff–student liaison controversially advocated by Gallop (1997): At its most intense – and, I would argue, its most productive – the pedagogical relation between teacher and student is, in fact, ‘a consensual amorous relation’. And if schools [i.e. universities] decide to prohibit not only sex but ‘amorous relations’ between teacher and student, the ‘consensual amorous relation’ that will be banned from our campuses might just be teaching itself. (Gallop quoted in Malcolm, 1997, p. 9)

Gallop’s point is that, if the erotic dimension of staff–student relations is simply censored out of hand, a key dynamic of experience-based pedagogy will never reach awareness. As both Bion and Gallop would have it, such dynamics need to be recognised if the teaching-learning process is to advance. They cannot simply be repressed or passed over in silence. Hence Gallop’s fear that denial of the ‘pairing’ dynamic in the classroom

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will impair learning. This does not mean that the erotic feelings between staff and student should be acted out. Just the reverse: they should become grist for alpha-function.11 This is true of all basic assumption activity, as Bion makes clear. Group-learning only takes place if the group remains aware of its own proclivities for avoiding emotional struggle. Basic-assumption activity can be destructive if its grip is ignored. Maintaining awareness of basic-assumption activity, on the other hand, is essential to the emotional intelligence that prompts alpha-function. Hence basic-assumption activity need never be fruitless, carrying a pearl of understanding in its maw to those who can trace its occasion. These observations greatly extend the proposal that teachers of psychology need to focus their educational practice in the here-and-now of the classroom. ‘Getting to know’ will only take place if teachers can bring their own and their students’ awareness to bear on the emotional dynamics that constantly colour the learning process. This requires teachers to protect a space for the recognition that they are not necessarily the locus of all knowledge but that both students and lecturers have experiences that can contribute to the task of understanding psychical events. To do this, they will need to be aware of the ways that discussion about emotional experience may be blocked in a class, and take care that they do not institutionalise forms of interaction likely to evoke basicassumption rather than work-group activity. For example, a class in which the lecturer always does most of the talking, with perhaps just one or two brave students asking the occasional question, is likely to promote an assumption of dependency which will pre-empt the personal striving required for learning from experience. Conversely, a class that is set up in a way that does afford the kind of discussion necessary to maintain work-group activity will benefit both from the deep rewards of genuine learning and from feeding its members a lively stream of shared experiences. This is the kind of ‘content’ that enriches both students’ and staff learning, relating to such experiences as sexual feelings, covert destructiveness, collusion, gratitude and cooperation. Yet it is often bypassed by traditional pedagogies. Horizontal techniques for experience-based learning There is a wide variety of teaching methods that depart from the expertdriven top-down dependency-creating ‘banking’ model of education. 11

Gallop contends that, in her experience, it is the student who is the prime mover when these dynamics are acted out. Statistics on sexual harassment suggest that her experience may be exceptional.

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They aim to establish the kind of horizontal relationship between students and teachers required for the emergence of reflection about the socio-emotional dynamics that condition learning from experience. Many of these techniques have been developed locally by lecturers who have become dissatisfied with the standard paradigm for psychological pedagogy, being little known beyond a particular course or department. I will briefly illustrate one such technique for levelling the speech-situation in which psychological education takes place. Further examples are given in Chapter 9. Collective biography Collective biography is a learning-technique that ensures all members of a class, including the teacher, contribute some of their own emotional experience for discussion. This approximates a ‘horizontal’ speech-situation which does not prompt dependency-assumptions, promoting instead an ambience in which reflection upon personal experience is part and parcel of learning. It therefore requires a certain level of trust and self-identity to be built up in the class and a capacity to contain difficult emotional dynamics on behalf of the lecturer. The technique was first developed by Davies (1994) from Haug’s (1987) researchtechnique called ‘memory work’ (see Chapter 8). Davies (2003, p. 1; Davies et al., 2001) uses collective biography as a ‘dual strategy of retrieving memories and using those memories as data that can be analysed to produce insights into the processes of subjectification, that is the processes through which we are subjected, and actively take up as our own the terms of our subjection’. Davies argues however that collective biography is not one single Method ‘with fixed explicit rules to be followed’ (ibid.). In this spirit my colleagues and I have adapted collective biography to a variety of different pedagogical situations (Bradley, 2000). As we use it, a class of twenty or less will either be helped democratically to select a particular topos of experience that bears on a question germane to the subject they are studying or they will be given a topic by the lecturer. For example, in a recent fourth-year class I asked a group of fourteen students to come up with a topic upon which they would be interested in having psychology cast more light. After being given a minute or two for each of us to generate one or two topics, these are written up one by one on a white-board and then voted for, the most popular topic being chosen, in this case ‘aha! experiences’. Fifteen minutes are given for each member to note down or write out one or two incidents that give meaning to the topic for them – with as much circumstantial detail and as little post hoc

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rationalisation or ‘explanation’ as possible. When finished, each member describes their experience(s) with the rest of the group being encouraged to question each speaker to bring out contradictions and increase clarity. The group then draws out themes and enters into analysis of the stories told. In this case, a wide variety of aha! experiences was described, including being let down by friends, recognition of self-delusion and successful problem-solving. The group eventually hypothesised, with scant input from me, that an aha! experience involved a breakdown of ego-boundaries. As Davies’ work shows, it is important for the development of what Bion calls alpha-function to be able to build at this stage on existing theoretical understandings or to enter into new ones – to bring out the larger significance of the themes the collective biography has raised and the hypotheses it has prompted. This technique can be used with almost any topic in psychology, not just the more obviously ‘personal’ topics like personality or depression, including the brain, sensation, perception, memory, cognition, learning and research methods. It has the advantage of giving personal meaning to the discussion of more abstract topics and, by instituting turn-taking and careful listening, it ensures each person in the class gets a more equal amount of floor-space than tends to happen in lectures or even focusgroups (where braver more animated students may be taken to speak for their more reticent peers). Furthermore it gives space for students actively to challenge and interpret others’ experiences, including those of their lecturers. Discussion How psychology is best learnt is the least-debated but most important question about the discipline’s practice. Whether you become lecturers, clinicians or theorists, personnel directors or school counsellors, the way you have learnt about psychology will shape your professional ambitions, how you access and weigh research findings, how you approach the people with whom you are paid to deal as well as your gut feel for what good psychology is. This chapter has argued that psychologists have a crucial choice about how the subject is learnt. Current approaches favour a top-down technical-rational understanding of psychological education which posits the subject-matter of the discipline as a commodity produced in the past that is to be handed down to the current generation, significance already determined. The subject’s syllabus is predominantly driven by a core of theory that is supported by non-applied, experiencepoor, ‘pure’ or ‘basic’ knowledge, this core being seen as the foundation for practice. There is undoubtedly considerable internal coherence to this

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approach: pedagogical practice and theory appearing all of a piece. In this regard, Scho¨n’s model of a technical-rational education fits current psychological curricula to a tee. The upshot, however, is that students spend the first formative few years of their acquaintance with psychology at a remove from their own experience and from the kinds of task that the vast majority of them will end up doing when they get work. It is the ‘external validity’ of the discipline’s pedagogy that raises doubts. The question the chapter poses is what would psychology have to be like if it adopted a more egalitarian approach to learning? As the chapter has progressed, answers to this question have begun to emerge. These will be developed through the remainder of the book. One is the idea of a more interactive relationship between psychologists and those they teach. This links to the theme of equal respect mooted in the opening chapter, a theme crucial to the idea of promoting more democratic psycho-social practice in psychology that underpins the approaches of pedagogues like Freire, Davies and Dewey. Then again, recognising the importance of a more open relationship between learners and teachers ties psychological practice to the here and now within which that relationship subsists, everything to do with past and future being refracted through the collective matrix of current experience. This requires psychologists to think of immediate experience as being based in something more mysterious than a simple individualised instant of physical contact between the worldas-it-now-is and a given person’s sense-organs. The following chapters explore this avenue of thought. Bion’s work is probably the most detailed elaboration of the psychical complexity that lies behind the apparent here-and-now of group interaction so far as learning from experience is concerned. His proposals question staple ideas in psychology. One is the common assumption that there is a flow from past through the present towards the future which, in Dewey’s words, tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past. Hence we need to rethink both the nature of the present in psychology (Chapter 3) and the traditional form of psychological explanation which assumes a linear causal linkage of past!present!future (Chapters 4–6) and what we mean by psychical alteration (Chapter 7). On the other hand, rethinking the immediacy of immediate experience forces us to question the idea that such experience is solely an individual possession. For example, Bion’s vision of group dynamics assumes that different people can easily fall into the same defensive orientation to the task of learning from experience (viz. Menzies, 1960). Whether or not we feel convinced by Bion’s theory, it raises a question about the existence of a more or less hidden psychical inter-connectedness

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underpinning personal experience. Even to countenance this possibility requires us to be able to describe the here-and-now in a way that could confirm his ideas. Thus we are forced to bring intersubjectivity into the centre of our thinking about the psyche, both with regard to its implications for interpersonal dealings and with regard to the historicity of personal experience: the way it opens out into the current societal and political circumstances which accompany any psychical event (Chapters 3, 4, 8). After rethinking these fundamental questions in the main body of the book, Chapter 9 returns to the question of the best way to frame psychology’s curriculum.

3

From here to synchrony

Perceived simultaneity does not conform to physical simultaneity. (Paul Fraisse, 1984, ‘Perception and Estimation of Time’, p. 4)

Consider two ways of understanding the relations between past and future. One is that past events cause present events and present events cause future events. A swung club hits a still ball, the ball’s flight being put down to the force of the blow. As Dewey noted, this perception of events puts the weight of analysis on the past because the past is the origin of what is present. It also effectively annuls the future as a topic of inquiry as being, like the present, just a dim reflection of the past: Past

Present (

Future)

Figure 1 The past determines the significance of the present (and future)

The brackets imply that the future is assumed to be a reflection of the past – as it is currently understood. Should our knowledge of the past fail to predict the future, that is merely a sign for us to rethink what we take the past to be so that the future may once again sink back into the predictability of pure continuation. Against this causal logic, one might argue more psychologically that the way we construct the past is determined by the dynamics of the present. This implies further that the meaning of the present is often only clarified later on, by the jury of posterity.1 Only future events can give the lie to, say, an accusation of criminality or a politician’s claim that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The future’s potency is built into Popper’s (1972) model of inquiry where an hypothesis is open to disproof by an experiment that later fails to bear out what it predicts. It is also 1

‘The text we call present may be deciphered only at the bottom of the page, in a footnote or postscript. Before the recurrence, the present is only a call for a footnote’ (Derrida, 1967/ 1981, p. 160).

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47

implicit in the pragmatic formula for truth as the fruitfulness of a statement’s consequences. The potency of the future is not independent of the present, however. Every action is oriented towards a particular future and tries to bring it into being. Idiom holds that ‘it’s not over til the fat lady sings’. The goal that wins a game in injury time is the fruit of hours if not years of striving. The present is a battle to create the future, to give history a particular image, to establish a chosen sequence of events. Hence we get: Future

Present

Past

Figure 2 The present determines how we understand past and future

For the sake of simplicity, we will let these two schemas represent respectively (a) the traditional past-centred framework for teaching and research in psychology (see Fig. 1) versus (b) the more self-consciously psychological meaning-based framework that this book is written to elaborate, which holds that we should start by describing the dynamics of the present if we are to make sense of life (Fig. 2). The previous chapter showed how psychology’s traditional curriculum assumes knowledge is contained in textbooks which distil previous knowledge. Teachers are cast as experts because they have already mastered the predetermined corpus of facts and techniques which their students are yet to master. Implicit in this vision of truth is a statushierarchy between teacher and learner, past and present, the idea being that what has worked in the past will work in the future because, it is assumed, the future will be like the past. A progressive curriculum, on the other hand, is primarily based in how we can deal in an informed way with a here and now that includes both students and teachers. This second framework raises a series of questions about the psyche, the questions that are dealt with one by one in this and the following chapters. The present chapter examines the psychological constitution of the ‘here and now’. Immediate experience is often treated as the only doorway to reality. I have argued this on logical grounds, though the previous chapter indicated that the present can only be a starting-point for psychological analysis, not its be-all and end-all. This is also what empiricists believe who promote research based on ‘direct observation’: seeing something with your own eyes is the best basis for knowledge. This assumes eye-witness testimony is demonstrably less fallible than other kinds of knowledge. Yet research shows that even ocular ‘proof’ is far from certain (Loftus, 2003). This is not surprising given that research on the capacities

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of the brain shows that the ‘present’ of immediate experience is, in fact, ‘an altogether ideal abstraction . . . never realized in sense’ (‘Le moment ou` je parle est de´ja` loin de moi’; see James, 1890, p. 573). This is because ‘knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing’ (ibid., p. 571). ‘Immediate experience’ turns out to be a contradiction in terms, for experience is always mediated and can never be reduced to direct contact between observer and observed. The first section of the chapter examines the evidence that highlights this contradiction and explores its implications for what the phrase ‘immediate experience’ means. In so doing, I raise questions about the nature of the matrix which mediates our experience of the here and now. Psychologists have much to learn from the study of language as a model for this matrix. Hence the second section of the chapter reviews the lessons learnt from the study of language about the character of signifying systems. The third section then asks what modifications need to be made to the analysis of language as a formal system abstracted from the world of human intercourse if we are to re-apply linguistic lessons to understanding all the forms of significance that structure everyday life. We emerge with a picture of psychical space that is structured by multiple forms of intersubjective relationship.

Processing the here and now Anyone who has observed animals, whether they be in the wild or pets at home, must be aware that it seems possible to have a life rich with awareness that is largely bound up in a bubble of immediacy. Thus it seems possible to describe a dog’s life without needing to invoke much in the way of abstract rumination or planned action. They come when called, eat when fed, cavort and leap excitedly when the word ‘walk’ is spoken or their owner prepares to go out. When one is stroked, the other vies for caresses. They rush to the front door and bark whenever they sense another dog is passing (a sense which humans cannot match). They laze in the sun, alert to unexpected movements and sounds, echo other dogs’ barking, attack cats and possums, whimper in their sleep, chase each other, play-fight, dig up small crabs, copulate, suckle their pups, sniff for other dogs’ smells, roll in dirt. Upon reflection one is forced to admit past experience, habit and expectation shape these responses, sometimes in mysterious and alien ways. But even so, one can draw a picture of a dog’s day where all actions are linked to the meaning of information immediately available to the dog’s senses in the capsule of

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the present, with no need to invoke awareness of long periods of time stretching out before and after the current instant. Or think of a new baby. Piaget argued that for the first few months of life, human beings live in a world where ‘out of sight is out of mind’. During the first two stages of what he called ‘sensori-motor intelligence’, reality is made up solely by what is immediately present to the baby’s senses. Young infants cannot dissociate the world from their own activities and hence are locked in the immediacy of what Piaget (1955, p. 321) calls ‘radical egocentrism’. The child’s universe presents neither permanent objects, nor objective space, nor time interconnecting events as such, nor causality external to the personal actions. If the child really knew himself, we should have to maintain that solipsism exists. At the very least we may designate as radical egocentrism this phenomenalism without self-perception, for the moving pictures perceived by the subject are known to him only in relation to his elementary activity. (ibid., pp. xii–xiii)

Piaget describes the child’s world as being like the slowed-down projection of a movie with the child’s sense of reality being wholly bound up with the image currently on screen, an image having no necessary connection to previous or coming frames of the film but only with what the child is currently doing. From animals and infants we may move on to discuss current ideas of adult brain-function. A variety of authors has proposed that the way in which the brain processes the present depends on a form of ‘primary consciousness’ which is the state of being mentally aware of the things that now surround us and of having mental images in the present. But it is not accompanied by any sense of being a self with a past and a future. ‘An animal with primary consciousness sees the room the way a beam of light illuminates it. Only that which is in the beam is explicitly in the remembered present; all else is darkness’ (Edelman, 1994, p. 122). Edelman traces back this idea to a distinction made by William James between primary and secondary memory. For James, ‘primary’ memory dealt with the direct intuition of time. James contrasted this intuited time with conceived time or ‘secondary’ memory, describing the relation of secondary to primary as being like that of the fictitious space pictured on a theatre’s backcloth to the live action on stage. More recent researchers have called ‘primary’ memory ‘short-term’ or ‘working’ memory as opposed to memory proper or ‘long-term’ memory (e.g. Cowan, 1997). Evidence for the existence of the short-term basis of consciousness comes from people with brain-damage. Alan Baddeley describes the case of a musician who, having suffered brain-damage through encephalitis, perpetually felt that he had just recovered consciousness. ‘If his wife left

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the room for five minutes, on her return he would greet her as if he had not seen her for months, asking how long it was that he had been unconscious. In short, he lived in a perpetual present, which he described as ‘‘like being dead – all the bloody time’’ ’ (Baddeley, 1989, p. 34).2 So far, so good. It seems that there is a phenomenological and physiological reality to the idea that the present is the platform for all our mental operations. The only thing we can absolutely depend on is this very moment: ‘the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns’ (Marcus Aurelius, c. 107, p. 34).3 Everything else is construction, castles in the air. Hence the importance of direct observation as the bedrock of empiricism in science. But the seemingly dependable ‘reality’ of immediacy is illusory. James (1890, p. 573) pointed this out at the dawn of modern psychology. When we come to the analysis of ‘the present moment’, the witness of eye and ear, something that should surely be the most ineliminable and immediate experience of all, ‘one of the most baffling experiences occurs’. The present melts before our grasp, flees before we can touch it. We can only apprehend the ‘now’ as something umbilically corded to a much wider tract of time. The present is not something we directly sense but something we construct. What we think of as our most immediate experience occurs therefore only in what James (ibid.) calls a ‘specious present’. James’ first approach to unravelling what he means by the specious present comes from experimental research. Even in the 1880s, copious studies of perception showed that we can be completely conscious only of a period no longer than twelve seconds, this being ‘the maximal extent of our immediate distinct consciousness for successive impressions [rhythmical beats]’ (ibid., p. 577). But this ‘practically cognized present’ is from the outset ‘a synthetic datum, not a simple one’ (ibid., p. 574), made up of the apparent present’s narrow ‘saddleback’ together with and opening out into an ‘immense region of conceived time, past and future, into one direction or another of which we mentally project all the events which we think of as real’ (ibid., p. 605). How we make sense of the present scene is not determined simply by what is before our eyes. There is no purity of the living present. The present scene only has sense in conjunction with its relations, however imaginary, to the ‘absent’ events, past or future, with which it is juxtaposed. The present can never be primal therefore.

2

3

Interestingly, he could still play the harpsichord and sing with great facility, suggesting that he had lost any way of storing what was in his primary short-term memory but had retained aspects of his pre-encephalitis long-term secondary memory. Cf. ‘So wherever they are and whatever they are [future and past things], it is only by being present that they are’ (St Augustine, quoted by Paul Ricoeur, 1983, p. 10).

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It is always an admixture, synthetic or (re)constituted. Given the illusory quality of the present – and hence of those mental operations of sensation or direct perception which supposedly yield up ‘sense-data’ and give us access to objective reality – the task for the psychologist, James implies, is that of unravelling the prima facie indubitability of so-called immediate experience, of showing its dynamics in terms of the finite play of possibilities that produces it as subjectively real. The disparity between the brief surfboard of the present upon which all our mental activities must balance and the wide oceans of time of which we feel we can be conscious has not become any less puzzling since James. Merlin Donald (2001, p. 25) calls this ‘the paradox of paradoxes’. It is as if the vast pyramid of human consciousness, all development, all knowledge, all meaning, were turned upside down and had to balance on the finest point: During the past fifty years, in countless laboratories around the world, human consciousness has been put under the microscope and exposed mercilessly for the poor thing it is: a transitory and fleeting phenomenon . . . Even under the best of circumstances, we cannot keep more than a few seconds of perceptual experience in short-term memory. The window of consciousness, defined in this way, is barely ten or fifteen seconds wide. Under some conditions, the width of our conscious window on the world may be no more than two seconds wide. (ibid., p. 15)

Were the present not specious, our consciousness would be reduced to a series of glow-worm sparks, like the lights of a plane at night. Because it is specious, the background of past and future events to which we connect the present lends continuity to our perception of the world. That is why our reality, even in the most immediate here and now, is inherently subjective: The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is ourselves . . . Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from point to point – first, upon all objects which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related with these. (James, 1890, pp. 925–6)

Edelman agrees, noting that the phenomenal scene is accompanied by feelings or emotions, however faint. So ‘the actual sequence of qualia is highly individual, resting on a series of occasions in one’s own personal history or immediate experience. – Given the fact that qualia are experienced directly only by single individuals’ (Edelman, 1994, p. 114).4 It is this fact that means psychology must be built on quite different principles than those that operate in physics or biology or any other 4

‘Qualia’ refers to the qualities of conscious experience: redness, seductiveness, fearfulness, etc.

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science. For as Nagel has argued, the difference between a primary consciousness that is bound to the here and now of currently available information and a present that goes beyond the information given to our sense-organs, in Bruner’s (1974) phrase, is the difference that gives human experience its subjective character. It is by now a truism that human perception is ill-posed with regard to the information available to the senses. For example, there is never sufficient information in the retinal image uniquely to determine the visual scene. This means that ‘the brain must make certain assumptions about the real world to resolve this ambiguity, and visual illusions can result when these assumptions are invalid’ (Bulthoff and Yuille, 1991, p. 286). It is this excess, these assumptions, that mean that ‘no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism . . . every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view’ (Nagel, 1974, pp. 392–3). Hence, the essence of any belief that an organism has experience, a bat for example, comes down to this, that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Here is the turning where psychology parts company with physics and physiology. In every other science, the way we seek a better understanding of a phenomenon is by moving away from our initial subjective viewpoints towards a more generally accessible and accurate view of the real nature of the thing we are studying. The less our analysis depends on a specific human way of seeing things, we think, the more objective is our description. But the reverse is true of experience. When we erase the particularity of the experiencer’s subjective point of view, we erase the essence of their experience and remove its subjective character. In removing this subjective character, the usual reductive type of scientific method jettisons the essential quality of experience, which remains where it was, untouched by our analysis. It is not hard to test the truth of Nagel’s argument for ourselves. We may note, in others – our children perhaps – more easily than ourselves, how often humans get so bound up in their own worlds that they do not hear when voices call them or find what is before their eyes (Bradley, 1993a). Or take my world. My watch goes beep-beep regularly on the hour, if I want. But on the occasions that I have availed myself of its capacity so to do I have been, in retrospect, much struck by one from that great class of the facts of Nature, the psychical: I hardly ever hear it. The watch works fine. My ears also. I sleep not. Neither do I drowse. But to the sounding of that electronic chime I am well nigh oblivious. Clearly, for much of my waking life, especially when I am at work, I am not at all where I appear to be. I live in a world that is in no wise coterminous with

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my environment, that cannot therefore be directly observed. My reality is, to coin a phrase, subjective: an exponent of some space outside and larger than myself, something that involves me in a way that others can only sense by going beyond the information available to their hands and eyes and ears. Hence the impossibility of ensuring that, even in the most standardised experiment, where room-temperature, lighting, furniture and instructions are all rigorously controlled, all subjects experience their setting as ‘the same’. Not surprisingly then, being entirely ‘in’ the present, turns out to be extremely difficult to achieve. Go to a yoga class and you will be encouraged to close your eyes and pay attention solely to what you can hear, the tick of a clock, your own breathing, distant cars, a neighbour’s snoring. This sounds simple but so difficult is it to avoid being waylaid by the siren voices of inner speech that attaining such unmediated awareness has become the goal of whole theologies of spiritual exercise. Such theologies advocate disciplines of prayer and meditation where being wholly here to the present brings revelation: ‘We need, above all, to disentangle ourselves from habits of speech and thought which set [the material and the spiritual] apart, making it impossible for us to see that this – the immediate, everyday, and present experience – is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of the universe’ (Watts, 1973, pp. 11–12). According to this view, the present moment is the only opening through which the human can enter into contact with the ultimate ground of being, the ‘that’ that mystics express in the Sanskrit formula ‘That art thou’ (tat tvam asi). Thus all spiritual striving is striving to become a child of time present: ‘Past and future veil God from our sight;/Burn up both of them with fire’ (Jalal-uddin Rumi, quoted in Huxley, 1974, pp. 215–16).5 But it is a needle’s eye through which most of us, who cannot easily let go our precious personal baggage, find it well-nigh impossible to pass.

5

A similar if less ‘pure’ form of such present-awareness is to be approached by taking hallucinogens. Thus James (1890, p. 602) describes the effects of hasheesh-intoxication as massively magnifying the specious present so that there are far fewer things in one’s here and now, with each of them taking up much more than its normal space. The backdrop of past and future fades away. A parallel yet more pronounced effect is reported by Aldous Huxley from his experiments in California with the powerful hallucinogens mescalin and LSD: ‘Drooping in green parabolas from the hedge, the ivy fronds shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance. A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue . . . The world is now seen as an infinite diversity that is yet a unity, and the beholder experiences himself as being at one with the infinite Oneness that manifests itself, totally present, at every point of space, at every instant in the flux of perpetual perishing and perpetual renewal’ (Huxley, 1980, pp. 48, 254–5; cf. Watts, 1973, pp. 132ff).

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Conceptualizing psychical space How are we to think about the pyramid of psychical space which makes sense of our glancing contacts with the here and now of what we call external reality? Some useful clues can be drawn from experimental research on the perception of time. Fraisse’s (1984, p. 4) remark that ‘perceived simultaneity does not conform to physical simultaneity’ summarises studies showing that what we perceive as being a discrete moment often integrates elements of information that are really successive. Humans are incapable of distinguishing sensory stimulations that succeed each other by less than twenty milliseconds, whether these be auditory clicks or flashes of light. Hirsh and Sherrig (1961) call this the ‘succession order threshold’. However, this threshold increases manyfold for more complex stimuli that can be integrated into meaningful events. For example, if four dots that correspond to the apices of a diamond are lighted successively, they are perceived as simultaneous if the separation between the first and last dots does not exceed 125ms (Lichtenstein, 1961). And Hylan’s (1903) classic studies show that six letters forming a word, when presented successively and in any order, were perceived as simultaneous provided that the total duration did not exceed 90ms. Fraisse (1966) reports that two identical superimposed triangles are perceived as a hexagon if projected within a time-window of 150ms. Stroud (1955) called this the ‘discrete moment’ hypothesis, postulating that the perception of time is discontinuous, being subject to the integration of sense-data into distinct moments. Here we begin to see the results of an interaction between what we take in from the world around us and how we subjectively make sense of the world. Such interaction reminds us that the distinction between primary and secondary memory is purely analytic so that, in fact, we live in a world where the way we make meaning predominates over sense-data, using such data only as a reference-point for our own subjective trajectories through psychical space. Hence the topography of psychical space becomes primarily a question about how we make meaning of the world. Sense-data that do not cohere with such meaning-making have no significant impact on our consciousness. Konen and von der Malsburg (1993) illustrate this state of affairs using a computer programmed with a system that learns to classify mirror symmetric pixel patterns from single examples. They propose a style of learning where significant relations in the input pattern are recognised and expressed by the unsupervised self-organisation of dynamic links. The power of this mechanism is due to the principle of conservation of topological structure within the system.

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How we understand the world determines how we perceive it, rather than vice versa. Helmholtz (quoted by James, 1890, p. 274) said that we notice only those sensations which are signs to us of things: ‘A man’s empirical thought depends on the things he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a large extent determined by his habits of attention. A thing may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter his experience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct?’ (ibid., pp. 274–5). When asked to memorise a chess-board with pieces randomly placed, experts are as bad at reconstructing it as amateurs. When asked to memorise a position taken from a game, however, they make far fewer mistakes, the relative positions now being meaningful to the experts but not to the amateurs (Soar, 2003, p. 28). There is a famous tale of the twelve-year-old Mozart’s going to hear Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel. The Miserere was so sacred that the Pope’s regulations forbade its transcription. Indeed, the prohibition called for excommunication for anyone who sought to copy the work. Upon arriving at their lodging after hearing the Miserere, the boy sat down and wrote it out from memory. Mozart’s father described the feat in a letter to his wife dated 14 April 1770 (Rome): You have often heard of the famous Miserere in Rome, which is so greatly prized that the performers are forbidden on pain of excommunication to take away a single part of it, copy it or to give it to anyone. But we have it already. Wolfgang has written it down and we would have sent it to Salzburg in this letter, if it were not necessary for us to be there to perform it.

Exposed to a series of meaningless clicks, human beings are unable to recall accurately more than a few seconds’ worth.6 But Mozart’s musical abilities provided him with a topological structure that allowed him with almost total accuracy to recall from one hearing a sequence of sounds lasting around five minutes. To you or I, the Miserere would have left only a fragmentary echo. Mozart’s experience was quite different. For him the music was, to use Helmholtz’s vocabulary, a precise statement in a wellknown system of signs. The model of language So what is the psychical constitution of the systems of signs which give form to our experiences? The best-understood such system is language. 6

Although, interestingly, if we perceive regular clicks as having a rhythmical pattern, we will accurately recall many more of them (James, 1890 ).

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Linguistics is hence often viewed as the pilot-science for the study of signsystems (also known as semiology). The last century saw a revolution in our understanding of language. This revolution is usually traced back to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Freud, Saussure and Durkheim were born in consecutive years (1856–8). And each seems to have recognised that the social sciences could make little progress toward understanding individuals until society was considered as a reality in itself. It is as though they had asked, ‘what makes individual experience possible? What enables us to perceive not just physical objects but objects with a meaning?’ The answers they gave rejected historical and causal explanations in favour of the study of interpersonal systems of norms which, assimilated by individuals as the culture within which they live, create the possibility of a wide variety of meaningful activities (Cf. Culler, 1974, pp. xiff). Saussure in particular saw linguistics as in the vanguard of the human sciences, particularly psychology – a discipline where questions about the meanings people make of the world are unavoidable. Thus what was essential to linguistics was also likely to be essential to other areas of psychological inquiry. He saw this essence as being collective, arguing that insofar as language was a system of signs and not a collection of physical speech acts, it was both ‘purely social and independent of the individual’ and ‘exclusively psychological’ (Saussure, 1974, p. 18). As a consequence of Saussure’s work, it has become a truism that any science concerned with significance (alpha-function) rather than mere information (beta-elements) cannot proceed without making a distinction between the system of signs per se and signs as they relate to time. He described language as ‘a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms’ (ibid., p. 80). To show this, he distinguished two axes of psychological explanation (see Fig. 3). The primary dimension was the synchronic (A – B). The secondary dimension was diachronic (C!D). Anticipating the conclusions of Stroud (1955) and Fraisse (1984), Saussure observed that, so far as the individual speaker is concerned, succession in time does not exist. The speaker confronts a single state, a state of simultaneity. That is, the words a speaker utters must be seen as elements that have meaning by virtue of the part they play in a larger synchronic system. Saussure drew a parallel with chess. At any point in a chess game, the value of each piece depends on its position in relation to all the other pieces on the board. In speaking, each linguistic term derives its value from its relations to all the other terms constituting the simultaneity into which I speak. The past as such is irrelevant. Meaning is not a function of a sign’s history but of current relationships between significant terms:

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C

A

B

D Figure 3 The two axes of linguistic analysis ‘(1) the axis of simultaneities (A – B), which stands for the relations of coexisiting things and from which the intervention of time is excluded and (2) the axis of successions (CàD), on which only one thing can be considered at a time but upon which are located all the things on the first axis together with their changes’ (Saussure, 1974, p. 80).

In a game of chess any particular position has the unique characteristic of being freed from all antecedent positions; the route used in arriving there makes absolutely no difference; one who has followed the entire course of the match has no advantage over the curious party who comes up at a critical moment to inspect the game; to describe this arrangement, it is perfectly useless to recall what had just happened ten seconds previously. All this is equally applicable to language and sharpens the radical distinction between diachrony and synchrony. Speaking operates only on a language-state, and the changes that intervene between states have no place in either state. (Saussure, 1974, p. 89)

This comment marks a watershed in Western intellectual life, overturning the empiricist tradition of thought in which everything has become what it is; everything has a genesis; everything has a cause; every change must be to some end; the world is a thing, and must have been made by some agency, out of some original stuff for some reason (Langer, 1957, pp. 3–4). Susanne Langer argues that this revolution had been foreshadowed by science’s dependence on mathematics. While not denying the importance of sense-data and empirical fact, sciences such as physics had become increasingly preoccupied with the bodiless ciphers of algebra. This was equally true in psychology, a fact to which the central place of inferential statistics in the determination of significance has long borne testament. Reliance on the mathematical formulae of statistics is a paradox for empiricists because, despite its usefulness to science, maths has never professed to say anything about the existence, reality or efficacy of observable things at all. Its concern is with the possibility of symbolising things, and of

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symbolising the relations into which they might enter with each other. Just as Saussure notes of language, mathematical concepts are symbols that have meanings solely in terms of relationships, not of substance. No one could pretend they were direct reflections of reality: witness imaginary numbers and infinite decimals for example. Yet something in reality answers to them. Given this fictional status, says Langer, the faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics insidiously led their work to become less and less observation and more and more symbolisation. Scientists continued to conduct tests. But the ‘findings’ which were accepted as true by virtue of these tests were not observed at all. ‘What is directly observable is only a sign of the ‘‘physical fact’’; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions. Not simply seeing is believing, but seeing and calculating, seeing and translating’ (ibid., p. 20). Hence, to the extent that significance is a matter of calculation rather than observation, even the most tough-minded experimental psychology is no longer built on the ‘hard evidence’ of first-hand experience. It is interpretive, not empirical, relying for its results on the symbolic universe of number. So, what kinds of relationship underpin human meaning-making? Saussure saw two. One is illustrated by the importance of serial order in the construction of a sentence. A sentence is made up by the combination of different kinds of term, terms which are both contiguous and (at least) successively present. Saussure calls this form of organisation ‘syntagmatic’. Think of the different ways the same pieces of furniture could be laid out in a bedroom: two beds, a chair, dresser, mirror. In chess: a pawn defends a bishop while black’s queen checks white’s king. In painting: each brush-stroke gains meaning from its location with respect to others. A word gains some of its significance from its relations to everything that comes before or after it in the dialogue of which it is part. Secondly, signs gain value from the place they have in a set of relations and oppositions that are ‘associative’ or ‘paradigmatic’ (Ardener, 1973). Here, meaning accrues by a process of selection from a single set of semantically related (but different) terms. If I select a king-size fourposter bed, not a single trestle, the four-poster partly gets its meaning by ‘displacing’ other candidates with which it is then implicitly contrasted (it can be shared, is bigger, grander, dearer, more like Ma’s). Likewise when I choose pate´, not salad for entre´e (it is dearer, less healthy, more French). Likewise when a pawn moves in a different way from a knight (it is less valuable). This brush-stroke gives a glance bright complicity, not frowning displeasure. I pick the salacious verb ‘peer’, not the honest word ‘look’. I say I love Jane but not Robert. This is the domain of antonyms and synonyms. It is also the domain of metaphor, and is often personally

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idiosyncratic, as related terms evoke each other by association (Lemaire, 1977). Saussure (1974, p. 123) observes that syntagmatic relations occur ‘in praesentia’ whereas paradigmatic relations occur ‘in absentia in a potential mnemonic series’. Thus the relations that determine the meaning of a synchronic language-state link both things present and things that might have been present but are absent. It is this fact that makes a simultaneity something other than pure here-ness. Without its invisible backdrop, simultaneity could be quite precisely defined as everything that is present at a particular time and place. But synchronic organisation is not like that of a snapshot. It is more that of a painting. Signification involves evaluation, which implies both rejection and appropriation. Hence simultaneity does not equate to ‘everything that is simultaneous’ (ibid., p. 90). For example, James (1903, pp. 160–1) tells the story of a visit to an asylum which held for him a complex horror associated with his own melancholy and existential ‘panic fear’. He saw an epileptic patient, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.

Meaning here is an amalgam of presence and absence. Most crucial is the fact that James felt he could at any moment become absolutely nonhuman like the young epileptic. James is depressed but not epileptic, so the meaning of the scene hangs on an absence: what is not, but could be. What is described is highly selected. Of the many different ways he might be described, the youth is called idiotic (the antithesis of a brilliant young philosopher). James corrects himself about where the patient is sitting: it is not on a bench but on a shelf. (At this stage of his life, James had no clear plan for a career and believed he would never marry, hence was also ‘on the shelf’). But this is all we hear about physical surroundings. Twice we hear the youth described as black, though with greenish skin and dressed in gray. (James was a talented painter, with a high susceptibility to colour.) The imagery James imports to help describe the scene is feminine and exotic. (James, a great advocate of manliness, notes that he was very careful at this period not to disturb his mother ‘by revelations of my own state of mind’; Townsend, 1996.) Hence, to understand the dread this scene evoked in James we need to do more than picture the

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‘syntagmatic’ juxtaposition of phenomena that were present to his senses: we need also to enter into an invisible web of sensorially absent ‘paradigmatic’ associations. Saussure’s comments on the two types of relationship that structure the synchronic by no means exhaust all the kinds of relationship which support human meaning-making. Nor were they intended to. Linguistics was for Saussure the ‘pilot science’ for a far larger enterprise that he called semiology, the study of all human sign-systems. Furthermore, he was quite aware that the organisation of language is underpinned by social organisation. This is clear in his distinction between la langue and la parole. La parole is the surface-structure of language as it is actually spoken, warts and all: ‘many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously – physical, physiological, and psychological’ (ibid., p. 9). It belongs both to the individual and society, lacking analytic unity. La langue refers to the structure of language as a formal system, abstracted from the messiness of everyday speech, being ‘a self-contained whole’ (ibid.). Just as Chomsky is interested in competence more than performance, Saussure is interested in la langue not la parole: In separating language [la langue] from speaking [la parole] we are at the same time separating: (1) what is social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental . . . Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts . . . It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create or modify it by himself [sic]; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community. Moreover, the individual must always serve an apprenticeship in order to learn the functioning of language. (ibid., p. 14)

Language-learning is quintessentially social. There is no evidence that Chinese babies are born already knowing the elements of Chinese while French babies are born knowing what is French. Everything that is specific to our mother tongue we learn through social intercourse. This just underlines the arguments of writers like Ryle (1949) and Wittgenstein (1958) that the meanings of words depend on their uses and their uses are regulated by communally maintained ‘forms of life’. Language is a public phenomenon: there is no such thing as a private language. It is maintained by relationships that exist independently of the individual. If I solely speak English, English must structure my thought and understanding from toddlerhood to death but my existence has no necessary effect on English. That speech depends on collective understanding is evident in many ways. Thus the meaning of personal pronouns like ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘you’ depends not on their direct reference to any particular party but on the

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kinds of interpersonal dealing speaker and listener(s) assume. Suppose I am arguing with my aunt and I say ‘You said ‘‘I will do it’’’, her understanding of the word ‘I’ draws on awareness of the kinds of relationship people take up when dealing with each other, in this case promising and blaming, not on any abstract system of linguistic rules. Indeed many verbs play parts in social acts from which they draw their sense: ‘I warn you’, ‘I bet’, ‘I vow’, ‘I blame X’, etc. They are ‘performative’ to use Austin’s (1962) term. Likewise words such as ‘here’ and ‘this’ depend for meaning on the circumstances in which conversation occurs, not just on linguistic rules. This is even more obviously the case in highly regulated forms of social life like religious ceremonies or speech in a court of law where statements like ‘I marry you’ or ‘I hereby sentence you’ have a binding meaning by virtue of the social rituals of which they form a prescribed part. Developmental psychologists argue that it is precisely the relational foundations of language that provide the stepping-stones which lead babies into speech. Infants must first be able to develop ‘intersubjectivity’ (share meaning) with others, independently of language, if they are to grasp the role-positions that disambiguate the words they learn (prohibitions, questions, answers, requests, etc.). The fact that intersubjectivity far outstrips linguistic competence when we start speaking was demonstrated in Bloom’s (1970; cf. Macnamara, 1972) classic diary studies which found toddlers using (grammatically) identical two-word utterances like ‘Mummy sock’ to mean quite different things in different interpersonal settings. Capacity to orientate with respect to our interlocutors implies the existence of what Habermas (1970) calls ‘dialogic universals’ underpinning language. Communicativeness always implies the existence of some other to whom our acts are directed: self is never self-sufficient and the psyche only exists in relation to some ‘other’, either fantasised or Real.7 Intersubjectivity founds subjectivity. ‘The psyche is the other in the same, the other within me in spite of me, calling me to respond’ writes Critchley (1999, p. 64). Social theorists from Mead (1934) to Bakhtin (1986) agree, pointing out that this goes for many domains of social behaviour, not just language. Conversely, the rise of ‘cultural studies’ draws on the insight that the intersubjectivity that underpins what we call immediate experience can only have its meanings by drawing on culturally convened sign-systems which can be analysed as such in their own right.

7

Lacan: ‘The unconscious is the discourse of the Other’ (Wilden, 1981, p. 106).

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Research in cultural studies has taken up Saussure’s synchronic approach, demonstrating its applicability to the many different signsystems that organise meaning, from television programmes, through film, to advertising campaigns, fashion and the behaviour and attitudes of different sub-cultures (e.g. disaffected working-class ‘lads’ at school; ‘mods’ and ‘punks’; Hebdidge, 1979; Willis, 1981). Because meanings are produced by signs’ relationships to each other, not referentially, the signs making up an advertisement for cigarettes featuring the Marlboro Man can connote a wide variety of often contradictory meanings (from freedom and pleasure to outdoorsy toughness to cancer to America). In the jargon, human meaning-making is polysemic (or over-determined). The concept of polysemy opens up a field for research in which cultural artifacts can be analysed both in terms of what they might signify in a given culture and for what they do signify to selected groups of informants. So Morley (1980) showed how different groups (black versus white, women versus men, unionists versus non-unionists) viewed given episodes of the British current affairs programme Nationwide, making different kinds of sense of ‘the same’ show. From here it is a but a step to seeing society as comprising a complex overlay of discrete cultural fields, families, work relations, peer groups, educational establishments, political ideologies and so on – each directed towards its own imaginary future, its own possibilities for pleasure and transgression, its own imagery of satisfaction and success, its own perceptions of unacceptability and otherness. One’s experience is inevitably positioned ‘paradigmatically’ in relation to these fields. Thus I live in a culture which determines that, refracted through some admixture of emulation and opposition, my family life stands in relation to insistent media messages portraying a perfect family as having an attractive, nurturant mum, achieving dad, frolicsome kids, a spacious house surrounded by well-tended garden, plenty of white goods and a gleaming car in the garage. As a result my child’s, my wife’s and my own sense of well-being will partly revolve around how far our family can fulfil that image, even if such fulfilment remains partial or only for a moment. At the same time these cultural fields are polarised by the socially ordained power-structures that organise and limit access to cultural and material resources – hence some aspects of the idealised imagery, more than one child and the new car for example, are likely to remain imaginary in my case. Conclusions Research on the way that the human organism samples the environment shows there can be no immediate contact between mind and world. We

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have no direct access to the here and now. Such contact is always mediated by the way the world signifies to the person perceiving it. Furthermore, the space which structures our attention takes after language. Analysing language shows that sign-systems present themselves to us as synchronic wholes where meaning is not referential but constituted by various types of relationship: syntagmatic, paradigmatic, social and cultural. These relational domains are collectively maintained and come to us in the main (if not in detail) ready-structured. Hence, although we sometimes feel our moment to moment experiencing is pure ‘flow’, experiencing is never just a stream but always an element in a larger pattern that defines it as ‘an experience’ of a particular kind. Thus Csikszentmihalyi (1990) observes great sporting feats to be experienced by their protagonists as ‘flow’. Yet such fluidity can only come about through the player’s immersion in a tightly regulated and highly organised social situation to which his or her powers of selective discrimination have been trained to attend at the acutest possible level. The ordered sense of self that athletes call ‘being in the zone’ only arises when intensely engaged in the unfolding of something larger, a highly structured event that has always already created the zone for the athlete to inhabit. Gordon Banks’ supreme ‘reflex’ save from Pele´ in the 1970 World Cup is a luminous example of a sportsman at the peak of his powers being deeply immersed in the moment. But this moment was only made possible by Banks’ mastery of the deep grammar of soccer. Banks’ dive arose from his capacity to coordinate his responses predictively to those of others, Pele´ in this case, a capacity I call here intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity forms the psychical pass-key to the many different cultural spaces we inhabit, spaces that overlay each other in such a fashion that even the simplest act is simultaneously soaked in many varied layers of significance. It is this fact that accounts for both the rich complexity and the uniquenesses of individual experience: potentially the same act draws its sense from multiplicitous sets of signs. A woman chooses to go out for the evening wearing a blue dress. How might her choice be inflected with significance? Is the dress fashionable (playing on the signsystem of haute couture; Craik, 1994)? Does it fit her mood (drawing on an ancient sign-system endowing colours with psychological and cultural meanings; Pastoureau, 2001)? Is she seeing someone who has previously said she looks good in blue (resonating with the system of her current, past and future emotional attachments)? Is she going to a fancy dress party dressed as a police officer (playing on all the significances surrounding uniform, including potentially both sober conservativeness and sexual fantasies surrounding authority and subordination)? Perhaps her other smart dress is a red mini and she wants to avoid a certain kind of attention

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(her anxiety being structured by a system of gender politics surrounding ‘red women’ see Chapter 5 below)? All of these semiotic systems are socially structured. All of them may be relevant to her choice, wittingly or not. All of them are as yet unfinalised and so may be modified by what happens later in the evening, the kinds of thing she does and says, how others respond. In short, the way this particular woman is situated in the semiotic economies that gives her act meanings cannot be known a priori, will be unique to her and therefore intimately tied up with her individuality or, in Nagel’s (1974) terms, what it is like to be her. It is the complexity endowed by the human capacity to live amphibiously in many realms of meaning at once that makes the realities upon which ordinary experience opens so multiplex and untidy, if sometimes iridescent. The challenge of mounting a psychology that recognises we all live with a sense of immediacy which easily overwhelms and submerges the linear logic of the Likert scale and the normal distribution is an old one, so old perhaps, that it is easily forgotten. A century ago James was complaining about the thin and superficial picture of reality offered by the ‘half-way empiricism’ of the psychology which conceives the human world ‘statically as a geometric structure’. He advocated instead a ‘thicker and more radical empiricism’ that was happy to lie ‘flat on its belly in the middle of experience’. His would be an empiricism that did not ‘carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out’, being capable of recognising that ‘the tough, vital throbbing everyday realities with which our immediate life is concerned’ were ‘a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility’ (quotes from Pandora, 1997, pp. 4, 22–3). We could of course choose to settle at this point, as phenomenologists do, and having marvelled at the grand luxuriance of the experiential jungle, set about cataloguing it, theme by theme, like Darwin catching butterflies in the Brazilian rainforest (Pollio et al., 1997; Bradley, 1998). The argument of this chapter points in a different direction however. It posits experience less as a marvel to be described than as a doorway to be stepped through into a multi-dimensional space of meaning-making, the space that defines the psyche. I have argued this space to be atemporal or synchronic. It is constituted by an intersubjectivity that has two sides: collectively coordinated and psychical. Chapter 5 concentrates on the psychical side of intersubjectivity. Chapter 4 investigates what it is about the world the psyche enters into that affords intersubjectivity, namely, the productions of coincidence. Immediate experience is like the surface that forms between two immiscible fluids, the wind and the sea for example. Wave-forms are produced through the intersection of the separate dynamics of water

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and air.8 Yet the characteristics of waves can be reduced to neither. Waves have their own laws and idiosyncrasies, which even the most expert physicist needs to master before setting sail on the high seas. Likewise my experience is created at the interface of the psychical and the social. It is as individual as the motion of a yacht on the ocean, motion which is as much a phenomenon of intersection between wind and sea as the waves are. My aim is to understand the topography of the universe that constitutes experience, to describe it, its laws of form and growth and the principles that create it. Chapter 4 approaches this problem from the submarine side: examining what collected sociality requires of the psyche. Chapter 5 approaches the same space from the air, examining how the psychical animates the collective.

8

In later chapters I refer to these surface-phenomena as constituting a ‘field’ or ‘space’.

4

What to make of coincidence

Earlier in the day, in the swaying train, Leith had written to a wartime comrade: ‘Peace forces us to invent our future selves.’ Fatuity, he thought now, and in his mind tore the letter up. There was enough introspection to go round, whole systems of inwardness. The deficiency didn’t lie there. To deny the external and unpredictable made selfpossession hardly worth the price. Like settling for a future without coincidence or luck. (Shirley Hazzard, 2003, The Great Fire, p. 10)

Imagine a girl at the beach idly playing with dry sand. Handful by handful she trickles grains between her fingers. At first the sand is flat and the grains lie close to where they fall. Each grain’s motion can be understood in terms of its individual physical properties. The pile grows and its sides get steeper. Soon she will see little sand slides. The higher the pile gets, the bigger the slides. Eventually, the slope of the sides cannot be increased, however much more sand is added. At the same time the avalanches get so large as sometimes to span all or most of the pile. At that point, the system is far out of whack. Its behaviour can no longer be understood in terms of the behaviour of individual grains. The avalanches have a dynamic of their own which can only be understood from a description of the properties of the whole heap, not from a description of single grains. The sandpile has become a complex system. This story is one way to introduce the idea that many natural phenomena transcend the traditional laws of physics (Bak, 1997, p. 2). Viewed in isolation the behaviour of sand grains is like that of billiard balls, subject to Newtonian laws. But when sand grains are massed together in a heap, they may attain what Bak calls a state of self-organised criticality, and Newton’s insights cease to apply. Bak (ibid., p. 51) imagines the girl’s sand pile sitting on a picnic table such that the amount of sand she adds is eventually balanced by the amount falling off the edges: ‘It is clear that to have this average balance between the sand added to the pile, say, in the centre, and the sand falling off the edges, there must be 66

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communication throughout the entire system.’ Once it has gone critical, the pile is the functional unit, not the single grain of sand: ‘Studying the individual grains under the microscope doesn’t give a clue as to what is going on in the whole sandpile. Nothing in the individual grain of sand suggests the emergent properties of the pile’ (ibid., p. 60). Furthermore, once critical, an historical account of the pile’s growth ‘does not provide much insight into what is going on, despite the fact that each step follows logically from the previous step’ (ibid., p. 61). The heap’s synchronic dynamics transcend its diachronic history. Complexity theory has been applied to many phenomena, including fluctuations of the stock market and the formation of traffic jams. I am using it here to draw attention to the fact that the actions of individuals may often be better explained by their participation in patterns of behaviour that belong to complex wholes, not to the individuals involved qua individuals. This is not a fact peculiar to psychology. It is fundamental to how nature works. Yet it is particularly relevant in the study of psyche. The observation that everyone who passes a particular object calls it a tree is better explained as a social fact than individualistically. But language is just the most obvious example. At bottom, society is one enormous engine for producing simultaneities. Just as Bak notes that grains of sand in a critical sandpile are in immediate communion with each other by virtue of their participation in the same system, so social theory implies a deep interconnectedness between individuals. Concepts like class, class struggle, status hierarchy, kinship system, racism, dominant gender, anomie, community, alienation, epoch, culture and Zeitgeist all imply that large-scale social processes go to constitute the ordinary experiences, actions and opportunities of large sets of individuals. Indeed, the superordinate social determination of individual lives is, to one way of thinking, the whole raison d’eˆtre for social theory. The intellectual excitement generated by Marx’s or Durkheim’s pioneering work in sociology drew on this: forms of existence and behaviour you thought to be a reflection of individual choice or individual ability, for example the cycle of poverty, are in fact socially choreographed. Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method (1895) proposed that sociologists should study a class of entities that had to be absolutely distinguished from psychological facts. He illustrated the power of this new approach in Suicide (1897), self-slaughter being a phenomenon that seems to be par excellence the product of personal choice and therefore grist for psychology not sociology. Durkheim proceeded to analyse suicide in terms of the social currents of things like anomie (lack of integration into moral and social structures). Much like Bak and complexity theorists in physics, Durkheim posited that society constituted a distinct domain of

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empirical phenomena, ‘social facts’, that, similarly to geological facts or physical facts, could only be understood by a discipline specifically dedicated to their study. Society is not simply an aggregate of individual motivations, but ‘a specific reality which has its own characteristics’. It therefore follows that social facts cannot be explained in terms of individual motivations. In Bak’s parlance we would say that a society has ‘emergent’ properties which transcend those of its individual members and are therefore subject to different laws. Or, in Durkheim’s favourite expression, it is false to suppose ‘that a whole is equal to the sum of its parts’: insofar as these parts are organised in a definite fashion, then this organisation of relationships has properties of its own which deserve study in their own right.1 Thus Durkheim drew a crucial distinction between the explanation of the distribution of suicide rates (sociology), and the aetiology of individual cases of suicide (psychology). Yet while sociology set out by declaring its independence from psychology, ultimately it cannot escape the psychical. Thus Durkheim, for all his pronouncements about social facts being ‘absolutely distinct’ from psychological facts in The Rules of Sociological Method, could not help availing himself of ad hoc psychological explanations when he tried to account for suicide. Indeed, by the end of Suicide, he was forced to establish a rapprochement between the two disciplines: ‘We see no objection to calling sociology a variety of psychology, if we carefully add that social psychology has its own laws which are not those of individual psychology’ (1897, p. 312).2 The divorce between the disciplines turns out to have been the result of a misunderstanding. The sociologist’s beˆte noire is not the psyche. It is individualism. Once Durkheim recognised the possibility of a supra-individual psyche, he was happy to call sociology a branch of psychology. And with good reason. If sociologists are meant to explain ordinary experience and behaviour as being the consequence of social forces, then the only way they have of proving the truth of what they assert is by reference to human experience and behaviour (i.e. by doing psychology). Cut its links with psychology, therefore, and social theory floats off like a lost balloon adrift on thermals of speculation. This is doubly the case for those like Marx who have liberatory ideals as well as scientific ones. For Marxists, unless theory helps to make sense of a people’s real-life experience, it will not have the ‘this-sidedness’ or

1 2

Durkheim’s quotes taken from Giddens (1971, pp. 68, 90). It is in this connection that Durkheim put forward his seminal idea that ‘collective representations are of quite another character from those of the individual’ (1897, p. 312), a suggestion that has recently had considerable impact in social psychology. See Moscovici (2000).

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popular take-up required to produce political change (Marx, 1845, p. 123). Giddens (1984) has formulated this aspect of the Marxian approach by arguing that cultural systems have a ‘duality of structure’ which simultaneously consists in those rules and regulations that constitute social structure and the knowledge-laden subjectivities of the actors who draw upon these rules and regulations, thereby reproducing such systems in their interactions. This implies that, if the subjective domain of society is collectively produced and reproduced, its psychical dynamics too will be supra-individual. The aim of this chapter is to examine the production of the supraindividual spaces that ‘people go on inside of’, spaces structured in a way that enables them to exhibit intersubjectivity (Shotter, 1984, p. 106). The chapter has begun by pointing out the centrality of co-occurrence to the behaviour of complex systems, whether social of physical. I next show how the simultaneities which the last chapter described as defining the synchronic realm of meaning-making are typically rendered invisible or irrelevant to explanation in psychology if co-occurrences are written off as being ‘just coincidences’. For instance, the juxtaposition of descriptors (black hair, greenish skin, statuesque pose, idiocy) that so horrified James in the asylum would be seen as purely accidental in statistical terms. This argues a problem in psychological approaches to co-occurrence, for coincidence is absolutely central to understanding what the world offers to the psyche’s meaning-making. I then go on to show that coincidence is equally central to how the human organism makes sense of and interacts with the world, as brain-science and the study of coordinated movement prove. Finally, I argue that the significance of our capacity to couple our actions with others’ is hugely amplified by the fact that we exist in a world that is always already societally synchronised. In conclusion I note that psychology’s reappropriation of coincidence allows us to rethink a number of phenomena that have previously been split off from psychological consideration either as being grist more fit for ethnographic investigation and sociological surmise or as sports of chance, superstition and statistical ignorance. What these phenomena reveal has been glossed in different ways by different inquirers. At the very least, they confirm a human capacity for the synchronisation of significant action in a common intersubjective space. It is the topography of this space that Chapter 5 will go on to examine. More than mere coincidence Suppose that you are bicycling down the main street in the English university town of Oxford and getting ready to turn across the traffic

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down a side-road. You are in a hurry, so you give only a quick look back before pulling away from the curb. You don’t see the cyclist behind you, crash into him, and send him sprawling into the roadway. It turns out the cyclist is fortunate. If there had been a car coming he would have been killed, but there was not. He curses you, brushes off his clothes, and rides away down the street. This example introduces the idea of fate, or what Williams (1983) calls moral luck. Williams argues that the rightness or wrongness of what we do is not wholly up to us. It depends partly on the events that happen to be associated with our actions by coincidence. The main point of his story is that, in this case, you yourself have been morally lucky. If there had been a car coming you would have been guilty of carelessly killing someone, a serious moral wrong. As it is, you have only been harmlessly negligent – nothing to be proud of, but no great sin. Williams is highlighting a basic fact of human life, that the meaning of what we do depends on the patterns of coincident events which our actions help to make. Do the same thing in different circumstances and our action’s meaning may radically change. Hence the importance to psychology of examining the different kinds of pattern of event into which our own doings may be inserted. Just as with Bak’s sandpile or with what Wittgenstein (1958) called language-games, it is the larger pattern that determines the meaning of the part, not vice versa. Yet psychologists generally assume differently. If a larger pattern of events can ‘explain’ a given coincidence, then the coincidence itself is deemed meaningless. Thus the behaviourist Skinner once published a study which claimed that important aspects of Shakespeare’s poetry were random. His focus was on alliteration. First he counted how often the sound ‘s’ occurred in the same line in Shakespeare’s sonnets. He then calculated how often this would have been expected to happen by chance, given the frequency of ‘s’s in the poems as a whole. He found that there was no statistically significant difference between the rate of co-occurrence of ‘s’s in single lines of Shakespeare’s poems and what would have been expected by chance, concluding: ‘So far as this aspect of poetry is concerned, Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat’ (Skinner, 1939, p. 191). What is the flaw in this kind of reasoning? Consider an example that is more obviously absurd. Jack is suffering from cancer and is being nursed at home by his wife Ada. If Jack has a really bad turn, he will often call out ‘Ada!’ Skinner comes along and notes that almost half of all Jack’s utterances are addressed to Ada. He does a calculation that shows, given the frequency with which Jack cries for help and the frequency with which he mentions Ada, the frequency with which Jack’s cries for help mention Ada is to be expected according to the theory of probability: Jack

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might therefore just as well be calling her name by chance. One can only reason like this if one ignores the need to explain the larger pattern of events that makes an individual event predictable. An important fact is that Jack lives with Ada and depends on her. Is this not what explains the frequency with which he calls on Ada? This fact also inflects but does not necessarily or exhaustively explain any given utterance that includes Ada’s name, utterances in which a host of other more specific desires and purposes will be expressed: humour, longing, pain, anger, fear, frustration and so on. Likewise with Shakespeare: what is the explanation for the overall pattern of sounds he uses in his poetry? Presumably he had some reflective awareness of when an alliteration was sonorous, as in ‘full fathom five thy father lies’, and when not. All this is beyond Skinner’s scope. It is as if, once a concatenation of events can be described as statistically probable, it becomes psychologically meaningless. This is an error that was pointed out to human scientists long ago in EvansPritchard’s (1937) study of Azande witchcraft. The persistence of beliefs in witchcraft and magic both in complex industrial and smaller-scale societies implies that modern science cannot address a certain type of question. Thus in the African province of Zandeland, grain is stored in large wooden structures. When the sun gets hot the Azande often seek shelter in the granary’s shade. There is nothing wonderful about that. Every now and then an old granary will collapse, its legs eaten away by termites. There is nothing strange there either. But it follows that occasionally people will be sitting in the shade of the granary when it collapses and be injured or killed as a result. The question the Azande ask is: why was that particular person hurt by a given granary’s collapse? Science can explain the building’s fall. It can explain why people like the cool. But the consequences of the way that these two causal sequences overlap is dismissed as mere coincidence. This response cuts no ice with the Azande because it begs their question. So they invoke a form of psychical efficacy, witchcraft, which they test for by oracle (e.g. interpreting the innards of a ritually poisoned chicken). They do not deny the claims of science – the action of termites, the need for shelter from the sun. They seek to find the meaning in coincidence, something beyond the reach of a science that only recognises causal explanation. Superficially, said Evans-Pritchard, witchcraft is an explanation that is cast in a causal form: the reason the man died is because someone had ‘pointed a stick’ at him. But Evans-Pritchard’s research showed that witchcraft accusations are actually produced collectively, as an expression of current interpersonal and intergroup tensions within the Zande community. Causal explanation and psychical meaning are different things. And a coincidence can have meaning

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independenthy of causation. So we can only make sense of the way the Azande find meaning in coincidences if we look beyond causal explanation. In Jung’s (1952, p. 69) words: ‘we must conclude that besides the connection between cause and effect there is another factor in nature which expresses itself in the arrangement of events and appears to us as meaning’. In turns out, then, that both common events that are deemed to be obviously predictable because part of a larger pattern of probabilities and the rare events we call coincidences are rendered psychically meaningless by a causal mind-set. Only when the kind of social stigma that is equated with psychical abnormality coincides with statistical rarity (i.e. large departure from the mean of a normal distribution) do statistical approaches which aggregate data referring to groups make sense. Thus Bradley and Morss (2002) illustrate how the idea of individual vulnerability being caused by ‘risk factors’ only works when the vulnerabilities in question are statistically rare. Such research is inherently blind to the possibility of vulnerabilities that simultaneously affect a sizeable swathe of a population. For example Parker et al. (1998) point out that the sheer scale of illicit drug-use they found among English teenagers meant that equating drug-use with abnormality and then explaining it in terms of ‘risk factors’ makes no sense of their data (see Chapter 8 for an alternative approach to risk). The difficulty psychologists have in seeing beyond causality is also found in treatment of correlational results. As students are taught from year one, statistically significant correlations between different measures do not establish causality. Textbooks describe this as a ‘problem’ (e.g. Weiten, 2001, p. 56). Suppose one finds that parents’ low sense of selfefficacy is correlated with their emphasis on discipline, maternal depression and a less supportive child-rearing environment (Mainwaring, 2003, p. 11). Unless one can do a regression analysis or further experiments to establish a causal link between these measures, the result goes nowhere. The value of correlational research is solely that of ‘pointing to possible causal factors that must be explored experimentally’ (Dunn, 1999, p. 15). Yet correlated measures always define an arrangement of concurrent events that is eminently susceptible to analysis in terms of meaning. This is where non-numerical methods come in. An interview study could bring out the same four themes Mainwaring mentions, but in a way that showed a meaningful connection between, say, a mother’s attempts to discipline her child and her depression, as well as bringing in other facts to make a pattern that would render such concurrence meaningful (e.g. father’s violence, the child’s temperament). We would then be in a position to hypothesise in detail about the kinds of psychical

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dynamic underpinning the observed pattern of events (e.g. the mother’s self-absorption, or fear of the father), something a causal mind-set deems impossible. From coincidence to meaning So far in this chapter we have seen how central co-occurrences are to the behaviour of complex social and physical systems and also how a causal mind-set can render coincidences meaningless. Let us now take a step sideways and consider the importance of coincidences from the point of view of individual functioning. For example, coincidences are crucial to the work of the animal brain. Recognising a peer or judging a distance depends on processing a bunch of simultaneously presented features. Hence, whether we are talking about the calibration of biological rhythms with the seasons, sensation, perception, memory, learning, the coordination of movements or consciousness itself, research has increasingly argued the neurobiological importance of coincidence (e.g. Guerin et al., 2000). The significance of coincidence goes beyond the domain of neurons and hormones, however, for people find a preternatural significance in coincidence. Coincidences are often treated as marking the most crucial turning-points in our lives. There is, in short, an insistent drive to find meaning in coincidences at all levels of psychological analysis, even where coincidences may seem from a mathematical point of view entirely unremarkable. An owl hunts a mouse at night. Making a kill depends on its detection of patterns of coincidence between sounds arriving at its right and left ears (Pena et al., 2001). Likewise with vision, where both the detection of patterns representing objects and the perception of depth depend on identifying a coincidence of spatial features in the visual array. Not surprisingly, therefore, the hunt is on for neuronal ‘coincidence detectors’ in the brain, not just to explain the dynamics of sensation and perception, but as giving a basis for the production of consciousness (Kojima and Blake, 1998; Kohly and Regan, 2000; Rudolph and Destexhe, 2003). On this topic, Inayoshi et al. (2002) argue that some mechanism for coincidence-detection is required to achieve the neuronal synchronisation necessitated by the emergence of consciousness, an argument that Tsien (2000) traces back to ideas about the neural foundations of memory advanced in the 1950s by Hebb. Given the brain’s deep-rooted need to detect coincidences, it is perhaps not surprising that we are liable to make much of the coincidences we notice (Guindon and Hanna, 2002). Furthermore, memory failure, selective attention, personal investment and the short-cuts we

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take in making sense of perceptions may lead us to exaggerate the significance of rare events. Even at the level of primary memory, we tend to group phenomena that are actually sequential as being simultaneous, especially when these phenomena are meaningfully related to each other (see Chapter 3). Likewise, Falk (e.g. 1982) has shown that manipulation of apparently trivial details can easily fool us into being surprised by a story about chance events, particularly if those events touch on our own lives. In 1997 Kaplan and Medin experimentally demonstrated a socalled ‘coincidence effect’3 where people can be led to assign extra weight to features that two items have in common: two items that match on one dimension but have a large difference on another dimension receive a higher similarity rating than do two items that have only modest differences on both dimensions (Tanner and Jungbluth, 2003). This coincidence effect may also spill over into social relations, coincidental similarities significantly increasing the degree to which one person will comply with another’s requests (Burger et al., 2004). The production of coincidences is far from being solely an ‘internal’ neural, perceptual or psychical process. Many of the effects that we wish to have on the world depend on us actively producing coincidences: our actions need to ‘coincide’ with their targets. Once the owl has detected the mouse, it then needs to coordinate its swoop and pounce with the movements of the mouse. This is both a matter of anticipating what the mouse will do and of the owl guiding its own movements in terms of what it anticipates the mouse will do. The problems of guiding movement and also of linking one’s own movement with the movements of others have received intense attention over the past few years. While the solutions currently being proposed to these problems can only be provisional as yet, the problems themselves are central to how we conceive our ceaseless production of the coordinated psychical structures that constitute the here-and-now worlds in which we live. One of their best-known solutions is tau theory (Lee, 1976, 1998). The coordination of guided movement like touching a keyboard or hammering a nail requires prospective control. One might think that guidance of such movements would require the brain to follow a general formula equating at least three variables: distance from target, direction of target and speed of movement towards target. Drawing on the work of J. J. Gibson (e.g. 1958), tau theory proposes that things are much simpler than this. Only one variable is required, the tau variable, defined as the time-to-closure of a ‘gap’ at the current gap-closure-rate. Tau defines a

3

Pronounced ‘coincide-ence’.

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movement in terms of both space and time. Since first being proposed, a tau-function has been found to describe many forms of movement and perception, including braking a car, echolocation in bats, gannets diving into the sea, pigeons alighting and aerial docking in hummingbirds. But many movements require the synchronisation of more than one ‘tau’ in the regulation of their kinematics. For example, if I am playing a chord on the piano, my hands need to hit the keys at the same time. If I am playing catch, both hands need to close around the ball simultaneously. Lee (1998) proposes that the coupling of two (or more) taus which results in synchronised movement can be achieved by maintaining a fixed proportionality between the two taus of the gaps in question, that is, by a single (though higher-order) ‘tau’ (T) equation. This can be formulated as follows: Ta ¼ KTb K is a constant. Hence as gap a tends towards zero, gap b will also tend towards zero. Regardless of the different starting-points of the movements and rates of closure, gaps a and b will close to zero at exactly the same time.

Social synchronisation While the theory of tau-coupling has been shown to deal effectively with the synchronisation of a complex of movements made by one person, it applies with equal simplicity to the synchronisation of movements made by different people. Thus it potentially explains such things as the effectiveness of evasive movements made by boxers, ‘high fives’, making a good pass in soccer, hitting a softball (Millslagle, 2000), the temporal structure in ‘blind’ jazz improvisation (Scho¨gler, 2003) and the coordination of infant–adult communication (Stern et al., 1975; Trevarthen, 2000; see next chapter). On a larger scale, tau-coupling can explain the synchronisation of large groups of people on a dance floor, at a pop concert or in a football stadium where a hundred thousand people may go up as one when they see their hero blaze a shot at goal. Tau-coupling is just one elegant way of highlighting the need to explain how different people can come to occupy the same intersubjective space. As Lee and his colleagues’ work shows, this is basic to the animal psyche, not just to humans, the theory of taucoupling showing that the creation of intersubjective space need not involve the use of symbols. However, the use of symbols undoubtedly adds profoundly to the psychical commons of intersubjectivity. This deepening is made possible by the forms of societal synchronisation discussed at the start of this chapter.

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The interdependence of societal synchronisation and symbolic sharing could be illustrated in many ways. One is the human thirst for building supra-individual forms of synchronic organisation witnessed by startling new technologies of communication. In physics, action at a distance has until recently been deemed impossible.4 So far as the human psyche is concerned, however, there seems to be an insatiable need to overcome this impossibility. From clocks to the press and the postal service, from telephones, radio and television to the world-wide web, the human species has collectively found more and more sophisticated solutions to the problem of synchronising action at a distance. And not just action: thought and emotion too. The deaths of President Kennedy or Princess Diana are just two celebrated examples. Within hours of her underground crash in Paris, billions were grieving over the death of a princess they had never met. At any moment of day or night millions are exchanging messages by internet as easily with people on the far side of the world as they can with their boss upstairs. Millions more are playing games or courting people in a domain where geographical distance is immaterial. The basis for all this semantic synchronisation is what is also at the base of language, something Habermas (1970) calls the ‘dialogue-constitutive’ features of the collective psyche. I will discuss these in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 7. Here I will give just one illustration of how all talk depends on a sharing of meaning. The example comes from an article where Walkerdine (1982, p. 133) is combating Donaldson’s (1978) argument that toddlers have quite sophisticated but context-specific reasoning skills that naturally and universally ‘develop in the mind’. Instead Walkerdine wants to show that even three-year-olds can enter into ‘discourse formats’ which mean they ‘take up various positions within discourse’. These positions do not betoken universal mental capacities, but are culturally specific and carry societally endorsed power-relations within them. She reports a brief observation to back up her case. Two preschool girls are at play in a Wendy House: NANCY:

4

Hello Diane. Let’s watch telly.

Aspect et al.’s (1982) experiments show that scientists can produce ‘twin’ electrons in such a manner that interventions to the spin of one particle simultaneously affect the spin of its twin, even when the two twins are widely separated. (All electrons spin.) This finding apparently violates Einstein’s rule that nothing travels faster than light: twin electrons are apparently able to communicate with one another instantly across any amount of intervening space. Hence the impossibility of action at a distance is now being questioned, some favouring the contrary hypothesis that the quantum universe exhibits ‘non-locality’ (Davies, 1986).

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I’m just tidying baby’s bed up. You sit on that wooden chair. Here y’are . . . Alright I’m working I can’t watch telly. NANCY: Mum can I watch telly Mum? DIANE:

Walkerdine notes that Nancy’s invitation is to a game in which both girls will play themselves in a power-symmetrical TV-watching game (NB there is no TV in the Wendy House). Diane rejects this by refusing to position herself in the ‘television-watching’ discourse. Instead she ‘inserts herself in a position of control, . . . by asserting herself in the role of the ‘‘mother’’ and by implication therefore addressing Nancy as a child’ (Walkerdine, 1982, pp. 133–4). Nancy picks this up immediately, accepts it and starts referring to Diane as ‘Mum’. In short, she switches discourse formats and subject positions, and in the process subordinates herself to Diane. This interchange illustrates how power is mediated by ‘discourse formats’, even in the Wendy House. However, the interchange Walkerdine reports would not be possible unless each girl were able immediately to recognise the paradigmatic structure of the other’s proposal, what Walkerdine calls the other’s opening metaphor, and use it to fashion an appropriate response. It is the fact that Diane picks up so easily ‘where Nancy is coming from’ (discursively), and Nancy’s reciprocal reading of Diane’s opening metaphor, that illustrates how even power-relations are effected by intersubjectivity. Indeed, without a concept of intersubjectivity, we would have no way to account for this interaction taking place at all. Likewise with Princess Diana: as soon as the pretty queen of hearts is slain, millions mourn. Whether their reaction be facilitated by fairytales or is just an inevitable consequence of the destruction of a figure into whom so many could project their romantic ideals, virtual mourners can immediately enter into the subject-position of the bereaved. Correspondingly, anyone who saw the princess as an uppity attention-seeker is likely, just as quickly, to enter into a different response: ‘sad . . . but she had it coming’, ‘serve her right’. Whatever example we take, intesubjectivity is always the product of a confluence between two kinds of provision: society’s reproduction of shared communicative forms (‘discourse formats’) and the psychical capacity to share in meaning.

Conclusions Discussions of coincidence are often said to raise issues that go beyond the pale of science: coincidence is mere happenstance and hence beneath the dignity of any psychology that aspires to seek casual laws. Part of my argument in this and the previous chapter has been that psychologists’ conception of explanation as always being then ! now in form typically

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excludes the domain of the synchronic and hence the fundamental dynamics of human meaning-making. Once synchrony is seen as being at the crux of the psyche, ‘synchronicity’ – which we might define as a surprising coincidence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection – becomes less paradoxical (Bradley, 2001). While many psychologists have argued that the surprisingness of coincidences is partly specious, human meaning-making inherently relies on the detection and production of coincidences at every level, from the neural to the societal. Thus, human beings actively produce meaningful coincidences both within their own actions, face-to-face with others and more remotely, that is, societally and technologically. In this regard, what Jung (1952, p. 25) defines as synchronicity, namely ‘the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state’, is an inevitable consequence of the fact that meaning-making depends on the perception of simultaneities. Equally to the point, it is easy to overlook the statistical fact that events per person occur with such high frequency that, in the presence of enormous numbers of people, ‘any outrageous thing is likely to happen’ (Diaconis and Mosteller, 1989, p. 859). An event that is so rare that it is ‘one in a million’ will be plentiful in a population of three hundred million. Furthermore, we are often not particularly strict with our criteria of what counts as a coincidence. Lack of familiarity with mathematics may make it a surprise that there are even odds that two people have the same birthday if there are as few as twenty-three people present. If we loosen our criterion to ‘within a day’, we only need a group of fourteen people for there to be even odds that two have ‘the same’ birthday. The number drops to seven if we count birthdays within a week of each other as a coincidence (Abramson and Moser, 1970). It is partly for these reasons that ‘we are swimming in an ocean of coincidences’ (Diaconis and Mosteller, 1989, p. 860). Nevertheless, everyone is intrigued by ‘inexplicable’ coincidences. Indeed much of scientific discovery depends on finding the causes for perplexing coincidences. The kinds of coincidence which elicit most attention tend to be highly personal. These often draw on the kind of commonality Walkerdine called metaphorical and Saussure associative (or paradigmatic; Ardener, 1971a). Thus the author Bataille (1929) appended a brief autobiographical essay to his obscene Story of the Eye called ‘Coincidences’ where he describes a variety of seemingly accidental discoveries that gave unexpected scientific corroboration to what he had thought was a purely fictional equation in his story between balls, eggs and eyes. He commented ‘I ventured to explain such extraordinary

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relations by assuming a profound region of my mind, where certain images coincide’ (ibid., p. 71). One day when I was writing this book in the UK I became intrigued about the idea of non-locality in quantum physics, thinking it might yield a usable analogue in the discussion of synchronicity (viz. Aspect’s observation that if one of two twinned but widely separated photons is experimentally manipulated, its twin is also liable to be immediately affected). I went to bed wondering who I might discuss the idea with. The next morning I woke up to find an email from my wife in Australia attached to a recent article by Shotter (2003, p. 25) that mentioned non-locality, the first such reference I had ever seen by a psychologist. Beyond these fairly common autobiographical kinds of coincidence are the more dramatic events that we dub clairvoyance and telepathy. In the early decades of modern psychology, there was a great deal of interest in these matters under the heading of ‘psychical research’ (Turner, 1974). Jung is just one example. Evidence for telepathy or thought-transfer was widely collected by psychoanalysts, including Freud (1921, 1922a) and some of his younger female colleagues (see Devereux, 1953). James also spent a great deal of time sceptically attending se´ances and corresponding about psychics. The Boston medium Mrs Piper impressed him most. James (1909b) argues that her inexplicable knowledge about the secret love-affair and financial dealings of the dead psychologist Hodgson was neither trivial nor fraudulent. While James was unable to accept the ‘strong’ hypothesis that Hodgson had a spiritual existence after death, James proposed that Mrs Piper must have picked up these details through an unconscious process of thought-transference, either directly, during Hodgson’s life, or via James after Hodgson’s death. Summing up his work as a psychical researcher, James wrote: Out of my experience [with psychical research] one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest . . . The trees . . . commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.

More recent studies of telepathy have embraced the experimental method and have produced statistically significant results (e.g. Bem and Honorton, 1994). One example is by Schlitz and LaBerge (1997). They sat experimental subjects in pairs in two different rooms, well separated physically but connected by closed-circuit television. A camera was permanently ‘on’ in one room, pointing at the first subject. In the other room, the second subject viewed a monitor which was randomly switched ‘on’ and ‘off’. When it was ‘on’ s/he saw the first subject through the camera.

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When it was off s/he saw a blank screen. Subsequent analysis showed that the periods for which the monitor was switched ‘on’ coincided with significantly higher levels of physiological arousal in the subjects who were being observed than when the monitor was ‘off’, even though subjects could not tell when they were being observed. This suggests that we have a capacity for knowing when we are being looked at in the absence of any obvious sensory clues. While there is now a number of journals exclusively devoted to research in what is today called ‘parapsychology’, each full of articles which apparently use just the same experimental methodology as mainstream journals, psychologists are largely extremely sceptical of their results, however significant the results appear to be statistically. This is presumably because scientists cannot conceive of any kind of synchronicity as having a scientific explanation, for reasons I illustrated earlier in this chapter. One of my aims in this chapter has been to show that we do not need to venture into parapsychology to find evidence for a conception that has human beings cohabiting in a domain of meaningful coincidence. Any synchronic account of human action implies human beings dwell in a vast ocean of coincidences, many of which we orchestrate ourselves – individually, interpersonally or en masse – and upon which our perception of meaning is based. Thus James’ conclusion that the human psyche, however individualised it may appear on the surface, entails a deep subterranean commingling, need not await parapsychological proof. It rather requires a change of mind-set, only appearing plausible if we adopt the altered orientation to psychological understanding that this and the previous chapter have tried to outline. Once adopted, this new orientation leads us to ask new kinds of empirical question about the domain of intersubjectivity, questions that form the focus of the next chapter.

5

The topography of intersubjective space

(a) behaviour has to be derived from a totality of coexisting facts, (b) these coexisting facts have the character of a ‘dynamic field’ in so far as the state of any part of this field depends on every other part of the field. The proposition (a) includes the statement that we have to deal in psychology, too, with a manifold, the interrelations of which cannot be represented without the concept of space. (Kurt Lewin, 1943, ‘Defining the ‘‘Field at a Given Time’’’, p. 45)

What is the first thing we should assume in the science of the mind? What is our basic unit of analysis? Is it the solitary individual: ‘I think therefore I am’? Or is it ‘we’ : people in relation? Is the mind primarily solitary? Or does mental life first and foremost emerge from togetherness? Should the brain be conceived as a self-sufficient, self-generating organ? Or do brains only function to their fullest when in conjunction with other brains? Are humans essentially social? Or is my mind an island, entire unto itself? We first arrived at the need to conceive the psyche as existing in intersubjective space by drawing conclusions from the way in which the world has significance for us above and beyond the information available to our senses. These conclusions were reinforced by the implications of social theory and complexity theory for the supra-individual orderliness of experience. Consideration of the central role of coincidence both in meaning-making and in coordinating our actions further underlined the extent to which human beings live in a synchronised universe of significance. This chapter examines what can be gleaned from psychological research that bears on the topography of intersubjective space. Systematic observations of various kinds help in this regard.1 In particular, experiments yield strong evidence for the existence of intersubjectivity, as manifested in so-called ‘artifacts’. We will also find that some of the

1

Research on the higher apes has produced a swag of evidence relevant to their possession of a capacity to understand each other’s mental states, evidence which I do not review here (but see Whiten, 1991).

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fiercest battles about the existence and nature of intersubjectivity have been fought in the study of infancy. Before we get to empirical data, I will discuss the background that makes plausible the thesis that the psyche is organised supra-individually. Freud (1922b, p. 92) believed that ‘the psychology of the group is the oldest human psychology’. Few agree. The dominant psychological view – up to the 1970s at least – has been that humans start out as monads, separate from each other. Alone is what we most essentially are. Over time we may acquire social skills. But we start out as solitary individuals, with a basic set of behaviours and mental capacities, though no special orientation to others. The kind of learning theory that is illustrated by the behaviour of captive pigeons and rats does not say much about human social or communicative abilities. If this was its aim, there would be scant reason in modelling human behaviour on rats and pigeons – creatures not noted for their psycho-cultural achievements. It is likewise with the kind of cognitive science that models the mind on computers. Computers do not appear to have a very rich social life. But then nor do people if tested one by one in bleak white rooms by strangers, as is the case in so many psychological experiments. Even Piaget largely left out social life. According to him, children were incapable of seeing others as people until they had acquired the object concept some time in their second year of life. Hence in 1971, Schaffer confidently concluded from hundreds of studies: ‘At birth the infant is essentially an asocial being’ (p. 1). Schaffer’s confidence was part and parcel of a method that studied humans alone. Behaviourists, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists, even social psychologists (Gergen, 1994), habitually study humans isolated in laboratory settings, desert-islanded from their familiar surroundings, their friends and family. Psychologists conceive their own mental activity as equally solitary and independent from cultural, interpersonal and historical conditions. So we seldom hear a psychologist say that the idea of asocial mind simply makes no sense in terms of ordinary experience. One may be physically alone, trekking across mountains, camping under the stars, at a desk in a library, awake in deserted house, imprisoned in a cage, but is one’s mind ever empty of others, their voices, their influence, one’s anxieties and feelings about them? Even asleep, one dreams of others. Surely everything one is and feels and thinks and does is steeped in sociality? How social are we? One way to generate a sense of discovery in psychology is to base theory on suppositions that run directly counter to common sense. Human

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beings pride themselves on their distinctions from animals? Then let us treat them like rats. People imagine their most valued possession is their soul? Then let us model them on machines. Ordinarily we like to think of ourselves as having moral choice over how we treat each other? Then let us set out with the assumption that our relations with others are largely shaped by prehistoric instincts. The shibboleth of humanity is our capacity for speech? Then let us ignore speech in psychology and study pigeons and monkeys. Educationalists act as if their policies may improve the intelligence of children? Well in fact children’s intelligence is largely innate. Viewed from a theatrical perspective, this is a well-known technique called estrangement, perfected by Bertolt Brecht. Its aim is to make the familiar seem strange and thus to force students of the human to step back and rethink their basic assumptions. Typically counter-intuitive theories have a limited innings in psychology. While they may have a considerable succe`s de scandale, common sense eventually reasserts itself (Joynson, 1974). Psychology has done its best to imagine what it is to be human without being social. But there are signs that this too is an act of estrangement that is close to breakdown. So what does ordinary observation tell about how social we are? How far from reality is the desert-islanded imagery of laboratory-based psychology?2 The novelist Samuel Beckett did his best to create characters who had no social life: an old man dying alone in a room in Malone Dies, a solitary tramp rambling across France in Molloy. But Malone and Molloy are still comforted, intrigued, tormented and haunted by ‘voices’. The demented crone whose splintered monologue comprises Beckett’s masterly Not I addresses a spectral Auditor. At the other extreme, the literary portraits of the human that are most widely revered in the West, drawn by the likes of Proust, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Kafka, Woolf and Tolstoy, resonate with us because they give some sense to the complex web of social relationship which sustains our day-to-day being. The opening scene of War and Peace is justly famous in this regard. Two faded courtiers idly converse as they await guests for a tea party. Their discussion rehearses the latest political gossip of the St Petersburg elite in July 1805. This in itself is social enough, showing how involved we get in the lives of others, many of whom we only know by hearsay. But in just two or three pages, Tolstoy is also able to shade in the ways that the surface phenomena of 2

Re ‘desert-islanded’ see Riley (1978). If people think ‘social psychology’ is a counterexample here, please refer to the ‘minimal groups’ paradigm in social psychology, where ‘group processes’ are studied in the laboratory by asking individuals to sit in an anonymous cubicle on their own but imagine that they are interacting with say, someone of their own race when making decisions about someone from a different race (Hogg and Abrams, 1988). This point is pursued on a large scale in Gergen (1994).

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civil society can be agitated by the premonitory tremors of historic events, both personal and international, how forms of politeness are affected by relative status, how self-presentation is charged with significance by nuances of fashion, how people speak for the benefit of invisible audiences, how the inextricable problems of family life blight personal success, how people try to hide their motives in order to get their way, and how some may have the wit to divine what lies behind such disguises, deriving motive from the erasure of passion. And then of course, there is the language in which all this is conveyed, reminding us that the language within which we all constantly operate is a public common, a medium of exquisite subtlety that continuously registers and refracts sociality in myriad ways – something that, like buildings, streets, schools, businesses and all the other social regimes that we inhabit, pre-exists and outlives us, structuring our lives in the meantime, creating with our help what we have to be concerned about and the options we have to deal with those concerns. Imagine that we are to the social world as fish are to the sea: sociality is the medium within which we live and breathe and have our being. Imagine that, like fish in the sea, our identity with the social world is so intimate and familiar that we have no idea of its profundity. How might we begin to understand this level of dependency? How might we get fish to guess how much they rely on the sea? Take them out of it and they will jack-knife desperately for a while and then die. Take a person out of social life, lock them up in solitary confinement for example or maroon them on an island, and they do not fare much better. Sustained solitary confinement is inhuman according to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. We may have heard a few heroic tales of individuals who have survived an enforced or self-imposed exile from social life, but, if so, the survivors generally survive by obstinately ‘keeping their end up’ as social beings: maintaining their sense of involvement in social life by counting bricks, keeping records, talking out loud, telling themselves stories, rehearsing their memories, making plans, tapping on pipes, writing letters, befriending wolves. Such survival is seen as a great achievement; witness the respect formerly accorded hermits. We may also have heard of those who did not survive emotionally, like Genie, the abused child found in the US in the 1970s who had been brought up from infancy in total isolation with catastrophic implications for her well-being (Rymer, 1994).3 3

The psychologists who ‘investigated’ Genie were later sued by her mother for the damaging invasiveness of their assessments, that is, for ‘test misuse’ not in the ‘best interests’ of the child.

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A less catastrophic way of reminding ourselves how social we are is by the description of our habitual semi-conscious obeisance to osmotically acquired social mores. Great comedians can earn a living harping on this theme. According to Erving Goffman, what we do is never ‘natural’, ‘authentic’ or a product of individual choice, but always has a relation to the expectations of others. We are always absorbed in a social role and hence carrying on a dialogue with a generalised ‘other’. Goffman’s (1974) earliest research was done on the Shetland Islands. He describes the behaviour of waiters in the local hotel as they move from kitchen to dining area, likening the kitchen to ‘backstage’ in a theatre and the dining area as a space for public performance. In the kitchen waiters show no particular self-consciousness about their posture or facial expression, are loud, messy and show scant respect for hygiene, language is lewd and customers may be rudely described. Step through the doorway that divides the workers from the customers, and the waiters’ gait becomes more precious, their eye brighter, their demeanour businesslike, their manner courteous, their speech deferential, their knowledge on display if required and their attitude to the dishes they serve fastidious in the extreme. Goffman warns against imagining that what happens in the kitchen is true and what happens out front in the dining area is false. Both forms of behaviour are governed by custom and expectation, albeit different ones. Follow the waiters home and their attitude to food and customers will be transformed yet again. As we select clothes from our wardrobe and titivate our appearance at the start of each day, we do so with others’ reactions very much in mind. On holiday, we relax. But how we relax is very much in character. I park my car, but half way to the shops I remember the widget I have come to replace is still lying in the boot. I clap a hand to my head, spin on my heel and retrace my steps. That is, in Goffman’s terms, my actions ‘explain’ to any onlooker why I am suddenly doing an about face ‘for no good reason’. Once again, I am performing, playing – to a largely oblivious audience. Not just voices in the head but social facilitation, imitation and identification affect us willy-nilly. Are you having that chocolate dessert? If so, I want one. You yawn and suddenly I am yawning. Laughter and complaint are equally infectious. Crowds enthuse, applaud, panic or riot almost as one. A nation at war backs its leader in a manner unthinkable were the nation at peace. Whole sub-cultures exult in their great songs and films and sporting triumphs. Millions mourn the passing of a princess they have never met. I overtake a jeep which responds by accelerating to sit on my tail and I am suddenly glued into a scary mind-game of ‘if you do that then I’ll do this’. More prosaically, sports teams, juries, staff-meetings, the classroom, traffic jams on the freeway, chance meetings plunge us into

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inescapable and highly reticulated socio-emotional scenarios. In the committee room, the opinions of some are ignored or dismissed as troublesome whilst others, often as a consequence of networking, status, political savvy or personal charm hold sway in a fashion apt to preoccupy the newcomer until they too make their place among the committee’s traditions. Case-studies of group dynamics can dramatically capture what is conventionally called the irrationality of the processes involved (see Chapter 2 and below). Most immediate and constant as evidence for our psycho-social connectedness is perhaps our capacity for the communication of both information and emotion. That en masse we can get wrought up by the news, engrossed in ‘reality’ TV, novels, plays and music, follow fashions, can work as teams, follow instructions and play games together that depend on shared rules, converse with strangers often at great distances, can form lifelong friendships and antipathies and build on love, all this seems to underline the multiple dimensions of our capacity for interleaving our mental operations, that is, for ‘intersubjectivity’. Indeed, the idea of a deep interconnectedness between human beings is part of what promotes the raw appeal and longlasting popularity of evolutionary explanations of human behaviour, particularly sexual behaviour. For more than two centuries a favourite psychological theory has been that humans have instinctive emotions, even a ‘language instinct’, and that men and women are ‘naked apes’ who adopt biologically ingrained attitudes to each other in quenching desires for each other.4 Such arguments simultaneously simplify and naturalise human interconnectedness, exploiting the plausibility of the idea that we are bound together by deep-rooted (i.e. genetic, pre-historic) forms of interdependence. At the same time, evolutionary explanation in psychology is typically circular and speculative because evidence-poor (unlike anatomy, behaviour leaves no fossils), as well as being purblind to both the demonstrable variability between individuals and the creative role of psyche and society when discussing the behaviours it tries to explain (Gard and Bradley, 2000). For example Eagly and Woods (1999) show that differences in reported mating choices in thirty-seven different cultures were more comprehensively explained by the differing degrees of social inequality between men and women than by speculative species-based proclivities for maximising gene-transfer as hypothesised by Buss et al.(1998). So where may we look for a more satisfactory theory of intersubjectivity than that provided

4

For example, the Scottish ‘Common Sense’ philosophers proposed a language instinct in the second half of the eighteenth century (e.g. Thomas Reid).

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by evolutionary speculation? One good candidate, as Eagly and Woods’ work demonstrates, is social theory. Theorising the psychical side of society As argued in the previous chapter, social theory requires some concept like intersubjectivity to describe how social institutions sustain and reproduce ordinary experience. To the extent that it does not make sense of our ordinary experience, it is deficient. Thus Talcott Parsons (e.g. 1960) tried to account for individual experience by proposing that social actors are like empty bottles which ‘internalise’ as motives the shared values upon which social cohesion depends. In this view the psyche becomes simply a hidden microcosm, a dim mirror-image of the brightly lit social macrocosm. Parsons’ view was refuted by writers like Dennis Wrong (1961) who showed it produced an implausibly ‘over-socialised’ conception of human experience that could not account for the empirical existence of alienation, frustration, individuality, social resistance or the problem of social disorder. Likewise, in the hands of Althusser (1971, 1977), Marxian theory dissolved individuals into an analysis of ‘the capitalist mode of production’. Althusser’s theory asserts that the ways in which we think about ourselves as being individuals is generated automatically as part of the ruling ideology that sustains the capitalist mode of production. The very category of experience is abolished as individualistic, and therefore a product of bourgeois ideology. Thus experience can no longer fuel political resistance or radical social change, things that could only happen as a result of structural contradictions existing at a much higher level of theoretical analysis.5 Structural contradictions determine everyday life. Meanwhile, experience also gets banished from intellectual work: science is a theoretical practice that has no subject.6 Against Althusser, Gramsci argued that ordinary experience is central to theory because working-class experience is the source of the problems theory sets out to study and resolve. For anyone hoping to explain 5

6

‘Althusser, and most others associated with either structuralism or functionalism, proceed from the same ‘‘latent anthropology’’, the same ulterior assumption about ‘‘Man’’ – that all men and women (except themselves) are bloody silly’ [E.P. Thompson, 1978]. Social life, or human history, Thompson says, should be understood as ‘‘unmastered human practice’’. That is to say, human beings act purposively and knowledgeably but without being able either to foresee or to control the consequences of what they do. To understand how this happens we need a term which, Thompson says, goes missing in Althusser: it is what Thompson simply calls ‘‘human experience’’. Experience is the connection between ‘‘structure’’ and ‘‘process’’, the real material of social or historical analysis.’ (Giddens 1984 pp. 217–218). Henriques et al., 1984, p. 95.

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oppression or foster radical social change, it is counter-productive to cast ordinary experience as merely a mechanical side-effect of large-scale social processes. The goal of Althusser’s theory was to understand the contradictions of capitalist society but not how these were lived out. Hence Althusser’s work does not help us grasp the contradictions that we find ourselves living out in our everyday lives. It gives us no sense of how we can change, or how this can be an integral part of a political practice. Rather we are left with an external and mechanical conception of the ‘capitalist mode of production’. It is only within a different ‘mode of production’ that people could have any hopes of living differently. (Seidler, 1980, p. 114)

Recent work in sociology seeks to remove social theory’s vulnerability to the critique that it neglects ordinary experience. Thus Giddens (1991, 1992) has followed up his work on structuration by trying to bring light to problems that would formerly have been thought to fall squarely within the psychological domain: sex, emotionality, self-identity, reflexivity. ‘Modern societies have a covert emotional history, yet to be fully drawn into the open’ is his justification (Giddens, 1992, p. 2). But his analysis of such seemingly individual, private phenomena is inevitably second-hand, illustrated by data and generalisations selected from popular journalism as much as psychological research, the methodology and theoretical underpinning of which cannot become critical for him because his theory is not psychological and does not address or define how personal experience is psychically constituted. For example he writes that, ‘for women struggling to break free from pre-existing gender roles, the question ‘‘Who am I?’’ . . . comes to the surface with particular intensity. Much the same is true for homosexuals, male and female ’ (ibid., p. 30). But no evidence is offered for this statement and there is no discussion of what adequate evidence for it would be. Any empirical account of intersubjectivity will inevitably engage with social theory. Rather than being atomistic, with each individual having their own unique, self-generated experience that unfolds in a linear fashion from a point-source in the past, such data will test how well social life makes sense when experience is conceived as socially synchronised by the structures of which social theory treats. The imagery that both social theory and a synchronic psychology share is that we live in a complex multi-dimensional space of concurrent inter-relations rather than moving down a collocation of independent biographical lines. Social theory also implies that the synchronic is not a flat domain. It is a dynamic force-field with a contorted topography, full of rips and rift valleys, deserts and overlays, the mass characteristics of which social theorists try to capture

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in their discussions of class, race, gender, alienation, risk, culture, Zeitgeist and the like. This field ties in everybody, including the theorist. That intersubjectivity is a concept which links theoretical analyses of social structure with psychological analyses of the lifeworld is a claim central to Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Habermas draws out Husserl’s idea of the lifeworld as a domain of shared cultural ‘maps’ and assumptions comprising the substance and structure of our thought and action. Conscious subjectivities belong irreducibly to ‘shared interworlds of meaning’ (Crossley, 1996, p. 14). Habermas’ concept of lifeworld implies ‘radical intersubjectivity’ between members of a society or social group, an unavoidable communicative openness to others’ influence. In earlier societies, lifeworld and social system were one, says Habermas. But the evolution of complex societies has resulted in a divorce between system and human relationships such that everyday communicative action has little contact with, for example, the economic, political and technological dynamics of the global military-industrial complex. Much of Habermas’ interest is in conceptualising the links between lifeworld and social system, and he is adamant that in advanced societies, intersubjectivity is unavoidably where analysis starts from. The concept of intersubjectivity revolutionises social theory, he says, because it allows us to conceptualise the ‘between’ as essential, so that language, action and rationality are no longer seen as emanating from individual consciousness but from a communicative interworld that transcends individuality.7 As such, the idea of intersubjectivity transcends the dichotomy between subject and object, a dichotomy which had previously disabled attempts to integrate sociological with psychological theories of human action (Bradley and Trevarthen, 1978; Giddens, 1984; Henriques et al., 1984). Habermas imagines the lifeworld in pre-modern times to have been rather like Gauguin’s paintings of the idyllic Tahiti ‘before’ Westerners arrived: a place where ‘pure communicative action’ could take place. Habermas’ romanticism has been challenged by feminists like Nancy Fraser (1989) who argue that the idea of a pure and symmetrical lifeworld is a romantic delusion, communication being full of intrinsic inequalities, having always been regulated through micro-economies of status, wealth and power. On this basis, some theorists argue that intersubjectivity is not a good place to start when thinking about the social construction of subjectivity: intersubjectivity, they say, is less important than the 7

The ‘between’ is bound to be of critical interest wherever the law of ‘the excluded middle’ occurs; see Buber (1970). It has also been theorised as ‘transitional space’ by Winnicott (1974) and ‘liminality’ by Turner (1982). See also Macmurray (1961).

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dynamics of power. There has thus been a move by some towards using Michel Foucault’s work to rethink the psycho-social sphere, ‘power’ being one of Foucault’s chief concepts. So we find writers like Henriques et al. (1984), Rose (1999) and Walkerdine (1982) proposing that the key question for psychologists influenced by the claims of social theory is to understand how human subjects come to be positioned in the discursive practices that distribute power through society. This argument makes subjectivity and hence intersubjectivity effects of discursive power, implying that power could exist without intersubjectivity. However, analyses in terms of both power and intersubjectivity are required to make sense of human communication. While it may be true to say that intersubjective relations are always relations of power, power relations are also always intersubjective. They do not depend on physical causation but on mutually recognised meanings, and therefore on the capacity to maintain supra-individual relations (see Walkerdine, 1982, and her example from the Wendy House discussed in the previous chapter): ‘let us not deceive ourselves; if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others. The term ‘‘power’’ designates a relationship between partners’ (Foucault, quoted in Crossley, 1996, p. 91). And the capacity for relationship implies intersubjectivity. The generativeness of the ‘between’ We have seen how both lay observations of everyday life and social theories press psychologists to conceptualise a domain of intersubjectivity. Yet there are real difficulties in such a conceptualisation. First we must give up the abstract individualism that makes the individual the origin of everything psychical. As Gergen (1994, pp. 255ff) observes, ‘so long as the problem of interpersonal meaning is derived from a belief in the individual as the center of meaning, it will remain resistant to solution, [because] we possess access neither to the private domain itself nor to the rules by which it is translated into the public domain’. Echoing Foucault, Gergen (ibid., p. 263) proposes that we start our analysis, not with individual consciousness, but ‘at the level of the human relationship as it generates both language and understanding’. This is only the beginning of a solution, however. For the word relationship is usually treated as involving just two entities: a self and an other. See for example Stern’s (1977) book called The First Relationship: Infant and Mother. But, as Gergen implies, if we are to start from relationship, then relationship must be something more than the sum of self and other. Relationship must be an entity in its own right, an entity

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that has the same kind of analytic independence from its participants as does language from those who speak. It is not enough to say the psyche is made up of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. ‘If there is a need for this double statement, there is also a need for a triple one: the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute’ (Winnicott, 1974, p. 3). Winnicott describes this area of overlap between inner and outer as a ‘potential space’, the space that is most central to our sense of being alive. ‘Where are we when we are doing what in fact we do a great deal of our time, namely, enjoying ourselves?’, he asks (Winnicott, 1970). His answer is that we are neither inside the world of dream and fantasy nor outside in the world of ‘shared’ reality. We are ‘in the paradoxical third place that partakes of both these places at once’ (Davis and Wallbridge, 1987, p. 160). So while the boundary between the ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’ may be of fundamental importance in theorising individuation or integration, the potential space, what Winnicott (1970) called ‘the place where we live’, transcends this boundary. Potential space is where symbols have meaning, where behaviour gains the name of action. In adults it is the space that makes religion and art something more than a mere concatenation of events (Turner, 1982). It is where experience builds upon experience, where the world is continually ‘woven into the texture of the imagination’, so that new patterns of imagining emerge and people are able to be creative (Davis and Wallbridge, 1987, p. 167). Irreducible to subject and object, it is the space in which we play a game of hide-and-seek, tell a vivid anecdote, sketch a telling caricature. Psychically, it is the dimension in which a great piece of theatre will hold hundreds spellbound. It is where the deciding moment of a sporting contest captivates a coliseum. It is also the space in which a team has its spirit and a group its atmosphere. It has both creative and destructive aspects, as I will go on to illustrate later in this chapter. But first I want to examine one way psychologists talk about the generativeness of potential space. Psychical structures created by discourse Shotter (e.g. 1984) has pioneered the idea that ‘joint action’ is the matrix out of which all forms of individuality differentiate. He provokes us to adopt a new attitude towards our surroundings ‘where, by ‘‘new attitude’’, I mean a new way of relating or orienting ourselves toward the others and othernesses around us. Rather than distancing ourselves from them, with the aim of mastering and possessing them, our new task is that of being participants in a larger whole’ (Shotter, 2003, p. 14). One

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illustration of the way the concept of joint action can change the way psychologists work is in the social psychology of language. Symbolic interactionists such as G.H. Mead and Goffman generally describe speech in terms of the roles that people have taken up prior to speaking. In the 1980s, role theory was heavily criticised for adopting a theatrical imagery that implied the actor was distinct from and pre-existed the roles she or he played. Apparently roles could be picked up and dropped at will, but by whom? The rational ‘homunculus’ who made these choices constituted a human essence that remained untheorised in discussions of role (Henriques et al., 1984; Selby 1985). So instead of roles, psychologists began to talk about the social forms of life which ordain meaning a` la Wittgenstein also constituting the ‘subject positions’ that speakers and hearers adopt when they converse. Rather than individuals being pre-equipped with a set of abstract grammatical and pragmatic rules that produce utterances when we meet, individual subjectivities were said to precipitate out of discourse: The constitutive force of each discursive practice lies in its provision of subject positions. A subject position incorporates both a conceptual repertoire and a location for persons within the structure of rights for those that use that repertoire. Once having taken up a particular position as one’s own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of that position and in terms of the particular images, metaphors, story lines and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned. At least a possibility of notional choice is inevitably involved because there are many and contradictory discursive practices that each person could engage in. Among the products of discursive practices are the very persons who engage in them. (Davies and Harre´, 1990, p. 46; my emphasis)

This quote prompts two questions. (1) Positioning may be a surface phenomenon which does not necessarily imply any depth of shared understanding. Thus, in Walkerdine’s example (see Chapter 4), Diane and Nancy adopt the complementary roles of mother and child. This does not require the two girls to understand what the other feels about the role she is playing, though such understanding may grow over time. (2) We inevitably live out a contradictory, multiplicitous ‘conglomerate of positions, subject-positions, provisional and not necessarily indefeasible, in which a person is momentarily called by the discourses and the world he/ she inhabits’ (Smith, 1988, p. xxxv). This has led some theorists (Henriques et al., 1984; Selby, 1985) to dub the kind of subjectivity produced by intersubjectivity ‘multi-subjectivity’. It is unclear how this multiplicity is played out over time: in series or in parallel? Davies and Harre´ (1990, p. 48) propose both that speakers’ selves ‘are located in

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conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants’, and that speakers are free to choose which one from many available positions they adopt. This implies serial subjectivity, individual control and coherence. Alternatively, we get a messier picture implying individual variability, unwitting multiplicity and coercion: ‘several conversations can be proceeding simultaneously’ (ibid., p. 50) ‘social structures are coercive’ (ibid., p. 52); people ‘may conform because they do not define themselves as having choice, but feel angry or oppressed’ (ibid., p. 50); ‘everyone does not know each of our personal understandings and sets of emotions’ connected with occupancy of a given subject-position (e.g. mother, ibid., p. 52). A claim that we occupy subject positions one by one, experiencing subjective ‘coherence’ in each, clearly stands at odds with the idea that our speech expresses a compromise between a simultaneity of contradictory subject-positions, some or all of which are forced on us by social structures. In the latter case, one’s position may appear coherent, but only at the cost of repressing other positions that contradict it (Johnson, 1987): speech precipitates from divers intersubjective currents, intersubjective tensions being what gives the paradigmatic depth, associative allusiveness and performative idiosyncrasy to what one says. Empirically, this is the domain of parapraxes, illogicality and slips of pen and tongue. For example, Selby’s detailed interview-study of women PhD students at Cambridge University describes unresolved clashes between one of her informant’s (‘Margaret’) competing identities as: *

* *

*

a brilliant young researcher with ambitions to have an academic career; an underconfident first-year PhD student; a woman who prizes her femininity but works in a department that does not take women seriously; and a fiance´e looking forward to her imminent traditional marriage.

Selby’s interviews show that contradictions between these identities are intimately bound up with the details of what Margaret says. Asked whether she enjoys doing her PhD, Margaret replies: I enjoy the freedom very much and like being able to work when I feel like . . . I just enjoy, I enjoy the freedom of, yes, going out to shop if I want to, and come back in and so on, uh, I enjoy that very much, um, I enjoy being an aca – in an academic atmosphere with whom I can very much discuss what I am doing . . . I just, I just enjoy sort of being in the department, going to seminars and things like that. (Selby, 1985, p. 242; emphasis added)

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The italicised words in this speech encapsulate Margaret’s ambivalences. She starts by defining herself as an academic and then interrupts herself with a distancing gloss: she is not so much an academic as someone who enjoys being in academic environs, going to seminars and so on but also going out shopping. Meanwhile, the colleagues with whom she can discuss her work are dissolved into an ‘atmosphere’. Later in the interview, when asked to say how she sees herself in five years’ time, Margaret imagines herself as being happily married and, having completed her PhD, had a child and done a non-academic job for a while, being back working as an academic. ‘Simple arithmetic shows how impossible such a plan would be’ (Selby, 1985, p. 242). It transpired that Margaret got married to her fiance´ (an unemployed student), got pregnant, shelved her PhD and moved away from Cambridge when hubby began training as an accountant. Single words may carry multiple significances, inflected by a variety of conflicting subject-positions. Margaret’s word ‘atmosphere’ was inflected by her perception that she worked in what she had elsewhere called a ‘friendly atmosphere’ but one that trivialised women (Selby, 1985, p. 245). I occasionally find I have spelt the word psychology ‘spychology’, a word that I associate with two opposite trains of thought about the discipline, one positive (linking psychology to King Lear’s beautiful elegiac speech to Cordelia ‘we two will . . . take upon’s the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies’), one negative (linking psychology to the voyeurism of the main protagonist’s psychiatrist father in Michael Powell’s scary Psycho-like film Peeping Tom, 1960). Even apparently straightforward utterances may in time reveal themselves the product of contradictory positionings. Imagine a situation where four quarrelsome children are dividing up their parents’ estate. One beneficiary repeatedly finds he is in competition with an elder sibling over the things he wants and adopts the strategy of saying ‘You have it.’ In this way he owns his attachment to a number of different subject-positions: avoiding the logistical challenge of transporting many precious items over long distances; Christian ideals of it being holier to give than receive; quasiBuddhist ideas about the spiritual merit of shedding clutter; and a longstanding fear of family conflict. At the same time, he is denying his love of beauty, his desire to have mementoes from his childhood and his feelings of being repeatedly taken advantage of. In due course, all this comes out in a scene where the self-depriver blames everyone else for his sense of depletion. Here we see again the way in which it is perfectly possible to carry on a conversation replete with coherent subject-positionings where complementarity is only skin-deep. Given time, insight and a more ideal speech-situation, the cauldron of intersubjective conflict condensed in

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‘You have it’ might have been unravelled to disclose a more symmetrical ‘paradigmatic’ spirit of understanding between the siblings. Intersubjectivity in the collective There is now a growing body of research which shows how groups and organisations behave in ways that show their members’ actions are collectively infected by shared orientations to anxiety. Bion’s (1961) book Experiences in Groups is a classic in this regard, defining three kinds of ‘basic assumption’ that can derail task-oriented work in groups of all sizes: dependency, flight-fight and pairing (see Chapter 2). In Victims of Groupthink Janis (1972) analysed transcripts of President Kennedy’s deliberations with his cabinet prior to the failed US invasion of Cuba in 1961 known as ‘The Bay of Pigs’. This was a fiasco of giant proportions which Janis shows to have been based on a large set of irrational assumptions that, prior to the invasion, appeared eminently reasonable to the top men in the White House. In a path-breaking study, Menzies (1960) traced the dysfunctional organisational consequences of the shared social defence system which nurses used to avoid the experience of anxiety, guilt, doubt and uncertainty in a London hospital. Following in this tradition, Sinclair and Haines (1993; see also Rashke, 1983) have documented how large organisations habitually mobilise conscious and unconscious defences to distance themselves from the traumatic anxieties of thinking through deaths in their workplace: defences such as denial, scapegoating, minimisation, camouflage, victimisation, displacement of responsibility and legalistic obfuscation. The nations who made up the USA’s hasty ‘coalition of the willing’ to invade Iraq in 2003 are currently being forced to reflect on how their elite executive bodies could feel so sure that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction despite what we now learn was an absence of convincing evidence. One of the most thorough studies of ‘groupthink’ to have been published in recent years is Klaus Theweleit’s (1987, 1989) investigation of what gave psychical coherence to the German Freikorps in the years between the ends of the first and second world wars. The Freikorps were tightly knit militia initially made up of demobilised ‘shock troops’ disillusioned by the Treaty of Versailles. Each group was largely autonomous, roaming freely across Germany and exacting violent ‘revenges’ on Polish communists and nationalists, the Russian Red Army and the German working class. In the 1930s they became the core of Hitler’s fascist SA and, in several cases, went on to become key figures in the Third Reich. The Freikorps’ stock in trade was murder: throwing a grenade at a working-class couple making love on the grass, penetrating a female

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adversary with bullet or bayonet, gunning down a square full of protesting Spartacists, blowing off the heads of Jews and workers, knifing any comrade who they thought guilty of betrayal. All this is well known to history. But Theweleit was interested in the fantasy-life of the Freikorps. Analysing over 250 novels and memoirs plus postcards, films, posters, propaganda, pornography, paintings, training manuals, diaries and letters penned or read by Freikorpsmen, he uncovered a fascinating uniformity of imagery and idealism in how these proto-Nazis felt and thought about what they did. This imagery did not emerge ab initio in 1918 but has a long pre-history (and post-history) in European culture. In the first place, these men positioned themselves quite precisely with regard to women. They distinguished three kinds. The first were servile but negligible. Wives and fiance´es dropped from the minds of men absorbed into their bands, remaining largely unnamed and unnoted in Freikorpsmen’s memoirs, letters and diaries. Secondly there were the ‘white’ women embodied in the ‘white nurses’ who cared for men on the battlefront. These were chaste, upper-class German women, remote, indistinct, nameless, symbolic, disembodied: ‘in fantasy, the good woman, the white nurse, has no body at all; there is only a smooth white plain. In fantasy, she is already dead’ (Ehrenreich’s Preface to Theweleit, 1987, p. xiv). The Red woman is a more obstinate case. She is vividly, aggressively sexual; in fantasy, always a whore. Her mouth is enormous, spewing out insults at our Freikorpsmen as they attempt to ride, straight-backed, through the city streets. The Red woman is, in addition, armed, or is so at least in fantasy: she might have a gun under her skirt, or she might lead the Freikorpsman through a dark passageway to an ambush. In other words, there is no distinguishing her sexuality from the mortal danger she presents. So when the Freikorpsman kills her (as he will do over and over in these pages), he killed her in what appears to him to be selfdefense. In the brief moment of penetration – with bullet or knife – he comes close, thrillingly close, to her and the horror of dissolution. But once it is over, he will still be intact, erect (and we must imagine, quite clean and dry), and she will be – a ‘bloody mass’. With her absent, the world becomes ‘safe’ and male again. (ibid.)

This bud of imagery has myriad flowerings in Theweleit’s book. The battle, simultaneously actual and imaginary, between the stiff upright body of the passionless soldierly male and the blood-red contagious flood of the emotional feminised mass, inflects everything from the ruthless training of the SA to the ecstatic ‘cleansing’ wrought by pogroms. We read diaries of how a weak and isolated trainee is routinely and publicly

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humiliated until a ritual thrashing makes him acceptable as an unquestioning and unfeeling cog in the mechanical whole of his Korps. We hear how the German Volk are to be distinguished from the ‘red tide’ of the masses, whether it be the working-class or communist hordes, its redness the redness of ‘female flesh wallowing in its blood; a reeking mass, severed from the man. Red is a mouth dripping blood – now beaten’ (Theweleit, 1989, p. 283). We hear how the rigidity of the soldierly will resists all feminine blandishments, all sexual pleasure, the only permissible pleasure being the cathartic anarchy of killing. Image after image is shown to have its place in this rightist order of poiesis: the permissible eye, open in men, closed in women; the preferred bodily targets for torture and beatings; oppositions between water and dirt, high and low; the fear of slime and viscosity; how the leader’s voice casts its spell on the led. This repertoire of fantasy is played out again and again in diary, novel and letter. What Theweleit adds to our conception of the ‘in-between’ is not just an appreciation of the dark side of intersubjectivity but of potential space as a natural target for those who wish to have wide influence and, correspondingly, as an area of vulnerability in those who strive to be part of something larger than themselves. Charismatic religious figures, the publicists of football teams and pop stars know this as well as Goebbels. The hysteria surrounding a popular sensation such as Michael Jackson, the Beatles or Princess Diana is not solely evident in stadiums filled and streets lined. It is equally a common resonance in the fantasy life of the followers whether its symptoms be glossed as an identification with John Lennon’s lyrics (and some of us find that, almost without knowing how, we know them all) or outrage at Diana’s death. The dimension of potency in the topography of intersubjective space is hence not so much a matter of primitive unconscious forces that we trace back to the Neanderthal or the primitive paranoias of tiny babies as something both real and imaginary that feeds on and into current orders of social regimentation. The intersubjective infant Despite the importance of cultural dynamics in understanding the topography of intersubjective space, one of the key sites for empirically mapping this space has been the study of infancy. Vygotsky (1978), writing in communist Russia, had a very different approach to the study of social development than the monadic one summarised by Schaffer at the start of this chapter. Rather than assuming the infant is born egocentric and must work out how to connect up with other people by means of

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developing generalised asocial cognitive schemas (e.g. of object permanence), Vygotsky proposed that babies individuated out from a primary togetherness. Just as Marx had proposed that the human essence resides in the ensemble of social relations, Vygotsky proposed that babies are intrinsically connected to those around them so that: Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57)

Over the past seventy years, the take-up of Vygotsky’s ideas has been hesitant and patchy. The idea of intersubjectivity only began to make consistent headway in psychological research during the early 1970s. This was a move fed by pathbreaking observational research on young babies at Harvard’s Centre for Cognitive Studies during the late 1960s where a number of researchers became interested in the relational basis for early communication: Mary Bateson, Berry Brazelton, Jerome Bruner, Martin Richards, Daniel Stern and Colwyn Trevarthen. Their findings gelled with critiques of Chomskyan linguistics that stressed that early speech has meaning but very little syntax (Bloom, 1970). So if the semantics of early communication and not just its syntax were to be explained, there was a need for a theory of communicative rather than just grammatical competence (e.g. Campbell and Wales, 1970). Joanna Ryan (1974) plaited these two strands of work together in an important review article which argued that the developmental basis for communicative development should be conceptualised as a form of ‘intersubjectivity’. This word was taken up with alacrity by authors like Bruner (1975) and Trevarthen (1974) and has now, with its synonyms (e.g. attunement, empathy, meshing), found a permanent place in psychological vocabulary. The long-standing individualism of psychological discourse has, however, continued to exert a considerable pull on psychologists’ use of the term intersubjectivity. When Ryan imported it, her source was an article by Habermas (1970) that criticised Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition as too ‘monologic’. Chomsky explained the ‘asymmetry’ between knowledge and experience in language acquisition by arguing that some universal linguistic rules were innate and thus predetermined the form of all potential natural languages. These universals were founded in the species-specific equipment of the solitary human organism. But Habermas argued that there are fields of experience essential to language-use which are intersubjectively determined. Some aspects of

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grammar imply a pre-existing intersubjectivity (e.g. the use of pronouns; modal verbs; deixis). Language also draws on culturally created forms of knowledge (e.g. colour words, kinship words). Hence, while Habermas did not deny some monologic skills were necessary for language, he argued that there were also dialogic and cultural preconditions for language-use. Communicative competence depends on intersubjectivity. This was the message Ryan relayed. But as soon as developmental psychologists got their hands on it, they began to debate whether intersubjectivity was innate or acquired and if it were innate, what its origin might be in ‘the (lone) brain’.8 Hence, they swiftly returned debate to the monologic framework which Habermas had tried to escape. Nonetheless, the implication of Ryan’s review is that, if the fundamental stratum of the human psyche is not solitary but interpersonal, if human beings are ‘radically intersubjective’ – unavoidably relational and engaged with others – then we should be able to produce evidence for this by observing the ways babies involve themselves with those around them. The idea that we are all always already social beings and do not have to be ‘socialised’ over a period of months or even years before we ‘join the human race’ is central to the work of John Bowlby. Bowlby’s (1958, 1969) attachment theory proposes that we are born pre-adapted to social life by our possession of reflex-like ‘attachment behaviours’ which have proximity to the mother or her surrogate as their goal. These behaviours include crying, smiling, clinging, looking and following. Ainsworth (1974, 1978) added that these behaviours would only be successful in their aim if they were complemented by certain maternal behaviours, summed up by her as maternal responsiveness, availability, appropriateness and sensitivity. Implicit in this theory is the idea that babies are ‘monotropic’, that is, their social life is initially oriented to just one ‘other’, namely, the mother (under normal circumstances). Later relationships with father, caregivers, siblings and peers are modelled on the infant–mother prototype (the so-called ‘maternal precursor hypothesis’; Denham et al., 1991). Hence the bulk of attachment research has assumed that the infant–mother relationship is what best predicts the well-being of the developing child, an assumption that is basic to using ‘the strange situation’ as the best test of infant mental health (Ainsworth et al., 1978).

8

The habitual individualism in psychology ensures that when we talk about brains, we nearly always imagine that the correct unit for analysis is the isolated individual brain. It may be that we should always be studying brains together – where supra-individual patterns of brain-action might be observed (Perry, 1997; Selby and Bradley, 2003).

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Attachment behaviour, according to the theory, comes to form part of a homeostatic control-system which has proximity to mother as its set goal. But the research conducted at the Harvard Centre for Cognitive Studies showed that the infant’s repertoire of social expression was far richer and more subtle than was conveyed by the seven reflex-like ‘attachment behaviours’ which Bowlby said equipped babies for the social world. Behaviours like looking, smiling and crying are themselves far from stereotyped and therefore not reflex-like (Pratt, 1977; Bradley, 1989; Fogel et al., 2000). In fact babies are born with a palette of facial actions just as complex and nuanced as adults’. Ekman and Friesen (1978) have shown that human facial expressions are complex movements based on forty-two basic muscle movements. All forty-two of these movements can be observed in the newborn’s face, and they are combined in non-random ways from the first few days of life (Oster, 1978). What is the purpose of all this expressive capacity? Presumably it is not meant simply to ‘promote proximity’ between mother and baby. A more probing theory was needed to explain what babies did with others once proximity had been gained. Trevarthen’s (1974) idea was that what went on in intimate interaction between mother and baby was ordained by a baby’s innate intersubjectivity. The reason that babies have such highly expressive faces and that they are drawn to look at the human face above all other stimuli is that they are pre-adapted to conversation. Trevarthen’s films of two-month-olds sitting in a specially designed chair interacting with their mothers showed a pattern of turn-taking similar to that found in adult conversations. Bouts of expressiveness alternated between mother and baby, the baby’s expressiveness being described by Trevarthen as ‘prespeech’ in that the face was relatively neutral but the baby’s mouth, lips and tongue were very active as if the baby was trying to articulate words. At the same time as the baby was making such ‘pre-speech’ movements, her or his arms and hands were also active in gesticulation. For writers like Trevarthen (1979) and Bruner (1975), this kind of behaviour only made sense if babies were pre-programmed for dialogue. Further evidence for the existence of an innate faculty of intersubjectivity was that from the first minutes of life onwards, babies are observed to imitate simple facial gestures like tongue-protrusion and mouth-opening (Meltzoff and Moore, 1983). They were also said to act entirely differently to people than to things (Brazelton et al., 1974, p. 63): ‘we felt that we could look at any segment of the infant’s body and detect whether he was watching an object or interacting with his mother’. ‘The child in his responses from a few weeks of age distinguishes the category of people from the category of things’ (Bruner, 1975, p. 2). Finally, experiments which interrupted infant–mother proto-conversations by asking the

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mother at a pre-arranged signal to go ‘blank-faced’ for one or two minutes showed that babies responded with dismay to this form of perturbation, implying that even two-month-olds expected adults to talk properly to them if they were in a position to do so (Tronick et al., 1978; Murray and Trevarthen, 1985; Tronick, 1989). The idea that babies were interested in and able to enter into genuine communication with adults from so early in life – and that they therefore had and could read communicative intentions of the type hypothesised by Ryan (1974) – proved at once intriguing and controversial. Some felt the evidence upon which this claim was based was not particularly strong. Jacobson (1979) challenged evidence for neonatal imitation by showing that you could get babies to protrude their tongues ‘in imitation’ by simply poking a pencil at them. She suggested that Meltzoff and Moore had not discovered an innate capacity for imitation but a pre-programmed form of ‘fixed action pattern’ akin to the herring gull chick who will peck just as eagerly at a red spot on a ruler as at the red spot on its parent’s beak. There were doubts too about Brazelton et al.’s (1974) non-numerical study that was the basis for Bruner’s claim for an innate ‘categorical’ differentiation between people and things. Subsequent study showed that, when carefully observed, there was no single social behaviour that could be used to detect whether a baby was looking at its mother or at a thing: babies may reach for, smile, make pre-speech movements, gesticulate or frown at both kinds of stimulus (Bradley, 1985). The root of this controversy was a methodological worry. One aspect of Habermas’ analysis that had not been applied to the study of pre-verbal communication was that any speech act implies an ideal of transparent communication, that is, what Habermas calls an ‘ideal speech-situation’. This ideal is based on absolute symmetry between speakers’ status and capacities to express themselves and criticise others. But, as argued earlier in this chapter, because of the depredations of power-imbalances and ideology even into our most intimate relationships, such symmetry never exists – power-imbalances spice all relationships. As a result, intersubjectivity and therefore communication is always more or less ‘distorted’. Certainly, the laboratory conditions adopted to study the emergence and development of intersubjectivity have usually been highly asymmetrical. In this sense, Habermas’ comments about distorted communication have an important resonance for baby-research. Typically, a baby is studied face-to-face with one adult, the adult being under instructions (both implicitly and explicitly) from the experimenter to behave in a certain way (e.g. ‘chat as you do at home, but without touching baby’s feet’; or ‘after two minutes, please freeze your face and stare blankly at your daughter’s forehead’; Bullowa, 1979; Tronick,

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1989). Such work is generally intended to capture favourable instances of interaction through providing a relaxed intimate and uninterrupted engagement (Trevarthen, 1977). Nevertheless, in our efforts to get everything just right (lab setting, lighting, camera angles, infant’s mood, mother’s understanding of her role), it is hard to avoid creating ‘demand characteristics’ which can significantly intensify the mother’s attempts to interest her baby (Bradley, et al., in prep.; Suls and Rosnow, 1988). More generally, asymmetries between the players have implications for conceptualising and understanding both infant and mother. The baby is far smaller and weaker than her partner, far less skilled as a communicator and, of course, has no understanding of or way to challenge the experimenter’s instructions. Not surprisingly therefore, as the results from the dyadic en face paradigm began to appear, sceptics argued that the intricate interplay of ‘turn-taking’ and ‘proto-conversation’ that were being claimed to show intersubjectivity in the baby showed nothing of the kind. Rather they were results of a semi-conscious form of puppetry or ‘scaffolding’ by the mother who, under pressure to perform, and far more powerful as a communicator, fitted her expressions as best she could around her baby’s endogenous behavioural cadences. By acting as if what the baby did was genuinely communicative she gave observers the false impression that she was exchanging meanings with her charge, like a ventriloquist with a dummy (cf. Shotter and Gregory, 1976; Newson, 1979; Kaye, 1984). A route out of these difficulties is to study the far more symmetrical speech-situation obtaining between same-age infants without adults present, where claims of ventriloquism and scaffolding will not wash (Vandell and Wilson, 1987; Mueller, 1991). The idea of studying infants in groups has theoretical appeal too. Recent criticism of attachment theory has questioned the validity of monotropism, the idea that babies attach themselves to only one other. Nash (1995) has disputed that the savannah-dwelling ur-baby focused solely on the mother when under attack, rather than fleeing to any available adult within the hominid clan. Empirically Nash joins with those who criticise how attachment theory overlooks the father’s role and the proven capacity of young infants for multiple relationships (Schaffer and Emerson, 1964; Howes, 1999; Braungert-Rieker et al., 2001). The crux of her argument focuses on peers. Thus peer-relationships have been shown to insulate infants from some of the worst effects of neglect both in monkeys (Harlow and Harlow,1965) and in humans (e.g. Freud and Dann, 1951). But the psychological basis for the infant’s capacity to form such relationships cannot be of the same kind as the basis for infant–adult attachments. This is because the baby’s attachment behaviours only have survival-value

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insofar as they are complemented by maternal behaviours on the part of the baby’s caregiver: there is no point in the baby being programmed to cry if no one is programmed to respond! Hence the need to theorise attachment non-individualistically, as a ‘shared dyadic program’ (Bowlby, 1982, p. 378). But this shared programme cannot underpin babies’ dealings with their peers, because babies cannot practicably mother one another. Hence Nash (1986, 1995, pp. 314, 306) proposes ‘the possibility that infants are biologically prepared for relationships in general, rather than for attachments specifically . . . However, no alternative framework has been proposed for viewing infants’ developing relationships with such significant others as fathers, nonparent caregivers, or siblings’. One way of testing this proposal is to observe whether and how babies communicate with each other when in infant-only groups. Put babies together in infant-only groups and one immediately finds evidence that the human psyche is supra-dyadic. By the second six months of life, infants develop quite specific communicative meanings amongst themselves and can relate to more than one other at a time. Even in trios, babies quickly become involved with each other in distinctive ways, ways that parallel adult group-communication. During the course of these conversations, they generate unique new meanings. For example Selby and I have documented how an initial gesture (toe-holding), betokening one tense nine-month-old’s (Prue) attempts to contain her distress at her mother’s departure from the recording-studio, was soon playfully taken up by another baby (Esther) in the trio and reflected back to Prue (Selby and Bradley, 2003). Esther’s first two imitations drew no response from Prue, but after about a minute, Prue showed her first sign of social responsiveness, copying Esther’s toe-holding while looking back at Esther. From that point forth Prue’s main social interest was in Esther and the main currency of their exchanges was toe-holding. The exchange between Prue and Esther had added a new meaning to Prue’s expression. What was at first a way of containing anxiety about being left by her mother – shown by the fact that Prue was much more willing to engage with the world around her when she was grasping her foot than when she was not (i.e. toe-holding provided her with what Bowlby, 1982, called a ‘secure base’) – became in addition a form of playful communication with a preferred other. Thus a new specific meaning was generated through Prue’s conversation with Esther. More complex patterns of communication can also emerge in all-infant groups. Thus three babies in one trio who had never met each other before – two nine-month-olds Joe and Ann and a six-month-old Mona – developed a complex set of exchanges over twelve minutes. The first few minutes were spent largely in quiet, intense gazing at each other. Then

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Plate 1 Ann plays footsie with Joe while Mona looks on

the older babies became more demonstrative while Mona continued intently to watch. Ann began to direct a variety of overtures at Joe, gazing, pointing, making a series of repetitive high-pitched staccato vocalisations and later stretching out to touch his foot with her own, thus starting a prolonged game of footsie. Joe largely went along with these, watching and smiling at Ann, responding vocally though briefly to her vocalisations and keeping in contact with her foot (see Plate 1). But from time to time he would also make big smiling overtures to Mona, as if he was aware of wanting to ‘bring her in’ to the interaction. Mona marginally preferred looking at Joe than at Ann, whereas Ann spent much more time looking at Joe than at Mona. Mona tried to join in the game of footsie, stretching her legs out, eventually making contact with Ann’s foot. Ann responded to this contact by taking her foot out of Mona’s reach and tucking it under her chair, meanwhile maintaining contact with Joe’s foot with her other foot. The interaction approached a crisis as Ann became increasingly insistent on capturing Joe’s attention and correspondingly deflated by Joe’s even-handed attention to Mona. After eleven minutes Ann turned to make what looked like an aggressive, ‘rude’ gesture to Mona, then turned back to re-engage Joe with a smile. Joe sombrely watched Ann’s gesture and then turned to Mona with a broad smile and an open gesture of invitation as if to say ‘don’t mind her’. Ann watched Joe re-connect with Mona, her face falling. She

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looked distressed and soon began to cry so insistently that we had to end the recording. The fact that babies less than one year old can, without any adult intervention, get involved so quickly in recognisable group dynamics of like and dislike, demand and reparation, empathy and jealousy proves that human beings can from the early months of life get irretrievably involved in inter-mental worlds of great complexity. Observations like the ones I have summarised demonstrate that babies are aware of and engaged with the social actions of more than one other at the same time and therefore do from early on have a general relational capacity or ‘clan’ mentality of the kind hypothesised by Freud (1922b), Bion (1961), Nash (1995) and Perry (1997). The question now is: how does the existence of this ubiquitous kind of inter-mentality change traditional psychological explanations for human behaviour? Intersubjectivity in experiments The idea that everything is interpersonally ‘meant’ is an undercurrent in many everyday analyses. I ring up to complain about the burglar alarm that has started to go off repeatedly in the school across the street, plaguing my evenings. As I renew my attempts, I wonder are the security firm beginning to recognise my voice? The next time I complain, I am told I am being transferred to the supervisor but inexplicably ‘get lost’ in the process, so that I end up listening for several minutes to a hiss. On hanging up, I expostulate to my wife who says: ‘Ah, so that’s how they’re dealing with it’, implying that this is no accident but a deliberate attempt to frustrate my inquiry. It is only a step from here to the conspiracy theory that turns your ‘bad luck’ into a plot where your tribulations are no accident, rather you are the victim of complex interpersonal machinations, invisible but malicious (such theories may sometimes be true; e.g. Rashke, 1983). This kind of thinking gives purchase to accounts of sorcery and witchcraft among groups like the Azande (Evans-Pritchard, 1937) to paranoia and to psychoanalytic explanations for interpersonal ‘mistakes’ that give ‘accidental’ breakages and ‘unintended’ comments a covert intersubjective logic that can only be unravelled by interpretation. Then there are the ‘psychosomatic’ illnesses that seem to be caused by interpersonal and/or organisational stress. Some of the most famous evidence for the power of intersubjectivity comes from experimental evidence for ‘placebo’ effects. Careful experiments designed to test new drugs against ‘control’ stimuli which are biochemically inert (called placebos) widely produce a surprising, accidental finding: patients given the placebo get better significantly

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more quickly than do patients who have no treatment at all. This is called the ‘placebo effect’. Apparently, because you think someone is making a convincing attempt to cure you, you get better, even though the pill they give you may be made of flour and flavouring. Recent research has extended this research to show that the main thing determining who will get better from a placebo pill is what the doctor giving you the pill believes. The more convinced a doctor is that a drug or placebo will work, the more likely that it really will. For example, a study of pain-killers fooled one group of doctors into thinking they were administering a popular new drug (fentanyl) to patients having their wisdom teeth removed. Another ‘control’ group, were told they were to administer a placebo. In fact, both groups were getting identical placebos. Yet the patients of the doctors who believed they were administering an effective drug felt significantly better after an hour, whereas the patients of doctors who believed the drug they had administered was less effective got worse. ‘Somehow the clinicians were unknowingly transmitting their attitudes towards the medication to their patients’ (Elliott, 2004, p. 21). A similar phenomenon may explain the weird career of Tagamet, or cimetidine, an ulcer drug, that was much in vogue in the 1970s. Prior to 1981, clinical trials showed that 72 per cent of patients with gastric ulcers were healed by Tagamet, some studies reporting more than a 90 per cent rate of cure. After 1981, the rate was only 64 per cent and sometimes as low as 37 per cent. Moerman (2002) argues this was the result of a new drug Zantac coming on the market, which captured doctors’ faith. The better Zantac did, the worse Tagamet did. The implications of this kind of research have largely been ignored by psychologists, because, if valid, they render tendentious a great deal of psychological data and theorising. This is the explosive message hidden in many hundreds of studies that were done in the 1950s, 60s and 70s on ‘artifacts’ in psychological experiments (Rosnow and Rosenthal, 1997). The received idea of experiment in psychology is that the psychologist recruits a set of volunteers who are then tested, that is, asked to respond to prearranged things or answer prearranged actions. Their behaviour is then measured and the results fed into the annals of behavioural science as bearing directly on the psychologist’s hypothesis. The assumption is that people are much like iron filings or flies that simply carry on behaving when in the laboratory just as they would behave any where else i.e. ‘naturally’. Hence the findings of psychological research, just like physics, can be generalised to other situations. The idea that experiments might generate ‘artificial’ behaviour came up when psychologists began to wonder whether their ‘subjects’ were less ductile than they had initially assumed. Suppose what goes for scientists

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goes for everybody! Just as scientists’ behaviour is inspired by hypotheses they have about other people, the people psychologists study may also form hypotheses about psychologists. In which case, the people in an experiment may react more to what they think the experimenter implicitly seems to be doing or trying to achieve than to the experimenter’s explicit instructions. In which case, behaviour in a psychological experiment will not reflect general features of human mentation but rather the specific dynamics of the social situation that the experiment sets up between the people involved in it, dynamics which include the experimenter. If this is true, what the experimenter does, even unconsciously, will be crucial to the outcome of the experiment. We now have many different demonstrations of this truth. There was Clever Hans, the horse known throughout Europe at the start of the 1900s for his remarkable intellectual feats. Particularly well known for his mathematical ability, it turned out that Clever Hans was not in fact calculating when asked to do sums but tapping his hoof on the ground until the person asking the question looked as if they thought the number of taps added up to the answer (Pfungst, 1911). We have the Hawthorne effect, a kind of social placebo effect. The psychologist Elton Mayo (1933) found that, whatever changes he made to the routines of the factory he studied, production increased. Mayo concluded this was because the workers felt ‘flattered’ to have been selected as research participants and so were eager to perform well (Gillespie, 1988). We have Orne’s (1962) studies showing that volunteer subjects in hypnosis experiments try to act out the role of a hypnotized person even if they are not hypnotized, because they wish to be seen as ‘good subjects’. Then we have Rosenthal’s (1966) demonstrations that experimenters unconsciously communicate what they expect to find to their subjects who then act in a way to fulfil these expectations. Rosenthal and Fode (1963) even demonstrated this effect in rats. Two groups of students were told that they should train genetically identical rats to run a maze. Half the students were told that their rats were ‘maze bright’. The other half were given rats that were called ‘maze dull’. By the end of the trials, the ‘maze bright’ rats were performing significantly better than when they started and the ‘maze dull’ rats were performing worse. Somehow the students had unwittingly shaped the behaviour of identical rats so that they found what they expected to find. Major theoretical paradigms have been challenged in this way, one of the most significant being cognitive dissonance theory. The seminal experiments of Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) had seemingly shown that people change their attitudes if they cannot otherwise justify their previous actions. Thus people who were paid $1 (i.e. very little) to argue against their current beliefs were more likely permanently to change that

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belief than people who committed the same act of perjury for $20 (i.e. enough to justify it). Rosenberg (1965) showed that these results were the effect of subjects feeling that the experiment was a test of their integrity. They refused to change their belief for the larger ‘bribe’ in order to avoid being seen as dishonest. The $1 bribe did not arouse the same worries, hence they were happier to do what the experimenter seemed to want. What all such studies show – and there are many many more of them (Rosnow and Rosenthal, 1997) – is that no one, not even psychological experimenters, can escape from intersubjectivity. If you are dealing with other people, you must always assume that their behaviour is a product of their own subjective orientation, the role they take up, something partly constituted by your behaviour, and in ways you cannot easily predict. Experimenters cannot refine themselves out of this predicament. Hence their findings will never directly reflect ‘the operation of the human mind’ – as if that were something that could be studied in vacuo. In an experiment, subjects’ behaviour is generated not by ‘the mind’ but by the local topography of the field of intersubjectivity which experimenters and subjects co-produce, as is the case everywhere else. The field of intersubjectivity in psychological experiments is always liable to be distorted because of the public perception of psychologists as judges and tricksy mind-readers. Such distortion is exacerbated if psychologists do not level with their subjects about what their aims are, and if experiments are conducted on people who are relatively powerless when compared to the experimenter: children, the elderly, college students, the mentally ill or the poor, for example. As the devil is in the detail, let me end with an example of the way that an intersubjective interpretation of psychological experiment turns purported findings on their ear. Part of Piaget’s evidence for the cognitive egocentrism of children under the age of seven is that these ‘preoperational’ children are incapable of reversing actions ‘in their heads’. Piaget called his illustrations of this point ‘conservation’ experiments. In one example two identical evenly spaced parallel lines of five sweets, line A and line B, would be shown to a five-year-old, who would be asked whether A and B had the same number of sweets in or whether one line had more than the other. Most five-year-olds answer ‘the same’ to this question. Then line B would be stretched out so it was longer than A but still had only five sweets in (becoming line C). The children would then be asked if line C and line A had different or the same number of sweets. Most five-year-olds answer that the longer line C has ‘more’ sweets. Piaget argued that these children were failing to ‘conserve number’ because they could not reason syllogistically that if A=B and B=C, then C=A. They were overwhelmed by their immediate perception that C was longer than A

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(‘centration’), and hence, that C had ‘more’ than A. In the 1970s, this interpretation was challenged by Jim McGarrigle and Margaret Donaldson (1974; Donaldson,1978). They argued that the ‘speech-situation’ in which the experiment took place was alien to young children who therefore could not think straight, appearing far less rational than they really were. Maybe the children felt they understood perfectly well what Piaget had done but misread his intention when re-iterating the question, imagining that he was looking for a different answer, which they then dutifully gave. After all, this is very often what goes on in the classroom: a teacher asks a question which a pupil gets wrong (e.g. Q1: ‘What is 2 times 3?’; A: ‘5’). The teacher then repeats the question, stressing the aspect the student has got wrong (Q2: ‘What is 2 times 3?’) – and the student gives a different answer. In order to avoid the problem of children trying to work out what the experimenter ‘wanted’ them to say, McGarrigle modified Piaget’s experiment to make the transformation of B fi C appear accidental. He sat pre-schoolers down at a table with two lines of candy on them, just as Piaget had. But also on the table was a box in which lurked, he told his subjects, a ‘naughty Teddy’ who kept on coming out and messing up his games. He then asked Piaget’s first question, to which the children mostly answered ‘the same’. Then the naughty Teddy would escape (actually a hand-puppet manipulated by McGarrigle), zooming over the table, leaving line A alone, but ‘messing up’ line B so that it was longer than before (i.e. becoming line C). McGarrigle would then wrestle the Teddy back into its box and follow up by checking with the child whether line A and line C still had the same number of sweets in or whether one line now had more than the other. To which the children generally answered that A and C still had ‘the same’. McGarrigle and Donaldson argued that this new situation ‘made human sense’ to young children. Hence they were able to reason about it quite logically and reveal a capacity for ‘reversible’ thinking or ‘conservation’ far earlier than Piaget had found. Unfortunately, though, there is no escape from intersubjectivity. Hence, just as the children in Piaget’s initial experiment may have ‘read’ the intersubjective logic of Piaget’s repeated questions as meaning: ‘Obviously he thinks I got my first answer wrong, so I had better change my second answer’, McGarrigle’s revised discourse format may have led them to think: ‘Well, obviously, if that naughty Teddy made the change in the row of sweets, I had better discount it and give the same answer as I gave before.’ In this case, the answer McGarrigle’s pre-schoolers gave would not reflect an ‘underlying’ rationality in young children, but just the new subject-position afforded by a different set of intersubjective determinants. That this is indeed the case is suggested by a third experiment by Paul Light (1986). Light’s experiment involved a naughty Teddy too, but

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this time, the children doing the experiment were confronted by a low green table divided up into two identical ‘fields’. Each field was an identical square, being surrounded by eight equal lengths of white plastic fence, two per side. In the middle of field A stood a toy cow. In field B stood a horse. Having been told about the naughty Teddy, each child was then asked whether the cow and the horse had the same amount of grass to eat or whether one had more than the other. Most said ‘the same’. Then the naughty Teddy emerged, messing up the fencing so that the horse ended up standing in a differently shaped oblong field, three pieces of fence long by one wide. When Teddy was back in his box, Light repeated his opening question, to which most children answered that cow and horse still had ‘the same’ amount of grass to eat. But this is now a wrong answer. The horse in the oblong field (1
3 ¼ 3 square units) has less grass to eat than the cow in the square field (2
2 ¼ 4 square units). Which suggests that children’s responses to the experimenter’s questions are predominantly a function of the intersubjective situation the experiment sets up, not of the child’s underlying reasoning abilities. This underlines the need to have developed an account of the ways that children can be positioned in intersubjective space before drafting a theory of children’s reasoning. Conclusions There are all sorts of reasons for approaching psychology nonindividualistically: ontological, epistemological, ethical, political, sociotheoretical and empirical. But such an approach can only make sense psychologically if there is some way to conceptualise mental life that gets collective conceptions of the psyche in on the ground-floor of scientific thinking. The reason that methodological individualism has had such great success in psychology is partly because it naturalises a form of rationality consonant with the ‘enlightened self-interest’ promoted by a market economy and partly because this perspective is so long-standing that we habitually see the world through individualistic lenses. This is another way of saying that individualism makes common sense: the mind of the individual is the stadium for the exercise of reason, the home of memory, the house of responsibility, the source of subjectivity, the parent of personality, the citadel of choice. Suppose it is true that no man is an island, that human beings are social through and through, ‘born into relationship’ as Macmurray (1961) said, and that we individuate out of an inter-mental collectivity over time rather than starting life as monads and therefore in need of ‘socialisation’. There must then be some way of describing the mental sphere that makes us recognise as ‘common sense’

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our inherent sociality: reason is a culturally produced discourse, memory is a collective achievement, responsibility is relational, personality is a form of narrative.9 This requires a major turnaround in our sensitivities and ideas.10 This chapter has reviewed a variety of data that support the notion that we are ‘intersubjects’. Social theory would not make any sense unless there were some form of supra-individual organisation of the psyche, and neither would many everyday observations. Language is increasingly seen as a supra-individual matrix that at least partly choreographs the subjectivities of those who use it. Theweleit’s research documents how even the ‘private’ fantasies and ideals of Freikorpsmen were shared. Research on young children shows we cannot explain language acquisition unless we hypothesise infants’ involvement in social life from the earliest months onwards. Observations of babies with adults and in all-infant groups underline the ubiquity and complexity of a supra-dyadic intersubjectivity. Once this idea is accepted, it bids fair to turn on their head interpretations of all events conceived individualistically, as the study of ‘artifacts’ in experimental psychological research shows. There is no escape from intersubjectivity, whatever one’s experimental design. Indeed the very term ‘artifact’ may be seen as a belated attempt to relock this Pandora’s box, as Danziger (1990, pp. 8–9) notes: the social aspects of psychological experimentation cannot be relegated to accidental disturbances of the process of research just to preserve inviolate the ideal of a ‘purely logical, asocial, and ahistorical research process’. Psychological experiments are different in principle from experiments in physics ‘because experimenter and the human data source must necessarily be engaged in a human relationship. This is no ‘‘artifact’’ but one of the essential preconditions of having a viable experimental situation’ (Danziger, 1990, p. 9). What this chapter shows is that there is a great deal of data available to those who wish to explore the topography of intersubjective space. We have seen how intersubjective space may simultaneously position every one of its inhabitants in multiple and contradictory ways. It has both surface and depth. It may be more or less distorted and when it is distorted the depths may belie the surface, being neither harmonious nor complementary. It is a domain that shows the pull of both cultural traditions and social forces. It may be creative and/or destructive. It 9 10

See e.g. Sarbin (1986); Walkerdine (1988); Middleton and Edwards (1990); McNamee and Gergen (1998); Raggatt (2000) . Note that this turnaround bears similarities to the need to overcome the ‘fundamental attribution error’ (Ross and Nisbett, 1991) in which people attribute the responsibility of others’ actions to the individual actor but attribute the responsibility for their own actions to the situation they find themselves in. We need to see others as more like ourselves.

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operates both in large institutions – even in nations – and in intimate relations. It is not only supra-individual but supra-dyadic as is evident even from data collected in the first year of life. It may be rendered invisible but not ineffective. Thus the diachronic mind-set may produce investigative techniques that preclude the intersubjective as a topic of inquiry. See for example the minimal groups paradigm in social psychology and the individualism of computer-based experiments in cognitive science. Yet research on experimental artifacts shows the achievements of such techniques to be largely Pyrrhic. Psychologically, the reason experience cannot be reduced to history is because it is intersubjective and intersubjectivity is primarily a synchronic phenomenon. The current topography of intersubjectivity is what primarily defines the parameters of any individual’s experience. Just as a man standing in a valley or even on a plain cannot map much of his surrounds, so the topography of intersubjectivity is not easily seen by the individuals it embraces.11 Yet the methodological individualism of the experiment remains the model for pyschological research (Lukes, 1973). It is perhaps for this reason that genesis has largely supplanted synchrony in mental science’s affections (see next chapter).

11

The question ‘who am I?’ defies unitary answer – for we are as multiplicitous as the subject positions offered to us by the intersubjective topographies we inhabit.

6

The two axes of psychological explanation

If we are to use biology to name, it should be a biology ample enough to include our whole selves, and the social world in which we are made and which we help make, not in the disciplinary imperialism that sees ever broader compass for genetic control, but rather in the attempt to reach far enough to describe . . . what kind of world those genes ‘go on inside of’. (Susan Oyama, ‘How Shall I Name Thee’, 1993, p. 492)

This chapter sets out the formal case for a proposal that underpins the argument of this book; that there are two axes of explanation in psychology. One has to do with the field of synchronic relations. The other has to do with the genesis of events over time ‘diachronically’. The idea that the past explains the present is fundamental in modern-day psychology. But we commit a fallacy if we assume this to be the only or the primary dimension for psychological (or any scientific) inquiry. This fallacy has long been known to philosophers as the genetic fallacy – the word ‘genetic’ being used here to mean ‘pertaining to genesis’ (unfolding over time), not just to what we now call genes (the functional units of DNA that all living beings carry on their chromosomes). According to my argument, and to philosophers of the genetic fallacy, the primary question in understanding any entity is an atemporal, synchronic one: ‘what is X?’. Only when we have answered that question can we legitimately move on to ask the ‘genetic’ question: ‘how has X come about?’. Yet today’s psychology skimps attention to the ‘what’ in favour of the ‘how come’, as I now show. Previous chapters have argued the primacy of the synchronic intersubjective field to any understanding of psychical events. This chapter stands back from debates about intersubjectivity to make a more general point. Almost any branch of psychology could provide illustrations, but my main example will come from the study of genes. Before I get to it, I discuss the genetic fallacy in more detail, giving some historical background. I argue its prevalence has to do with the way experiments have come to be the gold standard for truth in today’s intellectual debates. I then examine an illustration from recent research on the biochemical expression of genes. Finally I argue that an unacknowledged awareness of the genetic fallacy 113

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underpins many of the defining debates in today’s psychology. The next chapter applies the conclusions of this chapter to one of the principal strongholds of the genetic fallacy: developmental psychology.

The genetic fallacy Perpetrators of the genetic fallacy assume that the genesis of an entity, proposition or belief is relevant to, or has a bearing on, its meaning or validity (Lavine, 1962, p. 321). It is a fallacy to which Locke (1696/1952, p. 261) was sensitive when he wrote that ‘the cause of any sensation, and the sensation itself’ are ‘two ideas so different and distant one from another, that no two can be more so’. Yet, in more recent times, we have become so prone to treat genetic explanation as synonymous with the mission of science that, at least in psychology, the question ‘what is X?’ has been relegated to corridor-gossip or our fast-vanishing philosophy departments. This was not always the case. Founders of modern psychology explicitly warned against the genetic fallacy. James Mark Baldwin (1895) deplored the tendency for evolutionary explanation, what he called ‘natural history’, to displace questions about being and ‘essences’, questions he found far more fundamental to the discipline. Likewise, James (1878, 1890, 1903) repeatedly argued that the study of embryonic forms such as infancy or our animal forebears – what he ridiculed as ‘the appeal to the polyp’ – could cast little light on the fully developed human being. Rather, the opposite was the case. ‘By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots’, wrote James (1903, p. 18). We cannot know how people develop until we have understood what that development produces, something which cannot be understood causally. The child-first ‘embryological’ approach to the explanation of human behaviour can but obscure the processes by which human beings develop. This is because development is best defined by what it produces, its fruit, not by how it begins. The embryos of frogs, pigs, monkeys and human beings are, in their early stages, as like as peas in a pod. The roots of a coconut-tree and a rose-bush are almost indistinguishable without a magnifying-glass and specialised knowledge. Grown-up, even members of the same species are easy to tell apart. ‘Interesting as the early stages of a subject always are, yet when one seeks earnestly for its full significance, one must always look to its more completely evolved and perfect forms’ ( James, 1903, p. 3). Wundt (1897) agreed: ‘It is an error to hold, as it is sometimes held, that the mental life of adults can never be understood except through analysis of the child’s mind. The exact opposite is the case.’

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About the same time, Nietzsche was making a similar point about history. The past can either be described like a fossil irrelevant to present concerns by historians who ‘no longer feel tempted to go on living or taking part in history’ (Nietzsche, 1873, p. 92). Or it can be described ‘artistically’ by those who want to cast light on the present, having ‘a creative buoyancy, a loving immersion in empirical data’ (ibid., pp. 117, 129). Such historians are intent not on ‘carrying their own generation to the grave, but in creating a new generation . . . always on the supposition that a unity of design must be imposed on material if it does not inhere in it already’ (ibid., pp. 115, 129). Nietzsche espoused a principle that was at the heart of the genetic fallacy (1887, p. 77): the cause or origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted for new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it ... an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.

Hence, logically, the first question in science is always ‘What is . . . ?’ What is this animal? How are we to describe it? What is intelligence? What is depression? We cannot set about inventing a drug to cure a mental affliction if we have not already mapped out what that condition is. And what something is cannot be established by causal explanation. In 1859 Charles Darwin came up with a powerful idea to explain how species have come to be the way they are. But his theory of evolution by natural selection was built on a firm foundation of previous work by naturalists and taxonomists who had already painstakingly described the ‘what’ of Nature, showing that life-forms could be organised into a huge array of more and less closely related but self-contained groups, living or extinct. Copernicus and Galileo established that the sun was the centre of the solar system, not the earth. But they were only able to do so because star-gazers had long ago established that there were such things as planets and that they, with the sun, formed a family in the sky. Likewise, modern geology is said to have begun on the day that William Smith published the first stratigraphic map describing the rock-formations which underlay England, Wales and southern Scotland (Winchester, 2001). But, psychology has yet to develop an independent taxonomy that embraces the whole field of human mental life. Categorisation is largely applied to ‘abnormal’ phenomena, troublesome conditions being picked off piecemeal and with scant heed paid to their larger ‘habitat’ in ordinary mental life. Perhaps because what depression is and why it is important seem so obvious to the many who have been depressed that the

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need to map the multiple dimensions of depression is satisfied by a brief entry in a Diagnostic Manual that equates it with illness. Look at it more closely, however, and this obviousness quickly dissolves into a host of different psychical dynamics organised along dimensions which are relevant to all of us, depressed or not: our sex, who we have to talk to, what kind of house we live in, our philosophy of life, our diet, how much sleep we get, our ways of dealing with stress and the character of our family (Ussher, 1991; Mauthner, 1998; Stoppard, 2000). Because the same kind of superficial obviousness does not pertain to titanium, ammonites or teal, there is more immediate pressure to develop comprehensive taxonomies in chemistry, geology and biology. The misleading obviousness of psychology’s phenomena is only part of the problem, however. A complementary factor is that experiments have become the gold-standard for inquiry and hence for research-training. Experiments are designed to examine causal hypotheses by testing out predictions about how changes in independent variables (causes) will lead to changes in dependent variables (effects). Thus I might predict that a certain drug
joy
will cure depression. In an experiment, I will randomly give either
joy
or a placebo to two otherwise matched groups of depressed people under carefully controlled conditions, predicting that those who get
joy
will show a measurable lessening of their depression when compared to those who get the placebo. If I find what I predict, I have good grounds for concluding that
joy
cures depression. This is hardly the whole story, however. I was only able to invent
joy
because I already had a theory that suggested what depression is, why it is a problem that requires treatment, how it is to be identified and how it comes about. This is what led me to undertake my research in the first place, and to include the psycho-active chemicals in
joy
that distinguished it from other drugs. Nor would this experiment, however successful, be the end of my investigation. I would then go on to test the generality of my findings, examine side-effects and, if a biochemist, proceed to see whether the active ingredients I put into
joy
did indeed bind to the sites I predicted they would in order to produce the lessening in depression the drug caused. The next section looks at this example in more detail. The idea of ‘independent’ variables The experimental analysis of behaviour depends upon the separation of dependent from independent variables. The reason a variable is called independent is that there seems to be no intrinsic reason why its should be connected with the dependent variable. The relationship between

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independent and dependent variables is entirely linear and one-way. What is independent pre-exists and is unaffected by what is dependent. Furthermore, independent variables are implicitly equated with causes and dependent variables with effects. Only if the drug
joy
cures (causes relief from) depression are the two events deemed to be linked. I want now to argue that this way of construing psychological experiments requires a significant over-simplification of the set of semantic, causal and social relationships which surround any process such as curing depression. In the first place,
joy
may in fact alter a long chain of connected events, the alteration in any one of which might be described as ‘the cure’ for depression: viz. i. L ! M ! N ! O ! P ! Q ! Depression ii. L ! M[+
joy
] ! N
! O
! P
! Q
! No Depression Accurately speaking,
joy
’s only direct effect is on M, and it was the alteration of Q that caused the depression to lift. Furthermore, this longer causal chain may have a significance to which my hypothetical experiment gives no clue. For example, it may be that the production of Q is normally blocked by chemicals analogous to but different from
joy
that are usually in abundant supply when individuals are in frequent friendly contact with others. It is only when individuals spend long periods in threatening or isolated social circumstances that Q accumulates and people get depressed. Hence depression’s function is as a communicative signal, a ‘cry for help’. In this case, the drug
joy
is less a cure for depression than a chemical way of altering one of the biochemical effects of the true cause of depression: lack of friendly intimacy. Likewise, one might say Alice froze because the nerves leading from her spine to the muscles in her legs fired in a certain order. But this would be misleading because it is an explanation divorced from the circuit of meaning which gives sense to her action – and hence is not psychological. Alice froze because she heard a sound in the dark.1 These examples show that, while the experimental method may help us identify ‘causes’ for psychical phenomena, understanding those phenomena psychologically requires us to examine them as drawing their sense from a nexus of human relationships. To imagine that establishing just any ‘causal’ dependency between a psychical event Y and an independent variable X serves as a satisfactory psychological explanation for Y is to forget the ‘what’ of human problems: that they only become significant because they play a worrying or intriguing part in the meanings 1

Compare Rose’s (1997, pp. 10ff ) five-explanation fable of ‘why the frog jumped’; Ingleby (1974) on causation and the social constitution of ‘fear of crime’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000).

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circulating between those affected by them. If an ‘explanation’ does not make sense within this circuit, then it is not a satisfactory psychological explanation. Hence the felt limitations of chemical or physiological ‘explanations’ for complex human behaviour like depression or fear. This brings us to a battle that is increasingly being fought over the place of experiments in psychology. Which circuit of meanings is most appropriate for the explanation of psychic events? One reason why the example of the drug
joy
developed here is plausible is because it plays upon a medical discourse of ‘disease’ and ‘cure’. Discourses that construct human beings as having ‘mental illnesses’ like schizophrenia or depression which can be ‘cured’ by psycho-active drugs like Prozac or
joy
are of relatively recent origin and peculiar to the West according to historians of the social sciences like Rose (1985) and Foucault (1972). Hence, while the drug
joy
may seem to be ‘independent’ of depression in experimental terms, the ideas of drug and mental illness are far from independent in discursive terms. They only ‘make sense’ because they are interdependent. Semantically, each is implied by the other. In psychological experiments, as everywhere else, nature as-object-ofhuman-knowledge never comes to us ‘naked’, it only comes as already constituted in social thought (Harding, 1991). This social connectedness can often be far more glaring than in my imaginary example of depression. For instance, over the years many psychologists have argued on the basis of scientific (quasi-experimental) research that black students’ poor performance on IQ tests relative to whites is a consequence of their being innately less intelligent than whites. Yet, IQ tests have been consciously designed over the past century in a way that allows them to show that blacks are ‘inferior’ to whites (Gould, 1981; Rose et al., 1984). If testdesigners wanted to make IQ blind to race they might have tried to withdraw or counter-balance those items that most discriminate blacks from whites as they have done for those items that discriminate between boys and girls. But they have chosen not to. Hence to pretend that race is a variable independent from IQ is hard to sustain. Finally, psychological experiments not only draw on socially constituted terms when they are conceived. They also take place in a social setting, a here-and-now of meanings that circulate between the experimenter(s) and their informant(s). Take cases where researchers collect their data by administering a battery of psychometric tests that are filled in at one sitting. Such tests might measure, for example, a man’s memory of his bond to his own father (independent variable), his current relationship to his wife (independent variable) and his own satisfaction with his relationship to his child (dependent variable). Despite calling some of these variables independent and others dependent, all of them are in fact reflections of how he is

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feeling here and now as he sits, under the eye of the experimenter, marking off the scales that comprise the different tests. Such interconnectedness is another example of the kind of ‘artifact’ discussed in the last chapter. Gene-expression in context It is commonly said that psychical qualities such as personality, temperament or intelligence have a predominantly biological basis. This is another way of saying that they are ‘inherited’, ‘innate’, ‘of genetic origin’ or ‘genetically determined’. Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists frequently hypothesise ‘genes for’ altruism or selfishness or aggression or masculine infidelity. Such traits are ‘coded’, ‘controlled’ or ‘programmed by the genes’. This way of thinking has its apotheosis in the excitement surrounding the Human Genome Project, about which one eminent molecular biologist Walter Gilbert has claimed ‘when we know the entire human genome, we will know what it is to be human’ (Lewontin, 2000, p. 113). This makes about as much sense as saying that we only have to get hold of an English dictionary to know what it is to write plays like Shakespeare. There are many powerful and substantive critiques of biological and genetic determinism already available and I do not intend to duplicate them. My aim here is to try to state in formal terms what gets left out by claiming psychical qualities are determined by genes. Thus I will not be content just to portray genetic determinism as leaving out ‘the environment’, because genes never interact with what we call ‘the environment’: trees, fields, cities, cars, weather, other people. Genes interact solely with cellular processes and it is upon these microscopic processes that we must focus if we wish to understand the poverty of accounts which propose our psychical qualities are explained by our genes. But the question of what genes do is historically and conceptually part of evolutionary theory. The very idea of the human genome arises out of debate about the ‘how come’ of evolution. I will briefly review this debate before proceeding. Darwin (1859, p. 488) first proposed his theory of evolution so as to ‘set psychology on a new foundation’. Since that time, however, maintaining distinctions between levels of analysis or orders of meaning has become crucial in evaluating evolutionary discussions of human behaviour. Transmission of particular types of DNA from one generation to the next may be a result of natural selection.2 This transmission takes place at 2

And of other non-evolutionary processes like genetic drift where random differences in mortality in tribes of a rare species lead to the accidental fixation of some genes over others in its genotype.

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the cellular level of what is called the ‘genotype’ (or genome), something susceptible of biochemical analysis. But natural selection itself largely occurs in the struggle for survival between whole organisms or ‘phenotypes’. This is the level at which words like selfish, aggressive and altruistic make sense: the level at which psychology properly operates. The idea that evolution can ‘explain’ human behaviour may be doubly confusing therefore. First, human behaviour is a formative part of the evolutionary process. So, unless one argues in a circle, it cannot simultaneously be explained by that process. And second, until we have some independent understanding of human behaviour as such, something which psychology must give to rather than be given by biochemistry, it is difficult to judge whether or not human behaviour has been ‘explained’. I will take the first point first. Evolutionary explanation generally assumes that the current behaviour of the phenotype is a product of natural selection that took place long ago. Thus in ‘The Past Explains the Present’ Tooby and Cosmides (1990) argue that the important questions about human emotions are best answered by reference to the structure of ancestral environments millions of years ago. But if we stop and think about the process of evolution, particularly in more complicated animals, we realise that the opposite is true. In the words of Ernst Mayr (1970, p. 322), ‘much evidence indicates that most major evolutionary shifts began with a behavioural shift’. Take Darwin’s finches for example. When Darwin landed on the Galapagos Islands, he found that they were home to a variety of different species of finch. Some had delicate long bills and fed on nectar. Others had fat strong bills for crushing seeds. Others had bills designed to hold twigs to dislodge grubs from trees. Yet others were fruit-eating. Clearly, none of these adaptations would have come about in the first place if the birds’ ancestors had not been able to fly from mainland America to the Galapagos. In the second place, adaptive radiation would not have occurred if different groups of birds had not been flexible enough in their behaviour, long before they had custom-made bills, to exploit new sources of food: nectar, grubs, seeds, fruit. And third, no stable selection pressure would have been maintained if each new brood of finch had not been able to imitate the habits of its parents. Only with all this behavioural apparatus in place could the finches’ bills begin to evolve. As genetic recombination and mutation produced variation in bills, birds with bills better fitted to their chosen food-supply would tend to have greater reproductive success and natural selection would lock in: provided that the birds’ feeding habits remained constant. This process mimics Lamarckian change, and was dubbed ‘organic selection’ by the pioneer developmentalist Baldwin (1896). ‘Behaviour will always tend to be one

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jump ahead of structure, and so play a decisive role in the evolutionary process’ (Ewer, 1960, p. 161). So, when we are faced with a living organism, we can now imagine two kinds of explanatory approach. The evolutionary psychologist asks, ‘why is that animal behaving the way it is?’. To which the answer is biological: ‘because of its evolution’. Alternatively one might ask, ‘why is that animal evolving the way it is?’. To which Baldwin answers, ‘because of its behaviour, habitat, sexual needs, dietary requirements, intraspecific relations’, which we can only make sense of psychologically. In short, behaviour comes first. So we cannot have an evolutionary explanation before we have got a psychological explanation. Ergo, we cannot have an evolutionary psychology. (We can only have a psychological evolutionism.)3 This conclusion is underlined by evidence showing the relative autonomy of the phenotype from the genotype in higher animals. Thus there are many levels of organisation between the cellular and the organismic which cannot be said to be ‘determined’ by genes. In particular, whole organisms show a radical plasticity with regard to their environment. If human beings travel to high altitudes, their genes stay the same but their bodies swiftly adapt by changes in blood-chemistry, lung capacity, not to mention clothing and life-style. A child born in China will learn Chinese. Its twin raised in England learns English. As Konrad Lorenz (1966) pointed out, the phenotypic plasticity given by the capacity to learn is an enormously adaptive trait. Such plasticity is also creative. It creates not only the organism but what is afforded by the environment in which the organism lives and therefore evolves. If this is true of finches on the Galapagos, it is even more so of human beings. I have heard archaeologists argue that around 60,000 years ago there was an enormous growth in the complexity of the human brain. ‘How can this have come about?’, they ask. Their hypothesis is that that was when our ancestors began to use symbols and signs, allowing single objects and sounds to have a multiplicity of semantic connections that were hitherto impossible. This increased connectedness created a new environment which created new selection pressures which created conditions for the evolution of what we now know as the human brain. Yet this connectedness is only susceptible of elucidation in psycho-semiotic terms, not biochemistry. To say we have ‘selfish genes’ or even ‘personality

3

This was very much the view Darwin took in The Descent of Man (1871). Thus he severally traced the evolution of strength, size of body, deadly tusks and teeth, musical organs, bright colours and ornamental appendages to species’ pre-existing psychical qualities: courage, pugnacity, perseverance, the exertion of choice, the influence of love and jealousy and the appreciation of the beautiful in sound, colour or form (cf. Bradley, 1989, p. 24).

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genes’ is to mix up these two orders of reference (Davidson, 1974; Dawkins, 1976). Selfishness is a psychological term. Genes are chemicals. They can cause changes in other chemicals. But they cannot ‘cause’ what is psychical. So much for what genes cannot do. The question of what genes do do is probably best broached by starting with the fact that in each one of the cells that make up a human being we find an identical set of genes.4 How is it then that cells on my scalp produce hair cells, cells of my skin produce epithelial cells and cells in my marrow produce blood cells? And how is it that cells in the same organism do different things at different times, depending on the developmental status of the organism and its current conditions? What is it that leads the same gene in one cell to be silent and, at another time or in a different place, to transcribe a protein? The answers to these questions cannot be that genes are controlled by genes, partly for logical reasons (we get into an infinite regress if we ask what controls the genes that control the genes; the buck must stop somewhere), partly on biochemical evidence (see below), and partly due to numbers: The nucleus of a cell of the fruit fly Drosophila, the favourite organism of geneticists, has enough DNA to specify the structure of about five thousand different proteins, and about thirty times that much DNA is available to provide spatial and temporal instructions about when the production of proteins by those genes should be turned on and turned off. But this is simply too little, by many orders of magnitude, to tell every cell when it should divide, exactly where it should move next, and what cellular structures it should produce over the entire history of the fly . . . There is just not enough DNA to go round. (Lewontin, 2000, p. 126)

In his book Topobiology (1988), Gerald Edelman has argued that it is the present location of a cell within the larger organism, and the cell’s current activity, that provide most of the information about what it is to do next. Thus a cell’s activity will not only depend on its location in a specific kind of tissue but on this tissue’s location with regard to the topography of the whole organism and the organism’s current location and activity within the larger environment. Within an adult, a cell within the pituitary will behave differently depending on whether the being it is part of is sexually aroused, stressed or asleep. Within an embryo, a cell positioned at the top of the organism may become an eye-cell. If at the other end, a toe-nail. Hence, at least during development, all cells must be equipped with the biochemical equivalent of compass and sextant. And, like the sand grains in Bak’s critical heap (see Chapter 4), they must 4

With the exception of red blood cells, the cells in our gametes and the rare cells within which genes have undergone mutation.

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communicate with each other. Only thus can they be open to effects from what is going on elsewhere within and outside the organism. Thus the enzyme that breaks down the sugar lactose to provide energy for bacterial growth is only manufactured by bacterial cells when they detect the presence of lactose in their environment (Lewontin, 2000, p. 148). It is this contingency on position, both intra-organismic and in the environment, that explains why, in treating genetic material solely at an intracellular level, we lose what defines organisms as being organisms. Even at the intra-cellular level, genes can only have effects by entering into non-genetic biochemical processes.5 Indeed, recent work suggests that, far from deserving star-billing, genes are little more than puppets of the cell’s non-genetic machinery. An assortment of proteins, and sometimes RNAs, pull the strings, telling genes when and where to turn on and off (Pennisi, 2001). Thus chromosomes contain large sections of DNA that act to regulate when and whether their target genes are transcribed.6 These regulatory DNA sequences are switched on and off by combinations of enzymes (operons and repressors) which work by stimulating alteration in the three-dimensional shape of the DNA helix. Activated DNA is more elongated in the coils of chromatin that bind genes together than DNA that is ‘switched off ’. Chromatin is hence far more than an inert scaffolding for DNA (Alberts et al., 1998).7 Thus, even if you wanted to argue that intelligence or height or eye-colour ‘is in the genes’, you would be blacking out all the organismic processes that make DNA expressible, processes that are not ‘genetic’ in any sense of the term, having to do with the current status of the organism and its place in nature. Scientists are only beginning to unravel the enormously complicated processes by which organisms develop from a single undifferentiated cell

5 6 7

Nowadays the word ‘epigenetic’ is often used to refer to non-genetic patterns of generegulation that can be inherited (Pennisi, 2001). Even accepting this, more than 90 per cent of human DNA has no known function. This 90+ per cent is sometimes called ‘selfish DNA’ because it just reproduces itself. A common way to deactivate a gene is through changing the shape of the chromatin by ‘methylation’. Methylation is where a common base (5-Methyl cytosine; m5C) binds to the gene so that it becomes inaccessible to the messenger-RNA which would otherwise start off the process of its transcription. The methylation of genes can last for generations and is maintained by enzymes called ‘maintenance methylases’ (Riggs and Porter, 1996). Genes are switched on by ‘switching’ methylases which remove m5C from the gene when it requires transcription so that the m-RNA can get at it. But we recently learnt that methylation may also affect the histones that structure chromatin in a way that can also switch genes on and off – as may phosphorylation and acetylation (Jenuwein and Allis, 2001). If gene-regulation goes awry, particularly of tumor-suppressor genes, cancer results. Alternatively, viruses work by injecting their DNA into cells, hijacking the cell’s protein-making machinery for their own sick purposes. Changes in DNA methylation are also linked to ageing (Holliday and Ho, 1998; cf. Rose, 1997).

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into their mature forms. But it is clearly a gross over-simplification to say that this process is ‘controlled’ by the genes.8 Genes are themselves controlled by the environment in which they develop. So it is patterns of gene-expression, not genes themselves, that define each type of cell. The significance of any given gene is not built into its DNA but depends on where it is located: in which form of chromatin, in which cell, in which tissue, in which organism, in which environment.9 DNA is but one element of a developmental system. It is this system which defines the role played by the gene not vice versa.10 If matter is interactive and so subject to changing interdependent constraints, outside direction by ‘the gene’ is not needed. Thus genes are not ‘for’ anything observable at the whole-organism (phenotypic) level, whether it be eye-colour, altruism or intelligence. They are for making proteins. And they only make proteins by virtue of the non-genetic cellular and larger organismic processes to which they are subjected. And these processes are linked to countless other genes, both within the same cell and in cells further afield. Hence it makes no sense to consider the influence of a single gene in isolation. One gene only has its impact against the collective background of the entire genotype (i.e. all the genes) of the individual organism. The need for synchronic analysis in psychology The lesson to be drawn from the example of gene-expression is that, when we consider the functioning of even so diachronically determined an entity as the gene, we end up invoking a synchronic order of interconnectedness to which projects that ‘decode’ the human genome give no clue. Just as Saussure argued of language, the ‘meaning’ of a gene is, so far as its hereand-now expression is concerned, determined by processes that have no necessary reference to evolutionary history. The key to the secret is in the present: the current state of the gene and its neighbouring genes, the threedimensional shape of the chromosomes, the balance of chemicals in its cell and in its neighbouring cells, the status of the organism as a whole and the organism’s current position in the larger environment. 8

9

10

This is even more the case in psychology, where even the determinists must acknowledge that features like intelligence or personality can only be ‘produced by’ the interaction of an enormous number of genes acting together (i.e. inheritance is ‘polygenic’). Indeed the idea that the genes ‘control’ or ‘determine’ or ‘provide the blueprint for’ development is one that itself requires analysis. ‘The gene’ is clearly an unwarranted abstraction from the epigenetic process. According to Oyama (1993, p. 479), conceptions of ‘homunculoid’ genes as ‘microscopic intelligences in the nucleus [who] plan and control the creation of the organism’ hark back to Descartes: ‘If matter is inert, organized processes can be explained only by reference to an intelligent, structuring being’ (ibid.).

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This key means that Saussure’s diagram (p.57 above) showing relations between synchronic and diachronic analysis in linguistics has a generic relevance to the structure of scientific explanation. Let us call the vertical axis C!D time’s arrow. To any given time (c´ d´ ) there will correspond a set of synchronic events (a´ b´ ) on an orthogonal axis A – B. In linguistics a´ b´ refers to a simultaneity of signs whose meanings are determined by their synchronic relations to each other whether through association or opposition. c´ d´ refers to changes over time of the sort discovered by etymologists. Anyone familiar with British politics has an idea what the word ‘Tory’ means. Few will know that it comes from the old Irish word to´raighe (outlaw). In genetics a´ b´ refers to the simultaneity of processes at cellular and supra-cellular, organismic and supra-organismic levels which lead to certain stretches of DNA being activated while others stay mute. c´ d´ refers to the changes in genes (mutations), gene pools and non-genetic processes over time that add up to what we call evolution. Are both these axes also requisite for adequate psychological explanation? Previous chapters answered this question affirmatively for numerous areas of psychological inquiry, including the study of language, perception, the coordination of movement, group dynamics, the study of infancy and the interpretation of experiments (and their ‘artifacts’). The next chapter focuses in particular on developmental psychology. But this is not the end of the list. Memory Take the study of memory for example. Does the past last for ever in the same form, being simply unearthed from time to time, as is implicit in the common-sense vocabulary of ‘retrieval’? Or does the past only get remembered today in a form that fits in with present preoccupations? A century of psychological research prefers the presentist interpretation. James (1890) argued that the purpose of memory was to provide the backcloth to present action, rather as in a theatre, where the backcloth gives us the impression that the action in the foreground extends far behind the stage. Freud (1899, p. 69) agreed: Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods of revival. The childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, which had no concern with historical accuracy, had their part in forming them as well as in the selection of the memories themselves.

Recent research strengthens this view. Damasio (1999), a popular expert on the neurophysiology of emotions, comments that current research

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agrees with Frederic Bartlett (1932) who introduced the idea that we do not recall facsimiles of perceived objects but rather reconstruct, as best we can, some approximation to the original perception. Nader’s (2003) neurochemical research on the dynamic quality of mnemonic traces supports Loftus’ (2003) conclusion that memories ‘of the past’ are being constantly updated in the light of more recent experience. Lewis (1997) reviews a series of experiments to explore the extent to which present circumstances shape what we remember. A variety of laboratory studies has been used to suggest that, if one can manipulate a person’s current beliefs about what is good for them, for example the ideal amount of exercise per week, what they recall about the recent past tends to conform to what they believe (Ross, 1989). Reiter (1980) was able to compare the party affiliations of Jews and African Americans during the 1920s – which were largely Republican – with what the same cohort remembered thirty to fifty years later, when most had switched to Democrat. The vast majority falsely recalled that in the 1920s they had voted for the Democratic party. Lewis (1997, pp. 62, 68) summarises: Earlier events are unlikely to have much relation to later ones. This is especially so if the earlier events that are studied are not related to the needs and plans of the individual as they exist now or in the future. We can understand the relation between earlier and later events only if we change our more traditional view of time and argue that our current needs and desires are likely to affect what people believe was true in the past. . . . The pragmatics of current adaptation determine how people behave. 11

Personality From memory, turn to the personality–situation debate. One of the most popular forms of explanation for human behaviour is in terms of the idea that human beings have fixed characters. Once we know what someone’s personality traits are, or their temperament, then those traits will predict what they will do in future. The idea is that, whatever the situations we find ourselves in, the ways that we think, feel and behave will be much the same. In short, there is a continuity about mental life which weaves its weft through everything we do, wherever and whenever we do it. This assumption of continuity is the basis for a whole branch of psychology called personality psychology or personology. Yet, when investigated 11

These ‘current pragmatics’ are not shaped by individuals alone. They are collectively produced. Thus what we remember is part and parcel of the ways we associate with others, the culture we live in and its immediate social demands (Middleton and Edwards, 1990).

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carefully, this assumption is controversial. ‘The fundamental attribution error’ is a term that refers to people inflating the importance of personality traits and dispositions, thus underestimating the importance of situational factors in shaping behaviour. This is the nub of the case against personology made by social psychologists. Many classic experiments in social psychology underline the power of situations over individual behaviour, showing how differently groups behave than individuals when asked to interpret ambiguous visual stimuli, make risky decisions or help someone in trouble. Other studies showed how being a member of a group with particular structures can have dramatic effects on political attitudes, aggressivity, harmfulness, competitiveness and cooperation (Ross and Nisbett, 1991). Mischel (1968) put together many such findings from social psychology to call into question the very idea of personal consistency which underlies personology. He pointed out that the average correlation across situations between different behavioural measures that were designed to tap personality traits like honesty, friendliness or dependency was in the range of 0.1 to 0.2. This means that knowing how friendly or talkative someone is in one situation is almost no help in helping to predict how they will behave in another situation. Likewise, scores on personality scales designed to measure such traits as extraversion or impulsiveness rarely showed correlations above 0.3, which suggests the idea of personality as a predictor of human behaviour has very little power. On this basis, Mischel proposed that crosssituational consistencies in human behaviour might be the exception and situational-specificity the rule. In short, the intersubjective dynamics of the situations in which we find ourselves are held primarily to determine how we behave. While this debate is still unresolved, its vitality attests to the potential importance of the A – B axis in describing consistent behaviour. Neurophysiology Turn to neurophysiology and a similar picture emerges. Nearly every current introduction to psychology has an early chapter on the ‘biological foundations’ of mental life. The chapter usually talks about genes, hormones, the nervous system and the brain. The idea is that mental life is built on and hence determined by (non-psychical) physiological processes which pre-exist and therefore determine the incidence and characteristics of moods and mental processes. This idea is fundamental to modern psychological thinking. Any mental condition, whether it be Einstein’s intelligence, an infant’s acquisition of language, intersubjectivity, schizophrenia or post-natal depression is liable at any time to be ‘explained’ by reference to genes, hormonal imbalances or the structure

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of the brain. A few years ago, one of my colleagues made the case that, once we understood how the brain worked, there would be nothing left for psychologists to do. It is as if the central mystery in psychology is a physiological mystery, how the body works, not a psychological one: how the mind works. But, as the example of
joy
showed, even a strong correlation between ‘physical causes’ and ‘mental effects’ does not make physiology the foundation of the psychical. This biological approach to psychology, popular though it be, begs a number of philosophical and logical questions. Can the brain cause the mind to be the way it is? Is this not jamming together two incompatible ontologies? (Davidson, 1974; Riley, 1983). And if physiology were logically prior to psychology, how do we explain the many ways that the mind appears to cause bodily changes? For example, the fact that giving patients pills they believe will cure them but are in fact inert placebos often does improve their condition. Might not brain and mind better be thought of as different aspects of the same mysterious substance? Is not ‘explaining away’ mental states as biologically caused actually an abuse of logic? Thus, in the first chapter of William James’ book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James sets out to prove false all psychologies which ‘explain away’ religious experience as a neural or neurotic aberration. Why? Because ‘all states of mind are neurally conditioned’ (1903, p. xxxvii). So, if we were to be consistent, we would have to write off the significance of all mental life in this way, including logic itself: ‘none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our disbeliefs [e.g. in religious experience], could retain any value as revelations of truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor’s body at the time’ (ibid., p. 14; first emphasis mine). James argues that we must therefore abandon the attempt to understand mental states by looking for their ‘origins’ or their ‘causes’ – whether these are thought to be in physiology, childhood, perverted sexuality, evolutionary or cultural history – and find a way of assessing their significance by analysing their effects. ‘The effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature’ (ibid., p. 11). Psychologists cannot interpret experience by explaining it in terms of something else. They must face up to ‘the plain truth’ that ‘to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness’ (ibid., p. 12). James’ argument has been elaborated by the pioneering Russian researcher Nikolai Bernstein (1967).12 Bernstein made the focus of his

12

Bernstein’s work partly inspired Lee’s (1998) ‘Tau theory’.

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inquiries the coordination and regulation of such simple voluntary actions as hammering a nail, filing, striking piano keys, catching a ball and walking. His work demonstrated that all the details of the constituent motions that make up these acts must be organised with the required degree of precision before the act is performed. Voluntary action is not an effect ‘caused by’ perceptual and cognitive processing of preceding events in the environment. It has to be ‘geared to’ environmental information, but it is not passively moved by such information. Such anticipatory gearing means that a one-to-one correspondence between the psychological features of plans and the details of the muscular motions they describe cannot (mathematically) exist. For example, twenty people can draw circles in the air with equal ease and to the same instruction when their hands start from a variety of different positions with regard to the rest of their body, but the circles drawn are effected by entirely different innervational programmes. Hence purposive movements entail an indeterminate relationship between physiological means and practical ends. This shows that, in order to understand the physiology of particular movements, physiologists must take as their guiding principle the end to which those movements are directed, that is, the motor problem as understood by the agent and his or her understanding of the result required for that problem’s solution. And this, Bernstein observes, ‘is a topic for psychological investigation’. Hence, psychologists who defer to physiologists for the solution to their problems, find physiologists are already deferring . . . to psychologists! Social construction The genetic fallacy does not just underpin traditional debates in psychology. It also infects a basic premise in the argument that holds modern psychological concepts and findings to be ‘socially constructed’. Thus it is common for such writers as Gergen and Sampson to point out that the ideas of mind peddled by contemporary psychologists are products of a particular social history. One target is individualism, the idea that the self is made up of a private interior consciousness which pre-exists any given social arrangement (Lukes, 1973). Our vocabulary of emotions is likewise seen to be one product of our particular cultural history, a history that traces emotions to inbuilt functions of body or brain. Go to Tahiti or ancient Greece and you will find people had quite another way of thinking about the passions – as, for example, divine intoxications or individualised eruptions of communal dynamics (Heelas and Lock, 1981). In this light, modern psychology is just another form of cultural knowledge with local cultural relevance but no more right to be generalised than the forms of

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behavioural analysis that circulate through any of the other communities around the world. This same argument impugns the universality of science. Thus Gergen tells us that the vocabularies of biology (cellulose, DNA, etc.), physics (atoms, molecules, elements) and economics (market forces, interest) are no more ‘written on the rocks’ than psychology’s vocabulary. They cannot be read off from nature. These vocabularies spring from the need within professions for communication. Thus scientific truths should be ‘viewed as outgrowths of communities and not observing minds. Likewise . . . objectivity and truth would not be outgrowths of individual minds but of community traditions. And too, science could not make claims to universal truth, as all truth claims would be specific to traditions – lodged in culture and history (Gergen, 1999, p. 14). The proponents of this kind of argument are particularly severe on concepts like experience. The term ‘experience’, we are told, does not refer to any real psychological entity. It is an ‘artifact of discourse’ (Gergen, 1985, p. 72). The same goes for words like ‘love’, ‘mind’, ‘thought’, ‘anxiety’, ‘fear’ and ‘sensation’. So many social constructionists jettison the possibility of a psychology ‘based on experience’ as if this were something based on an insubstantial puff of air. Instead they promote a discursive psychology, one that looks for the origins of discourse in social regulation or conversational dynamics. However, by saying a certain concept like ‘experience’ ‘would be unavailable without a culture to supply the terms’ (Gergen, 1999, p. 16), one is commenting on that idea’s genesis. But knowing the origin of an idea says nothing about that idea’s validity – unless one commits the genetic fallacy.13 For example, a thousand years ago, someone may well have had the idea that Earth is a sphere. This might have come to them in a dream, as a vision from God, through observations of an eclipse or by climbing to the top of a high mountain and noting the curved horizon. Whatever the idea’s origin, its validity is not affected. Likewise with psychological concepts: it is true that the word ‘experience’ is an artifact of discourse, but then so is the word ‘discourse’. Does this mean that ‘discourse’ is just as much of an epiphenomenon as experience? And if so, an epiphenomenon of what? Mathematics, phrenology, palm-reading and chemistry are also forms of discourse that have specific cultural histories. But the relative validities of these forms of discourse, what they are, whether and how they work, remain unaffected by their origins.14 13 14

Thanks to M.J. Smithson for alerting me to this point in the mid-1990s – and so introducing me to the genetic fallacy. In fact, Gergen’s (1999) critique of experience has primarily a rhetorical status: he wishes radically to estrange us from the kind of common-sense, individualistic, originary

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Conclusions The present is a complex of specificity and inter-relatedness that overwhelms our normal forms of description. Experiments can be given a beautifully linear logical elegance when conceived as examining what causes certain effects. But the situations in which experiments occur are messy with subjective construal, competing definitions of what is going on, confounds and potential demand characteristics. Genes are made up of strings of DNA which can and have been mapped in a matter of years. But every gene that is expressed is expressed in different circumstances and subject to the concurrent state of cell-processes, inter-cellular influences and the state of the whole organism – something that we are far from conceptualising, let alone studying, in all but the simplest cases. Evolution can be easily imagined to have occurred for one simple reason, the promotion of reproductive success in a sketchily imagined past. But evolution is also another name for all that is going on in the world this minute that bears on extinction and survival, something that seems too impossibly complex to study. Psychological development is likewise conceived as a unidirectional step-wise progression of the individual from infancy to maturity. But such a conception is only possible if we ignore both the problem of defining the end-products of development (ourselves) and the interpersonal, cultural matrix which affords individual change (see next chapter). Memory is also something that is easy to think of as going on ‘within’ the individual, a retrieval of the past. But research suggests a better way of understanding what we remember and forget is as a commentary on our current location in social relations. Ditto with the concept of personality. It is easy to use the idea of a pre-formed ‘deep’ personality to explain why people behave as they do in a given situation. But social psychological research suggests the specific features of a given situation may have greater predictive power than individual ‘traits’ when examined carefully. The same is true of physiological and social determinism. The question of ‘what’ is determined – current experience and action – logically pre-empts any attempt at explaining that what’s genesis. So we come to a general principle of inquiry: it is necessary to explore both synchronic and genetic axes of relatedness when attempting any psychological explanation. A second point accentuates this principle: the usual thinking that makes my thoughts, my experience, my perceptions (qua layman or scientist), what is ‘in my mind’ and knowable only to me, the unchallengeable bedrock of psychological understanding. Experience, like all other mental constructs, is a term embedded in discourse, a product of social relations, not an unmediated fact of nature. Once we have got this point, however, he is quite happy for us to use the full resources of our language to communicate about our senses of reality, including the language of ‘experience’ – a term he himself uses copiously, once his critique has been established.

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vocabularies of ‘genetic’ explanation in psychology are physicalistic and so logically incompatible with the mentalistic vocabularies required to describe the synchronic psyche. In this regard too, synchronic analysis is not only logically prior to but must stand independently of ‘genetic’ explanation in psychology.

7

Pictures of psychical change

She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding. (Virginia Woolf, 1937, The Years, p. 313)

The idea of the synchronic has given us a conceptual platform for analysing the psychological constitution of time: what it is that makes up our sense of the present. It tells us that what we experience as the present is an intersubjective construction that draws in elements placed as both past and future.1 The present is where we live, but its reality is psychical not physical. This insight has only been underlined by the discoveries of modern physics. Since the advent of the theory of relativity, time seems to have become ever more diverse and less and less subject to any unified perspective or uniform system of measurement in physics: ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one’ quoth Einstein (in Davies, 1995, p. 70). All of which makes psychology’s traditional way of treating change as evolving ‘over time’ increasingly problematic. This chapter argues that psychologists need to disentangle the concept of psychical alteration from considerations of time and recognise change as the more fundamental concept. We know from experience that the passage of time has no necessary bearing on alteration. Time may pass and nothing significant alter, whether this feels like peace, boredom or

1

Regarding the future: ‘the psychological future is part of what L. K. Frank has called ‘‘time perspective’’’, notes Kurt Lewin (1948, p. 104) in expounding his ‘field theory’. ‘The lifespace of an individual, far from being limited to what he considers the present situation, includes the future, the present, and also the past. Actions, emotions, and certainly the morale of an individual at any instant depend upon his [or her] total time perspective.’ Regarding the past: see previous chapters. See also Freud’s (1899, 1917) notions of ‘screen memories’ and ‘deferred action’: both concepts assume that a recent event can retrospectively make significant a past event that did not have that significance when it occurred.

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stagnation. On the other hand, things can change in a twinkling. In the midst of his morning ablutions, a newcomer to an expatriate community is visited for a few moments by a young woman who unexpectedly invites him to breakfast. When she goes he looks back to the mirror with new eyes, seeing a face whose aged appearance was nothing to him before she called. In fact, time only has meaning if changes occur that permit us to differentiate the past from the present. Without such changes, the measurement of time is meaningless (Motz and Weaver, 1989, p. 57). Yet change does make sense without reference to time. Thus Newton’s discovery of differential calculus was achieved by deducing how to take time out of an equation for spatial alteration (movement) to determine what is called ‘instantaneous speed’.2 Freud (1915, p. 191) notes that there is no such thing as time in the unconscious. Unconscious processes ‘are not ordered temporally, are not [necessarily] altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all’.3 Perception of psychical alteration (and hence the perception of time) requires a juxtaposition of different perspectives. Such a juxtaposition presupposes a world of perspectives within which the individual reorientates as part of ‘an intersubjective praxis occurring in the present’ (Joas, 1985, p. 192). Indeed the pioneering social philosopher and psychologist Mead claims the fact of perspective-taking, along with the societal reproduction of takeable perspectives, is what creates the framework within which psychical alteration must occur. The idea that alteration depends on a kaleidoscopic reorganisation of super-posed differences of subjectposition co-existing in the present has analogies with theories of musical development. It leads to a new way of conceiving the task of developmental psychologists, shifting it away from the supposedly disengaged observation of a ‘natural unfolding’ of mental capacities towards the creation of what Winnicott called ‘potential space’ (Davis and Wallbridge, 1987). Once created, such space is an arena for a public discursivity of experience. Viewed in this way, the descriptive task of the psychologist becomes the logistical one of providing adequate intersubjective conditions within which others are able to describe, negotiate and organise their experiences. Conceived thus, the task of the developmental psychologist is a pragmatised version of the sort of intellectual midwifery

2

3

He did this by asking what would happen if the value for time in the equation speed = distance travelled divided by time taken were to be made so infinitesimally small that it approached zero. ‘A humiliation that was experienced thirty years ago acts exactly like a fresh one throughout the thirty years, as soon as it has gained access to the unconscious sources of emotion’ (Freud, 1900, p. 734).

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(or ‘maieutic’ art) that Socrates claimed to ground education (Plato, c. 378 BC, pp. 853ff; Bradley, 1998). The developmental ladder Change is normally dealt with in psychology under the aegis of development, developmental psychology being the discipline’s principal stronghold for the genetic fallacy (described in the last chapter). The pre-eminent question in developmental psychology is ‘how did faculty X come to be as it is?’. The genetic fallacy ensures that key characteristics of the end-point of development are assumed rather than properly examined. Piaget never researched the ‘what’ of adult rationality. If he had, he would have found that the achievements of science are not based solely on a capacity for logical deduction and careful observation, but involve competition, collaboration, dream, intuition, repression and imagination, taking place in what Latour and Woolgar (1986; cf. Walkerdine, 1988) called an ‘agonistic field’. Neither did Bowlby research the ‘what’ of adult love. If he had, the plausibility of defining love as proximity-promotion might have palled (see Chapter 8). Yet their theories respectively set out to show the ‘how come’ of adult rationality and the prototype of love. As we shall see, this speculative relationship between the imputed End of development and the steps which supposedly lead to it immediately stamps a scale and character on what psychical alteration is: development is a series of steps that permanently ‘improve’ mental functioning. This means that many psychical alterations will be too small, too transient or too reversible to count as worthy of theorists’ attention. In fact, while developmental theories may appear diverse, they have a set of common features which tightly define the kind of thing that counts as psychologically relevant change. For example, developmental theories almost exclusively describe an individual trajectory. This means that development is something one charts individual by individual (but see Parker, 1995) There is no sense of development applying to a couple, a group, community or society, despite the fact that alterations in such collectivities do occur and are often of considerable psychical importance.4 But that is not the end of the commonalities in psychology’s picture of change. In the old days, psychologists like Gesell used to chart the ‘milestones’ of individual development, mapping out when the typical child first sat up, rolled over, stood, walked and said their first word. Gesell (1945) 4

Of course groups are well known to change over time e.g. Bales’ and Strodtbeck’s (1951) famous forming, storming, norming, performing sequence. But such changes are not seen as relevant to developmental psychology but social psychology.

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published atlases of what he called ‘behavioural embryology’ which illustrated what a one-year-old, two-year-old, three-year-old and so on typically did when confronted with such physical challenges as locomotion, drinking, etc. This descriptive approach to the study of what Kaplan (1983) calls ontogenesis had few explanatory pretensions. In the hands of theorists like Piaget or Bowlby or Kohlberg, ladder-like descriptions of human development in terms of ‘milestones’ have been subtly but profoundly recast. Now it is theory that prescribes the ‘stages’ or steps toward adult functioning. Such theories are assumed to apply to all children, regardless of epoch or culture. In this regard ‘the child’ they discuss is not directly observable but an abstract individual who is seen principally as the bearer of certain fixed and invariant human psychological features – instincts, faculties, schemas, concepts, desires – which the theorist deems to determine behaviour. Everything else is at best secondary. Family, social and political arrangements are irrelevant in a theory like Piaget’s that focuses on reasoning (Lukes, 1973, p. 73). Likewise, attachment theory assumes the baby has certain inbuilt needs which may or may not be met by the mother, maternal inadequacy having dire developmental consequences. In these theories (see below), the child is pictured as beginning life ‘outside’ society and therefore requiring ‘socialisation’ during the course of development.5 The notion of theory-defined developmental ‘stages’ implies a set of further assumptions about psychical alteration.6 As with Gesell, the imagery is still of an ascending ladder up which, simply by virtue of ageing, the climber necessarily goes step by step to a given destination. Moving up this staircase is still time-linked: the older we get, the further we climb. But it is also assumed to be inherently progressive: the further we climb, the better we get. Development now has a direction. It is towards greater competence, whether that be cognitive, emotional, social, linguistic, psycho-sexual or moral. Usually a theory deals with only one of these competencies, however, and deals with it exclusively, showing scant consideration for other aspects of mental life. Thus Piaget 5 6

Treating the individual child as the unit of developmental analysis ‘masks patterns of difference based on gender, class or culture’ (Burman, 1994, p. 167). See Kaplan (1983) and Morss (1990). Underpinning the ladder model of psychical change is a version of evolutionary theory. From Charles Darwin on, there has been an assumption that individual development recapitulates the evolution of the species. Thus the evolutionary ‘progress’ from amoeba to Homo sapiens is the same ascending scale up which each human being must climb from fertilised ovum to adult citizen. This ‘biogenetic law’ was first formulated by Haeckel (1874) in a book that was greatly admired by Darwin and many of his successors. In this, argues Morss (1990), Darwin was ‘nonDarwinian’ – for previously Darwin had argued that there was no necessary progress or scala natura in evolution.

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describes emotion as just the fuel which makes the cognitive machinery run.7 In fact the ladder-image endows ‘development’ with a set of further characteristics: development is a fixed track and one-way. Whoever goes up does not come back down, except in the cases of ‘abnormal’ development that Freud dubbed regression. Such exceptions illuminate another assumption: that there is such a thing as ‘normal’ development, and it is this that theory accounts for. To the extent that we depart from the norm, something has gone wrong: we have become abnormal. Finally, the imagery of a staircase brings with it an assumption that the first steps are the most important. Take away the lowest steps and the whole structure collapses. Remove the upper rungs and the remainder stay in place. Hence the child-centredness of developmental psychology, the fact that, traditionally, psychological development is deemed to be over by the time one attains majority. Morss (1992, p. 461) observes that, in developmental theory, ‘instead of facing the difficult issue of becoming . . . the more familiar phenomenon of moving is substituted. To recognize becoming is to recognize history, responsibility, desire . . . Moving carries no such existential load.’ Developmentalists are not only working with a ‘false, spatialised’ understanding of time, but ‘with respect to development, people’s lives are portrayed as taking place in a fourth pseudo-spatial dimension within which a coherent identity is conserved. The same one unique person is travelling through time’ (ibid., p. 462). Hence, the person climbing up the developmental ladder is changing where they are ‘in this lateral space of developmental time’ (ibid.) but not who they are. Developmental theories thus beg the difficult questions about how ‘the same’ person might ‘change completely’. Morss’ solution is to drop the illusory spatialised conception of development-as-movement in which personal identity is fixed, ‘instead of identity there must be difference’ (ibid.). This suggestion has two sides. One is the implication that developmental theory has not found a way to deal with true change, real ‘difference’, and must do so. Less obviously, Morss raises a question about identity itself: what would a significant psychical alteration look like? Is this not a contradiction in terms: how can I develop into someone who is both not-I and yet still me? This second question is largely avoided in developmental psychology (but see the section after next). Theories like Piaget’s deal only with isolated faculties of the mind (reason or emotion or sociability) and not with the whole of who one is.8 A century earlier though, one psychologist was acutely aware of the problem: 7 8

Affectivity is ‘like gasoline, which activates the motor of an automobile but does not modify its structure’ (quoted in Bradley, 1989, p. 153). There are exceptions of course, Erikson being a famous theorist of identity-change.

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In the world of the spirit the various stages are not like towns on a route of travel, which it is quite in order for the traveler to tell about directly: as for example, ‘we left Pekin and came to Canton, on the 14th of the month we were in Canton’. Such a traveler changes place but not himself, and hence it is in order that he tells about it in the direct unaltered form, and thus relates the change. But in the world of the spirit a change of place means a change in oneself . . . That a man has arrived at this or that distant place in the world of spirit is proved by the mode of presentation itself; if this testifies to the contrary, all direct assurances become merely a contribution to the comical. (Kierkegaard, 1846, p. 250)

Migrants and travellers will recognise the truth of this remark. Just as travel is not the same thing as a change in oneself, so one’s unchanging self may be an unwelcome encumbrance when one travels. De Botton (2002, p. 20) illustrates this point by recounting a discovery made on a winter break in Barbados. The trip was not what he had hoped. Why? Because ‘I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island’ – complete with all his familiar ‘psychological knots’. It was the pinch of these knots that determined the form of his holiday, its successes, its failures, not the island’s remoteness, the sweep of palms along the beach or the cloud-dappled blue of the sea. Afterwards he muses that it is often easy to imagine travelling to far lands when looking at holiday brochures ‘and ignore the complex creature in which this observation is taking place and for whom this [planned trip] is only a small part of a larger, more multifaceted task of living’. Likewise it seems easy to theorise about development as if it were merely moving from place to place, thus forgetting that the way one undertakes the complex task of living may really change, transforming who one is.

The stories theories tell Implicit in the foregoing commentary is a distinction between the agelinked ladder-like progressions that developmental theory inscribes in nature and the haphazard roller-coaster of psychical alteration as we actually experience it. This distinction is sister to the distinction Kaplan (1983) drew between development and ontogenesis. According to Kaplan, developmental theories impose a shape on the real phenomena of psychical alteration, phenomena which are neither necessarily progressive nor irreversible nor uniform nor coherent even. ‘Development does not lurk directly in the population(s) studied but resides fundamentally in the perspective used’ (ibid., p. 196). And the perspective used is developmental insofar as it projects on to nature a movement toward some form of perfection. Kaplan argues this orientation is a virtue, if acknowledged and understood, and defines developmental psychology as

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‘a practico-theoretical discipline, a policy discipline, concerned with the perfection (including liberation or freedom) of the individual’ (ibid., p. 188). The problems arise when theorists read their own values into nature and ‘see actual ontogenesis as moving through a series of stages in a fixed and quasi-necessary sequence toward some ideal end state of affairs or mode of operation’ (ibid., p. 189): an inversion of the naturalistic fallacy.9 Conflation between prescription and description turns out to be all too common in child psychology. This is particularly clear in the study of infancy (Bradley, 1989). Whether we take Freud or Darwin, Bowlby or Skinner, James or Watson, Chomsky or Piaget, all perceive babies as being naturally endowed with the psychical equipment required by their ideal of what it is to be human. Whatever babies are really like, infancy has become a blank slate upon which psychologists project their theoretical ideals. Freud is interested in adults’ repression of sexual feelings, so he ‘discovers’ an unrepressed sexual baby. Piaget is interested in the mental underpinnings of scientific thinking, so he finds a would-be scientist in the crib. Bowlby (1946) is concerned about the abnormality known as ‘affectionless psychopathy’, so his ‘normal’ baby turns out to be an affectionate little critter (Bowlby, 1958). Chomsky’s expertise is syntax, so his baby is an innate grammarian. Each theorist adduces certain key facts to prove his view, ignoring the rest. Freud’s evidence that children have a sexual life was that babies glow with pleasure when sucking at the breast and baby boys have erections. Such observations have no place in Piagetian, Chomskyan, Skinnerian or attachment theories. It is likewise with Piaget, who made much of the infant’s capacity repeatedly to suck back saliva into the mouth, arguing this to illuminate a step on the path to intentional action. But how is this relevant to language-learning, or to attachment theory, even though Bowlby’s theory does talk about the ‘reflex’ of sucking? Chomsky’s baby babbles, but what is phonology to Freud? Apparently developmental psychology is locked in the same prison as the novel, which, according to Kermode (1967, p. 173), is a place where we must accept ‘that our inherited ways of echoing the structure of the world have no concord with it, but only, and then under conditions of great difficulty, with the desires of our own minds’. In this regard, developmental theories have the same structure as narratives (Gergen and Gergen, 1986). The theory first establishes a valued end-point, sexual maturity in Freud or scientific rationality in Piaget. And then, just like a narrative, the theory prescribes a temporal order that leads to the end-point. ‘The End 9

The naturalistic fallacy assumes that what is the case ought to be the case. Here what the theorist thinks ought to be the case is treated as if it is the case.

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changes all, and produces, in what in relation to it is the past, these seasons, kairoi, historical moments of intemporal significance’ (Kermode, 1967, p. 47). The narrative thus contains and organizes – or bypasses – the otherwise disorderly alterations that punctuate our lives. It is ‘an organization that humanizes time by giving it form . . . because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death’ (ibid., pp. 45, 57–8). While narrative may be poetically satisfying, it does not resolve the perplexities about change that lead us to ruminate on time in the first place. This is partly because there is no guaranteed concordance between the flux of experience and the temporality of narrative. Narrative offers an escape from the perplexities that surround alteration, resolving them only by allowing us to deny, replace or flee their embrace. Developmental theory offers the same kind of haven, the stages it defines being ‘moments of intemporal significance’ that serve as comprehensible stepping-stones towards the ideal End of development a given theory imputes (cf. Kessen, 1993). These moments of narrative organisation are hence not necessarily commensurate with moments of psychical alteration at all. One solution to the divergence between change as lived and development as theorised would be to find some alternative form of literary portraiture that does greater justice to the complexities of consciousness and the exigencies of psychical life. Literary form is a matter of choice, and the choice of developmentalists to copy Victorian novelists in depicting ‘the unfolding of destinies of sharply individualized ‘‘characters’’ . . . within the conventional notation of chronological sequence is only one of many possible decisions, possessing no inherently superior claim to the allegiance of serious readers. There is nothing innately more ‘‘human’’ about these procedures’ (Sontag, 1967, p. 89; my emphasis). We will only be able to judge if a change of literary form is an improvement, however, if we have some idea of the kinds of psychical alteration developmentalists need to theorise and some idea of the ways in which such changes relate to the passage of time. The point of my argument so far has been to establish that these are separate empirical questions which cannot be decided by theoretical fiat. Cases of psychical alteration Because developmental psychology glosses over the question of what psychical alteration is, there is no obvious branch of psychology that deals with it. So one must dig in diverse corners if one wishes to get some idea of the topic’s dimensions. Potential sources are manifold. Whether it be from research, personal experience, humourous anecdote,

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therapists’ case studies, biography, drama, fiction or social history, a prime focus is human alteration, progress or decline, gradual or sudden, individual or collective. Hence, my illustrations will perforce be somewhat eclectic, drawn from art as well as science. A project I recently conducted using the technique of collective biography with fifty-seven Australian undergraduates gives an inkling of just how diverse are the alterations that stud people’s lives, even in this relatively homogeneous group (forty being 18–25 years old; forty-seven of them being female; all well-educated; all studying psychology). Some alterations were gradual. A male school-teacher, aged thirty-eight, felt he could no longer deny that he was getting slower and older: ageing had finally registered as ‘change’. Some seem accidental. Two younger students described the lasting effects of being the victims of violent hold-ups when at work. Two others described the alterations wrought in close relatives by surviving a car crash. Six described the death of a close friend or family-member as a defining moment. Other alterations are more actively sought. Seven picked overseas travel as a turning-point in their lives: making some value what they already had, making others question it. Five who had recently left home to come to university saw this as a turning-point. Others cited losing their religious faith, becoming a parent, recovering from serious illness, committing to a long-term relationship, getting divorced, parents getting divorced, moving inter-state, overcoming a ‘bad girl’ reputation, working on the streets, the irreversible consequences of a flaming row with teacher, mother or friend, the effects of taking Ecstasy, the confidence drawn from organising a large party. In most cases, what was significant about these experiences was that they could be described as a self-contained occurrence set in the past and so be used to illustrate the individual’s current understanding of themselves: lonely, mature, wiser, humbler, socially or physically diminished, more independent, more dissatisfied, more fearful, sadder, more responsible, more cynical, more aware. Others’ experiences were unresolved. Most of those who described the death of a loved one drew a moral from the event: seize the day, do not count on anything, wake up! But one young woman was still in the midst of her grief and incomprehension at her brother’s death two years previously. Emma, who had been held up with a syringe in a video-store, was still fearful of going out after dark. The mother of a handicapped child felt that she would never again be sociable and carefree. Reflecting on these findings we see how change is neither necessarily progressive nor generic and how the individual’s own values get bound up in the sense made of a personal turning-point. The sense-making which recuperates a challenging experience to become a significant part of

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someone’s life-story is itself a discrete and variable process. Thus physically everyone is relentlessly ageing. But personally recognising that one is ageing is a far less inevitable, far more intermittent and ambiguous experience. This process of sense-making is what makes psychical alteration so complex and so hard to observe ‘from outside’. Development, on the other hand, is often theorised as both inevitable and something that can only be observed externally, by the application of theoretically derived criteria to selected kinds of behaviour. For example, Piaget’s ‘conservation’ experiments are used to show whether a child has or has not transcended the stage of ‘pre-operational thinking’, something that cannot be accessed through the child’s own experience. In War and Peace the central characters all undergo significant transformation. Once again, these are not necessarily for the better. After the death of his wife, whom he did not love as he felt he should, Prince Andrey withdraws from other people beneath a carapace of self-denial and cynicism, bereft of the social energy, empathy and philosophic calm that had previously been his. He becomes thin, dull and lifeless with ‘a wrinkle on his brow indicating prolonged concentration on some one thought’ (Tolstoy, 1867, Bk V, p. 506). He is finally brought out of this moral decline by a conversation during a long trip with his friend Pierre, in which Pierre seeks to persuade him of the value of striving towards truth and goodness – even though the world be corrupt – and of the existence of life after death. Having tried to refute Pierre’s arguments by every means at his disposal, including reference to his remorse over his wife’s death, Prince Andrey finally lifts his gaze up into the evening sky ‘and something that had long been slumbering, something that was best within him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful in his soul’ (ibid., Bk V, pp. 516–17). We are told that his meeting with Pierre marked a new epoch in Prince Andrey’s life. He is soon in love with Natasha Rostova and energetically re-involving himself in public affairs. Another source for representations of psychic alteration is in casestudies by psychotherapists. Often progress in therapy involves changes in the therapist’s own behaviour. That is, in defining a client’s problems, the psychologist comes to recognise that she or he is exacerbating or cementing the problem by the way s/he is responding to it. As the psychologist starts to alter his or her behaviour, the patient too will be helped to alter. Psychoanalyst Anne Alvarez (1992) is particularly clear on this point, reporting how she became increasingly aware of the need to distinguish between two kinds of talk by her client, the autistic child Robbie. One was static, one-dimensional, repetitive and ritualistic. It seemed to have no fantasy associated with it nor to ‘have the openended qualities which would lead to the development of new networks

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of association’ (Tustin, 1981, p. 96, quoted in Alvarez, 1992, p. 44). Other rarer communications were more resonant and meaning-laden, being accompanied by lively interest and real curiosity about how what he said would be received. Once Alvarez had recognised this difference, she did her best to refuse the gluey ritualistic kind of communication Robbie frequently offered in favour of something that was more alive. This hardening of attitude in turn led Robbie to look at Alvarez differently, to be curious about her and to talk to her more vitally. One week he commented with admiration that he could see her and she was ‘straight and stiff’. A few days later he volunteered that he had been to London’s Natural History Museum ‘and I have bones and muscle and they are how I move’ (Alvarez, 1992, p. 47). Robbie was often so floppy physically that Alvarez says she had difficulty in believing he had a backbone at all, ‘so it was strange and hopeful to hear him show an interest in bones’ (ibid.). By the end of the week his language had changed markedly: Robbie was full of imagined movement, talking of building, collecting, filling, taking pictures, cuddling, climbing, kicking, breaking in and, most of all, wanting. The language for him, was extremely vigorous, full of verbs, full of verbal bone and muscle. I suspect that an important prelude to this development was the day on which he saw me as ‘stiff and straight’, and that this heralded the beginnings of an important introjective and identificatory process. (ibid., p. 49)

Alvarez (ibid., p. 51) comments that alteration like this does not pertain to the individual alone. It is crucial ‘to note not only that Robbie came to life at moments, but to whom or to what kind of figure or landscape or object in his imagined world he awoke, and by what figure or landscape or object a particular awakening was facilitated’. As with Prince Andrey, the transformation Alvarez describes is one that affects and is effected by significant relationships, not occurring just ‘within’ one individual.10 ‘Coming out’ as gay means reshaping one’s relationships with people who have previously thought one to be ‘straight’. New sexual partnership, falling in love and marriage are likewise significant insofar as they involve an altered orientation to others and others’ expectations.11 Another commonality is that such alterations register within one unchanging situation. To echo Kierkegaard and Morss, psychical alteration is not analogous to moving

10

11

This may seem to contradict the ‘internality’ of change discussed above. But Raymond Williams’ (1983) painstaking analysis of Shakespearean soliloquies demonstrates that even these archetypal ‘internal monologues’ are dialogic in structure. Notably, if such events do not appear to change their agent’s expressed relationships to others, it will often be judged that these events were ‘meaningless’ to the individual concerned.

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through space. Alvarez (ibid., p. 49) comments of Robbie’s sudden activation that it ‘is difficult to convey without describing hundreds of dead sessions just how foreign movement was to this vegetable-like creature’. Pursued in detail, such cases contrast in a number of ways with the kinds of event traditionally said to betoken psychological development. First, psychical alteration of the kinds being illustrated here is important because it means something to the individuals or groups undergoing it. Developmental theories, in contrast, largely ignore the experience of the individual developing. Bowlby (1958) called a baby’s crying a ‘proximitypromoting’ attachment behaviour and hence part of the ‘positive’ side of the child’s tie to its mother. The possibility that, in the baby’s experience, their crying is significant because it betokens anxiety, sadness, hunger, anger or aversion is thereby rendered irrelevant. Descriptive truth in developmental psychology depends on the fact that what is being theorised in, say, Piaget’s notion of sensori-motor intelligence or Chomsky’s notion of a ‘language acquisition device’ is a coordinating structure that underpins the infant’s mental schemes, such that when the structure alters, the schemes will be transformed across the board. But such structures lie far ‘beneath’ experience, too deep to be thought or experienced. A girl may well be proud that she is now ‘doing algebra’, but no child would be able to specify or experience the changes comprising the cognitive reorganisation which produces what Piaget called formal operational thinking. Indeed ‘doing harder maths’ may, so far as a child is concerned, be an inconsequential matter that has no real impact on his or her overall understanding of who s/he is. Likewise, an insecure boy may over years become aware of his insecurity. But the developmental events that attachment theory claims to have produced his malaise happened so early in childhood that they could at best be for him a dim surmise drawn from hearsay evidence fed into the fallible process of autobiographical reconstruction. Most of the examples considered here have no essential connection with age or chronological sequence. Indeed, a significant event may not become significant until well after it has occurred. Thus Freud hypothesises that it may only be through ‘deferred action’ that such events as the death or divorce of one’s parents come to have psychical significance. At the time they occurred they may have seemed inconsequential. Moreover the alterations discussed here are both eminently reversible and potentially ‘for the worse’. In War and Peace, Prince Andrey’s spiritual revival after his conversation with Pierre breaks down after Natasha is seduced into eloping with another man.12 His life again becomes senseless to him and he

12

Although, at the last moment, the elopement is foiled by Natasha’s family.

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buries himself in the anonymity of war. Natasha too goes into decline, tries to poison herself and falls ill. She loses interest in what were previously her greatest pleasures, party-going, coquetry, singing and dancing, and feels that she is morally bad and valueless to others. She wants nothing for herself. Formerly the life and soul of her family, she now feels awkward with everyone except her young brother, avoiding other people when she can. Instead she fills with religious zeal. The dynamics of social groups can also have profound effects on their members, whether these be in family structure, organisational structure or the depletion of small communities by rural depopulation. Coles (1986, pp. 27ff) gives an example of the first white youth to speak to a black in one of Atlanta’s desegregated high schools in the early 1960s. Faced day after day with a moral challenge, the persecution of two black children by his white classmates, this young man found himself, inexplicably and suddenly,13 impelled to help out one of these ‘niggers’ (as he called them). Day after day, the two black boys were bussed into the previously ‘white’ high school and told to ‘go, nigger, go’ by their white peers, including the fourteen-year-old in question. The school eventually had to get police to protect them. After a few weeks ‘I began to see a kid, not a nigger – a guy who knew how to smile when it was rough going, and who walked straight and tall, and was polite.’ Then one day it happened. I saw a few people cuss at him. ‘The dirty nigger’, they kept on calling him, and soon they were pushing him in a corner, and it looked like trouble, bad trouble. I went over and broke it up. I said, ‘Hey, cut it out.’ They all looked at me as if I was crazy, my white buddies and the nigger, too. But my buddies stopped, and the nigger left. Before he left, I spoke to him. I didn’t mean to, actually! It just came out of my mouth. I was surprised to hear the words myself: ‘I’m sorry’. As soon as he was gone, my friends gave it to me: ‘What do you mean, ‘‘I’m sorry’’!’ I didn’t know what to say . . . That was the strangest moment of my life.

As Coles reports, in that strange moment his life had in fact changed. In no time, he was beginning to talk more self-consciously to the black youth, eventually becoming his friend and advocate. What is interesting here is that, though this event can be told as a story, the event itself was very brief and was a variation on an oft-repeated scenario that involved a number of people – i.e. was collectively produced – and that does not have a place in any known diachronic sequence of individualised moral

13

Though not entirely without rumination. Thus prior to his unexpected outburst, the boy reports saying to his parents: ‘It’s a real a shame that someone like him has to pay for the trouble caused by all those federal judges’ (Coles, 1986, p. 27).

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development (which is why Coles tells the tale).14 Yet it was undoubtedly a moment of significant human transformation for all concerned. Coles’ example illustrates both that alteration over time has to do with a rearrangement of elements within the same synchronic state and that it has no necessary dependence on temporal duration. The next section works out a theoretical framework to make sense of the features of psychical alteration drawn out in the above illustrations. Re-theorising psychical change The idea that past, present and future are all parts of an atemporal synchronic field raises doubt about change. Is my ‘total time perspective’ and hence change to it, purely subjective? Does it have no relation to events occurring outside my mental envelope? If so, what I call alteration may also be purely subjective. Or is change intersubjective? If so, it cannot be ‘purely subjective’. For if ‘sociality is the character of the ‘‘present’’’ (Mead, in Joas, 1985, p. 183), then clearly it does bear a relation to things that occur outside my private ‘here and now’. The idea has been argued in previous chapters that what is present to me can only be so because it is part of a synchronic field which is a collective phenomenon. The relationship between temporality and intersubjectivity is the key to Mead’s (1932) Philosophy of the Present. First, without change, we could have no idea of time.15 Time is thus often a form of short-hand for representing change: she died at 4 o’clock; it takes three hours to drive from here to Sydney. But the fact that we recognise change at all, says Mead, depends on the fact that we are capable of viewing objects from two or more perspectives simultaneously. According to his theory, only if we can put together in the same mental space the thing as it was and the thing as it now is can we recognise that the thing has changed: we must be ‘able to hold on to two or more mutually exclusive systems within which the same object appears, by passing from one to the 14

15

Coles makes the point that this fourteen-year-old ‘redneck’ would have fared poorly on all the abstract ‘developmental’ tests of moral reasoning administered by the likes of Lawrence Kohlberg et al. (1983). Clocks ‘tell us the time’ by virtue of the fact that they both change and change predictably. But ‘the reason why a common time-perspective can be constituted in a common praxis is that time is structured in an action taking place in the present’ (Joas, 1985, p. 191). Time can only be ‘told’ at all because the clock becomes a reference-point within a common praxis. In the same vein B.F. Skinner argued (in conversation with me at Harvard c.1987) that what a clock is has nothing to do with its innards, whether they be electrical, clockwork, a sundial or atomic. A clock is what it is by virtue of the way it enters into the regulation of human action. He used this as an argument by analogy against the necessity of knowing about physiology when studying the causes of human behaviour.

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other’ (Mead, 1932, p. 80). It is in this capacity to take multiple perspectives that Mead sees the ‘sociality’ which makes time possible. What Lewin (1946) called ‘time perspectives’ do not fall ready-made from the sky. Neither does the individual create them ab initio. Time presupposes a world of perspectives which are constituted through ‘an intersubjective praxis occurring in the present’ (Joas, 1985, p. 192). Mead thus claims the fact of perspective-taking, and the societal reproduction of takeable perspectives, founds all temporal horizons. More precisely, in linking timeperspectives to the common praxis of social life, he argues that the specious present is bound up with the time-span of the currently occurring social action: ‘The stretch of the present within which this self-consciousness finds itself is delimited by the particular social act in which we are engaged’ (Mead, 1932, p. 87). Mead’s approach to time can be linked up with the theme of collectivity we earlier deduced from Saussure’s (1974, p. 77) approach to language: ‘It is the whole set of linguistic habits which allow an individual to understand and to be understood.’ Such habits are communally not individually maintained.16 Without its social context, language becomes something artificial: ‘Contrary to appearances, language never exists apart from the social fact . . . its social nature is one of its inner characteristics’ (ibid., p. 77). But the social forces that constitute language operate invisibly unless we view language unfolding over time: ‘if we considered the community of speakers without considering time, we would not see the effect of the social forces that influence language’ (ibid., p. 78). We can return to the Wendy House for an illustration of the way in which the collective, intersubjective underpinnings of language create the conditions for psychical alteration without regard for time. Walkerdine’s description shows how ‘the same’ two girls in ‘the same’ physical structure move quickly through three overlapping fields of language (‘discourse formats’). The first is implied by the Wendy House itself and the first words of Walkerdine’s description: two girls are ‘at play’. Cultural history has provided these girls with a pre-school equipped with a Wendy House, a physical structure which invites feminine play. Nancy, Diane, Walkerdine and we her readers all show ourselves absolutely familiar with this ‘form of life’: we are all members of this community of speakers. So the girls easily imagine a TV, busywork and characters in a domestic drama. And we easily accept their imagining as play – rather than as madness for example. Walkerdine picks up the story at the point where Nancy invites Diane to ‘watch tele’. This too is highly familiar. Watching 16

A conclusion often derived from Wittgenstein’s (1958) ‘private language argument’ (e.g. Gergen, 1994).

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TV together is not a skill, a perspective or a schema that exists by itself in Nancy’s mind: it is a language game that it takes more than one to construct and to play. Diane’s disinclination is not summed up in a ‘No.’ She still wants to play. So she swiftly recasts the situation as a family scenario in which she is the busy mother and Nancy the demanding child. Once again, this discourse format would not work if it was solely ‘in her head’. It only works if Nancy recognises the format and wants to join in Diane’s proposed ‘perspective’, which Nancy obligingly does. There is thus a rich paradigmatic ‘over-determination’ of the circumstances that define the simultaneity the two girls are ‘in’ – and this example only skims the surface of what potentially could be meant by play in a Wendy House. Such rich metaphorical associativeness is synchronous, supra-individual, collective. And it is the collectiveness of this multiplicity of meaning which allows the two girls so easily and so rightly to assume that their overtures will engage each other and thereby to shift between overlapping simultaneities of sense. The supra-individual nature of simultaneity and the changes this affords is also seen in therapy. Klein’s work suggests that it is not enough to go looking for missing aspects of the patient in his or her repressed and buried unconscious: these missing parts or feelings can sometimes lie in other people’s thoughts and feelings. The phenomena of ‘projective identification’ include situations where some of the people you meet make you feel intelligent and attractive, while others make you feel you have egg on your chin: Human beings, often quite unknowingly, can evoke very specific and often powerful feelings in other people, and we may do this repetitively in certain systematic ways in order to rid ourselves of unwanted or simply unacknowledged parts of our own personality, or because we genuinely believe a particular feeling or thought or talent could never be ours. A child may indeed have an elder brother who is more intelligent or more academic than she is, but if this fact of family history has led her to believe that everyone is more intelligent and that she is stupid, not only see others as more intelligent (Freud’s notion of projection – Freud, 1911), she may be doing something much more active and continuously impoverishing to her own personality than simply having a perception: she may really be allowing or even inviting others to do the thinking for her in situations where she could do it for herself (projective identification as described by Melanie Klein,1946). (Alvarez, 1992, pp. 2–3)

From this viewpoint, the dynamics of therapeutic alteration – such as those illustrated in Alvarez’s client Robbie above – would not even be conceivable unless a grid of personal attribution were interpersonally accessible. Just as in the Wendy House, there must be some tacit supraindividual framework of intelligibility within which people can position

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themselves as stupid and into which they invite other people’s cleverness. This vision has the paradoxical result that ‘who one is’ is not necessarily localisable in ‘one’s own’ psyche. One’s ‘personality’ may be simultaneously distributed across many sites. Hence psychical alteration in ‘who one is’ must also have dynamics which are supra-individual, as is shown to be the case in the last section’s examples. The fact that human action typically occurs in a collective space richly stacked with alternative meanings is also what makes situational humour possible. An action or statement is made that has more than the one construction: the sudden outing of an alternative, whether deliberate or accidental, giving rise to laughter. The existence of such paradigmatic layering can in practice, as Saussure notes, only be borne out in a linear fashion over time, as in the Wendy House – though the amount of time required may vary from moments (viz. the Wendy House and Coles’ example) to centuries (as Saussure observes of linguistic change). Nevertheless, the implication is that this structure of metaphorical possibilities is always already ‘there’ vertically stacked in a super-position of alternatives, awaiting orders as it were – like Schroedinger’s cat.17 It is thus that Freud’s remark that there is no time in the unconscious makes sense, because all the significant possibilities are always already ‘there’. I put ‘there’ in scare-quotes because, as we have just seen, a simultaneity does not necessarily have a single physical location either. We can draw an analogy here from physics, where the results of the famous experiment by Aspect et al. (1982) showing that two electrons are apparently able to communicate with one another instantly across time and space. Simultaneous measurements are too closely correlated to be explained otherwise, thus over-turning the physicists’ assumption of locality: that events can only influence other events in their immediate vicinity. This result has given rise to the notion of interconnecting quantum ‘fields’ which enfold individual particles in universe-wide wave functions that

17

The concept of ‘super-position’ comes from quantum physics as a way of dealing with the fact that an act of measuring, e.g. the spin of a sub-atomic particle, means that one cannot then measure its position. The act of measuring spin has ‘precipitated out’ or instantiated a spinning particle from the universe, which means one no longer ‘has’ a particle defined in terms of position – whereas if one had set out to measure position, one would have ‘precipitated out’ a particle with position but indeterminable spin. Super-position refers to the state of the particle prior to measurement. It is in a sort of indeterminate limbo or ‘super-position’ of contrasting states: spin and position. Shroedinger dramatised this paradoxical state of affairs in a thought experiment that involves a cat in a metal case which contains a vial of poison that may or may not have been released depending on whether or not a smidgen of radioactive material has or has not decayed. Prior to opening the box, we cannot tell whether the cat will be dead or alive. Prior to that time, it is therefore said to be in a ‘super-position’ of live and dead states.

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contain a stupendous number of correlations (Bohm, 1986; Davies and Brown, 1986, p. 177; Davies, 1995). This implies in turn that the very reality of any given particle is instantaneously interwoven with that of the rest of the universe. By analogy, I have proposed that the intersubjective field of the synchronic may also exhibit ‘non-locality’ or ‘synchronicity’ if that field can be conceived as something which has an instantaneous coordination independent of space (Bradley, 2001; Shotter, 2003). Such a conception is certainly in keeping with Karl Marx’s (1845) proposition that human consciousness is sustained by ‘the ensemble of social relations’, and indeed with the explanatory aspirations of social theory per se (see Chapter 5). Viewed against this background, the features of psychical alteration illustrated in the previous section begin to cohere. The independence of psychical alteration from duration has already been noted, as has its collective basis. We also begin to see why psychical alteration consists in a kaleidoscopic rearrangement of elements within the same synchronic state. In this, analogy to music is apt. For, in music, the concept of development only makes sense if it is applied to a particular composition. The composition will typically set out with a statement of musical themes or its ‘subject’. There will then be a treatment which breaks up the initial themes into their constituent members, that is, ‘analyses’ them and explores them by making new passages out of them (often by modulation of key). Finally the first-stated themes will be repeated but with new significance and greater depth, owing to their development during phase II. The rules of harmony determine that there is an enormous but finite set of variations implicit in any one musical idea. And it is through their awareness of these rules that composers establish their originality. Thus it is that Schenkerian analysis can define, albeit only retrospectively, a musical shape or Ursatz which functions as a fundamental thematic cell that is transformed into multifarious guises across the surface of a given piece. The Ursatz unifies all the themes, however contrasting they seem, giving them the unity and goal-directedness which allows them to be heard and perceived as a whole (Dunsby and Whittall, 1988). That music is susceptible to such analysis proves its unity, though not its predictability. In the same vein I argue that it is, paradoxically, only by alteration that a psychical simultaneity can ‘develop’ its full meaning and distinctiveness of character. Note that this leads to a very different concept of change over time than that which is traditional in developmental psychology. This is first, because what is being developed is an action (the composition), not an agent (the composer). The meaning of an action takes time to emerge – and will be collectively constituted. But the time of emergence and its duration are not built in to the nature of the alteration.

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Hence the connection between a change and the age/time of that change becomes an empirical question that must be determined by research and cannot be built into developmental theories a priori. Hence I do not gainsay that four-year-olds may generally be much altered from when they were two. I only say that this is not necessarily the case. The ‘what’ in developmental psychology is normally an agent, the specific individuality of whom comes from his or her personal history: ‘So you have to go back to your childhood to get at why you are the way you are’ (Hillman and Ventura, 1992, p. 17). Arbitration between these two views comes down to the question of whether it is possible to be an agent, that is to act, without connection to other agents, a question which I have consistently argued must be answered in the negative. A second result of the view of psychical alteration being worked out here is that, viewed synchronically, development is constructed, being neither natural nor generic nor inevitable. The analogy of music underlines that psychical alteration principally allows the elements that comprise an intersubjective organisation of significance to be more clearly seen and so described. Thus we know more about what Prince Andrey’s world is and can be after his conversation with Pierre than before because something that was already within it ‘suddenly awoke’. Likewise, while the ‘deep’ synchronic structure of language can only be revealed through speech, that is, over time, the grammatical rules so revealed, the rules that organise language syntagmatically, remain atemporal. So too in mathematics where, in the theory of groups for example, change reveals invariance. ‘The laws of nature are those algebraic functional relationships among physical entities that do not change when we transform our coordinate system in any way we may desire’ (Motz and Weaver, 1993, pp. 123–4). Plus c¸a change, plus c’est la meˆme chose. The psychoanalyst Lacan makes the further point that the relation between time and intersubjectivity is not simply that time is required for intersubjective organisation to be disclosed. The order in which events occur over time has a revealing intersubjective significance. For people within a situation, how actions unfold over time ‘syntagmatically’ will have meaning because it will be taken as logically related to the structure of the still-opaque simultaneity which structures its members’ actions. Lacan (1988, pp. 4–5) emphasises this point by analysing a version of the prisoners’ dilemma in which a guard sets three prisoners the following dilemma: I have five discs differing only in colour: three white and two black. Without letting you know which I have chosen, I shall fasten one of them to each of you between his shoulders; outside, that is, your direct visual field – any indirect ways

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of getting a look at the disc being excluded by the absence here of any means of mirroring . . . [and you are not] allowed, of course, to communicate amongst yourselves the results of your inspection . . . the first to be able to deduce his own colour will be [set free] . . . as soon as one of you is ready to formulate your conclusion, he should pass through this door so that he may be judged individually on the basis of his response.

Lacan takes the case where all three prisoners have a white disc attached to their backs. The only way for prisoner A to solve the problem is to decode the responses of the other two prisoners. If A’s disc had been black the other two, by watching each other, would have been able to tell if they too were black because, if they were, one of them would walk confidently to the door, knowing he was white. Because all three pause, all three can conclude that their disc is white. Hence the intersubjective structure created by the puzzle the guard has set the prisoners produces a temporal ordering of actions (i.e. if X happens after Y, then we can conclude Z) which is logically precipitated by that structure and so allows the puzzle to be solved: temporal structure results from intersubjective structure. Intersubjective self-clarification by temporal ordering is borne out in the empirical analysis of music. Scho¨gler recently concluded an experimental study of improvisation between two jazz musicians playing in separate rooms connected only by a sound-system (and therefore not able to see each other). Scho¨gler demonstrates how the co-produced rhythm of the music creates synchronies which help the musicians anticipate and so realise the ‘time space’ their music has made: ‘each point of synchrony in performance represents a moment highlighted or accented for its structural significance by the simultaneous expression of the performers’ impulses’ (Scho¨gler, 2002, pp. 52, 76). Scho¨gler found that the shared pulse of an improvisation was irreducible to the individual pulses of the two performers’ play. It thus contained crucial information about the shared structure their music was elaborating. Moments of heightened rhythmical synchrony were particularly informative in this regard. As Scho¨gler (ibid., p. 200) puts it: ‘points of synchrony appear to give musicians intersubjective information regarding the mutual intentional space created by their interaction, and allow them to share management of it at the levels of both pulse and narrative’. Beyond the temporal self-clarification internal to a given simultaneity, which I am calling ‘alteration’, a synchronic approach to psychical transformation must also recognise a more radical ‘arbitrary’ kind of change which must be represented as absolute discontinuity between two unrelated synchronic states – that is as pure difference or disjunction. The musical analogy would be of flipping from a piece by Beethoven to some completely different composition by Brahms or Cole Porter or Eminem.

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This leads to the need to posit a pluralistic universe of experience, wherein the individual may participate in multiple and often contradictory ways – as is implicit in the concept of ‘multi-subjectivity’ developed by the likes of Henriques et al. (1984; Selby, 1985). The fact that individuals can flip between entirely different synchronic states, from waking dream to traffic jam to committee meeting to work lunch to TV ad to telephonic lover’s tiff, immersing themselves first in one and then in another like a fly that flits from orchid here to ordure there, does not at all imply progressive change. It just implies multiplicity. Alteration Alteration or non-arbitrary change can only occur in conditions that allow the over-determined features of a given situation to play out over time. Because simultaneities are collectively maintained, it is unlikely that such play can be entirely solitary. Hence we get the idea that psychologists interested in change – or in probing the depths of a particular situation – need to develop ways of finding and observing or creating and sustaining intersubjective ‘cells’ within which what Beck (1997, p. 123) calls a collective ‘discursivity of experience’ can emerge. The latent perceptions and experiences of those within the cell can then emerge and elaborate themselves. As has been previously argued (following Habermas, 1970), the formation of such cells needs to approximate the conditions for ‘ideal speech’, including freedom of expression, equal access to the floor and the right to criticise without censure. Most of the examples given earlier in this chapter could be used to illustrate the idea of alteration within a psychical ‘cell’, however transitory the cell: Diane and Nancy in the Wendy House; Pierre and Prince Andrey travelling together in a coach and four; Alvarez and Robbie in her consulting room; a group of boys in a classroom in Atlanta. The next two chapters will develop further examples in the discussion of laboratory experiments, action research, interviewing and undergraduate tutorials. In all cases, psychical alteration is only possible because of the intersubjective over-determination that structures and defines a given cell. Inevitably, alteration emerges ‘over time’, whether precipitously or gradually. Alteration is what reveals the semantic layering of structure because, under ideal circumstances, structure affords alteration (under non-ideal circumstances, structure may block alteration). The crux for psychologists is to recognise the interdependence of facilitative intersubjective dynamics and the phenomena of transformation that illuminate those dynamics. As is the case with music, it is only in the interplay between a given intersubjective space and the self-revealing

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transformations which such a space enables that the word development makes psychological sense. Conclusion This chapter rethinks ‘change over time’ from a synchronic perspective. Its first step was to disentangle the concept of psychical alteration from that of time, arguing that change must be given priority. This allimportant topic has received little psychological attention because it is supposedly dealt with by developmental psychologists. Yet in developmental theories, the question ‘how come’ generally pre-empts the question ‘what’ in a manner that commits the genetic fallacy. Hence the picture of development we get from psychologists is usually abstract and generic, seldom being tied to a thorough empirical investigation of the fully fledged ‘what’ (rationality, love, moral competence) that is supposed to be being explained by the theory. The central image is of a ladder, an image that brings with it a host of assumptions about psychical alteration: that it is individual, linear, progressive, one-way, that what happens earliest is most profound psychologically and that change is best understood as effecting change of place, not change to identity. I argue that the ladder-imagery implicit in conventional developmental theories can usefully be understood as homologous to the structure of narrative, with the progress of the ‘plot’ being determined by the psychological ideal for maturity the theorist defines as development’s End. I then review a series of more detailed examples of psychical alteration as food for comparison with existing developmental theories of change. I argue the examples I describe do not support the assumptions about alteration typifying developmental psychology. They are better explained by a theory that sees alteration as the simultaneous elaboration and illumination of the over-determined meanings nascent in a given psychical ‘cell’. Insofar as they are objects of psychological interest, such cells inevitably involve the psychologist, either actively or passively. Hence I derive the principle that psychical alteration is always both relative to and revealing of a specific intersubjective space. This idea is taken up and elaborated in the next two chapters. It is fundamental to the re-conceptualisation of psychological practice with which this book is concerned. Whether one is assessing, doing therapy, experimenting, interviewing, observing, learning or teaching, one’s work ‘develops’ and thereby reflects the characteristics of the intersubjective space within which it is done.

8

Research among equals

Perhaps there is, properly speaking, no method, but rather a certain way of acting. (Henri Bergson, 1895, quoted in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1989, p. 26)

A far-seeing commentary on hopes for a scientific psychology is to be found in Norbert Wiener’s (1948) Cybernetics. At the end of a book that in hindsight might seem to have blazed the trail for what we now call cognitive science, Wiener fired a warning shot for all those tempted to venture down that path. This was based on an allegory drawn from Maxwell (1972, p. 309) to show the thermodynamic impossibility of a ‘demon’ who lives on the same scale as the particles it studies being able to draw any valid conclusions about their behaviour. To succeed, the demon must ‘stand above’ its fellow molecules in order to judge their speed or temperature. Yet the laws of quantum mechanics say that the only way for the demon to get this information is by exchanging energy with its peers. Hence the demon’s own speed will be constantly changing as it tries to judge the others’, making it impossible to use its own perceptions as a standard. So ‘in the long run, the demon is itself subject to a random motion corresponding to the temperature of its environment . . . it receives a large number of impressions, until it falls into ‘‘a certain vertigo’’ and is incapable of clear perceptions. In fact, it ceases to act as a demon’ (Wiener, 1948, p. 58). Wiener (ibid., pp. 164–6) likens the demon’s predicament to that of the social scientist. In the natural sciences, all the great discoveries traditionally concern phenomena which exist on a very different scale from the scientist: ‘there is a certain high degree of isolation of the phenomenon from the observer . . . We are too small to influence the stars in their courses, and too large to care about anything but the mass effects of molecules, atoms, and electrons.’ Hence the natural scientist can afford to ignore events which might be of the greatest significance were they viewed by an observer conforming to the scale of existence of atoms or stars themselves. But in subjects like psychology, the coupling between 155

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observer and observed is impossible to loosen.1 Psychologists have not the advantage of looking down on their subjects ‘from the cold heights of ubiquity and eternity’ (ibid.). Of course, social science can be conducted in this way, as a mass study of the human animalcule observed ‘like populations of Drosophila in a bottle’, but this will miss our individual ‘rises and falls, pleasures and agonies’, says Wiener, so is not something ‘in which we, who are human animalcules ourselves, are particularly interested’. Worse, ‘in the social sciences we have to deal with short statistical runs, nor can we be sure that a considerable part of what we observe is not an artifact of our own creation. An investigation of the stock market is likely to upset the stock market.’ Wiener concludes that there is much we must leave, whether we like it or not, to ‘the un-‘‘scientific’’, narrative method of the historian’. Wiener’s allegory promptly became a cornerstone of explanation in social anthropology (Ardener, 1971a, 1971b).2 But its resonance for psychology is equally strong. What Wiener says of Maxwell’s demon damningly links together the two most controversial elements in psychology’s traditional methods of research: the elevation of the researcher ‘above’ those he or she studies and the reduction of the people studied to impersonal swarms of ‘animalcules’. This chapter argues that the critique implied by Wiener’s allegory is what drives the growing movement of psychologists away from surveys, psychometrics and laboratorybased tests towards non-experimental, more meaning-based methods of research. At issue is a sharpening appreciation of the need for justice in psychologists’ dealings with others, whether in therapy, assessment, teaching or research. This need distinguishes two frameworks for inquiry that I dub top-down and democratic. My aim in this chapter is to elaborate the democratic rationale for empirical research, illustrating as 1

2

It is also impossible to loosen in modern physics. Hence, the opening sections of Einstein’s historic paper ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ deal with the definition of simultaneity as something necessarily including or ‘relative to’ the point of view of the observer detecting the simultaneity: ‘So we see that we cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity, but that two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relative to that system’ (Einstein, 1905, pp. 42–3). See also Heisenberg’s ‘principle of uncertainty’ (Davies, 1986). Maxwell and hence Wiener used the word ‘statistical’ in contrasting two models of scientific explanation: ‘statistical’ and ‘dynamical’. Statistical models, upon which the second law of thermodynamics is based, deal only with ‘large masses’ and refer only to the average molecule. Dynamical models involve ‘more delicate observations and experiments which we may suppose made by one who can perceive and handle the individual molecules we deal with only in large masses’ (Maxwell, 1972, p. 309). It was the idea of ‘dynamical’ explanation that Levi-Strauss (1950) imported from Wiener (1948) into anthropology.

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I go how this framework makes sense of a variety of investigative techniques that are growing in popularity with psychologists. I argue that a democratic approach to research can only be worked out in terms of the concepts of experience, synchrony, intersubjective space and alteration developed in the foregoing chapters. The chapter’s later sections demonstrate that the introduction of principles of justice into the rationale for empiricism touches on nearly every phase of psychological inquiry: from selection of topics for investigation to techniques for the collection of data to the selection of a language to use in the description of psychical events to the role of the researcher and the logic of generalisation. Two frameworks for research Justice requires freedom of expression and that equal consideration be given to the interests of all those affected by public actions and policies. These principles are what differentiates traditional top-down approaches to research from the democratic approach developed here. Psychologists who stand above the perspectives of the people they study – ‘like the populations of Drosophila in a bottle’ – frame the conceptual universe of their studies largely in their own terms, and so ignore or mis-hear others’ voices, not respecting others’ interests as equal to their own or assuming others’ interests are the same as their own. It was the anthropologist Geertz (1973, pp. 5, 9) who said that, if you want to understand what a science is, you should not look at its theories or its findings, but at what its practitioners do. Finished reports normally obscure the assumptions that lead psychologists to describe others’ behaviour how they do, most of what we need to comprehend a finding being ‘insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined’ (see also Fleck, 1935; Madigan et al., 1995). Shotter elaborates. When we say that a certain psychological method allows us to see things in a certain way, this has to do with ‘our whole way of relating ourselves to our surroundings, our relational way of being in the world . . . what we notice and are sensitive to . . . our sensibilities, the background practices we have embodied that make us the kind of professionals we are’ (Shotter, 1998, pp. 34–5).3

3

Likewise Danziger (1997, p. 158) argues that the way we perform our language when we inquire into the psyche helps to create the psyche we find: ‘A scientific method is never just a wordless or signless practice; it is a practice under some description. So the practitioners’ understanding of what they are doing is intimately tied up with their understanding of the world in which or to which they are doing it. On the other hand, a language is never just a system of representation; as soon as it is used it becomes a practice. People ‘‘do things with

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So what are the background practices that set in place the top-down approach to research? Some are endowed by psychology’s social function (Ingleby, 1974; Rose, 1999). Psychologists have had the job of dealing with individuals ‘at risk’ since the modern discipline began in Victorian times. Galton’s interest in eugenics and Binet’s work on intelligence testing were both aimed at identifying individuals who were likely to fail socially or educationally. This interest has not abated. Today a concern about ‘risk factors’ and their synonyms, ‘pathology’ and ‘disorder’, is widespread in the literature. Seligman (2002, p. 126) remarked when launching his ‘positive psychology’ that ‘for the last half century psychology has been largely consumed with a single topic only – mental illness’. A long tradition of psychology aims to construct and fix the social boundaries between ‘abnormality’ and ‘normality’ (Foucault, 1961; Bradley and Morss, 2002). Here practice is shaped by a seductive conflation between statistical and psychological notions of what is normal. Statistically the word ‘normality’ refers to a bell-shaped distribution of which the vast bulk is held by convention to be ‘normal’ with only the outermost edges counted as ‘abnormal’. But, due to a semantic slippage, statistical abnormality has come to be seen as synonymous with psychological abnormality. The statisticians’ humped image of ‘the normal curve’ has now soaked so thoroughly into psychological consciousness that nearly everyone is held to be normal, attention being paid predominantly to the ‘abnormal’, statistically that small sector of the population who, due to a mixing of meanings, are held to be psychologically problematic (see below for an alternative conception). This reassuringly implies that the vast bulk of people are normal, mentally because statistically, and hence unproblematic – psychologists included.4 The ‘normal’ psychologist who is employed to preserve the efficient regulation of existing social institutions thus focuses their attention on the ‘abnormal’ other who

4

words’’ (Austin, 1962); in speaking or writing they carry out performances that have significance for their world. So language and method are intimately bound to each other.’ Viz Chapter 2 where it is noted that there has been a similar slippage from what were in the 1920s defined as ‘variables’ solely in statistical terms being now taken as direct reflections of psychological reality. Thus we talk of ‘personality variables’, ‘motivational variables’, ‘cognitive variables’ and the like which supposedly are both psychically real and operate isomorphically with statistical variables: they are unitary, can be measured on a linear scale, have causal rather than semantic relations with each other, are logically independent, etc. Danziger (1997, p. 171) remarks, ‘analysis in terms of variables has become a way of eliminating questions of meaning from the explanation of human conduct’. At the same time the model that fixes norms is typically based on the male adult middle-class rational Caucasian individual. This makes the poor, the criminal, the irrational, the nonCaucasian, the child and women ‘abnormal’ almost by definition (cf. Ingleby, 1974; Venn, 1984; Rose, 1999).

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they pick out by using diagnostic mental tests. In this way, hierarchy steeps psychological practice. Hierarchy structures the laboratory too. Danziger (1990, p. 184) describes how, by the middle of the last century, psychologists had established ‘a kind of class system within the investigative situation, so that only the investigators counted as competent witnesses while their subjects were limited to the role of objects of investigation’. Danziger notes that this division of labour – the psychologists actively inquire, their ‘subjects’ obediently report – was partly an echo of a political decision made when the Royal Society was set up in the seventeenth century: that the pursuit of science was to be limited to an elite. It was also a reflection of already existing patterns of social relationship in medical settings and school examinations. Furthermore, it chimed in with the need to feed data to policy makers for the purposes of prediction and social control, both top-down processes. What such social settings for psychological practice most immediately locked in place, whether in the consulting room, the laboratory or the lecture-hall, was a fundamental asymmetry between the subject and object of knowledge: ‘This asymmetry was not merely epistemic, however, but also, social, because it was accepted that it was to be useful to the subject (or those for whom he acted) in controlling the object. What was desired was knowledge of individuals as the objects of intervention rather than as subjects of experience’ (ibid., p. 67). Danziger’s main focus is on establishing the effects of this top-down dynamic on the object of psychological investigation. But methods of research also position psychologists. Danziger (ibid., p. 62) describes the psychologist’s traditional investigative position as one of ‘arrogance and callousness’: ‘the investigator does not think of the subject as a human agent but simply as material for the demonstration of his pet ideas’. The relationship between psychologist and psychologee is so ‘distanced and intellectual’ (ibid., p. 166) that the investigator becomes purely ‘a machine for analyzing data and drawing conclusions’. Karl Scheibe (1988) elaborates on Danziger by proposing that the psychologist’s ‘advantage’ over their human data-source has three dimensions. The first is the control and authority we exert over the contingencies and environment of the people we study. This is most obvious in behaviouristic studies of the rat, the life of whom the psychologist may control in almost every detail. But it is true of human experiments too, where participants typically agree to yield their independence of thought, their volition and even their moral beliefs, into the hands of the psychologist, as Milgram’s (1963) famous studies on obedience showed. This dynamic is only exacerbated by the fact that researchers frequently enlist as objects of

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investigation individuals inferior to themselves in terms of power: children, mental patients, old people, welfare recipients, ethnic minorities, undergraduate students and military recruits. Scheibe’s second dimension is the greater knowledge of the psychologist. This is partly a matter of perception. Who has not, on revealing their profession is psychology, heard the comment ‘Oh you’ll probably see straight through me then’? But it is also a matter of fact. Thus in nearly every study, the psychologist knows far more about what is likely to happen, what has happened previously and what other people do in a given situation than the people serving as their data-source. Scheibe sees psychologist’s third advantage being one of ‘superior cleverness’. Psychologists are well versed in observing and interpreting the behaviour and motives of other people. Empathy is our business. Hence we are liable to ‘out-psych’ the layfolk who help us with our inquiries. Indeed, psychological knowledge is by its own lights the only valid source of knowledge about others, an assumption which ‘amounts to an enforced silencing of anyone who would dare to make any claims whatsoever about matters psychological if those claims could not be based on laboratory proofs’ (Scheibe, 1988, p. 63). Scheibe’s picture of the advantaged psychologist’s attitude to others is as ‘lofty’, immodest and dehumanising. Loftiness is a venerable metaphor for psychology’s attitude to its subject-matter as we saw in Wiener’s commentary on Maxwell’s demon. Historical work traces this imagery back to the seeds of the modern discipline in Victorian biology. All language is figurative, including scientific language (Gibbs, 1994). More precisely, all languages are structured by literary conventions ‘which enable them to have the meanings they do’ (Todorov, 1977, p. 8). Taken together these conventions define a language’s ‘poetic’, its capacity to ‘open up a space, create a ‘‘clearing’’ full of beings within Being, in which both the space and its contents emerge together’ (Shotter, 1993a, p. 415). The poetic which has most shaped contemporary psychology’s take on the world is a form of Romantic sublime (Weiskel, 1976). Indeed, one of the principal bequests of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to the new psychology it founded was replacement of the pre-scientific colloquial and religious discourse on human nature ‘that valued design and took for granted godhead’ (Beer, 1983; Beer and Martins, 1990, p. 168). Darwin’s appropriation of the Romantic or ‘egotistical’ sublime for this purpose defined new subjectpositions for both psychological researchers and the objects of their research. A close reading of Darwin’s literary approach to nature over the decades that followed his writing in the diary he kept while circumnavigating the world in HMS Beagle shows a poetic mutation homologous to that

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undergone by Wordsworth in his autobiographical poem The Prelude (Bradley, 1993, 1998). What first registered in Darwin as an overwhelming sense of awe at nature’s sublime grandeur is reworked in such a way that, by the time he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin had subsumed the mind-boggling diversity of nature under his own ‘view of things’. The complex profusion of varied and interdependent species that had overwhelmed him on his youthful voyage, most powerfully outside Bahia in the Brazilian rainforest on 28 February 1832, had a quarter of a century later ‘all been produced by laws acting around us’. For the mature Darwin, it is no longer Nature that is full of grandeur but ‘my theory’.5 Darwin’s text positions him as someone who has out-rivalled ‘authors of the highest eminence’ in divining ‘the laws impressed on matter by the Creator’ (Darwin, 1859, pp. 488–9). This heady vista was the fruit of Darwin’s tireless efforts to reconceive nature in scientific terms: a new and sublime ‘view of things’. And an egotistical one to boot, as Darwin was later forced awkwardly to admit.6 As for its consequences, Darwin complained at the end of his life that he had lost his sense of beauty both in art and nature and, instead, had become ‘a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts’ (Darwin, 1958, p. 139).7 Initially astounded by the rainforest’s staggering profusion, he had later subjugated nature to a formula that also condemned his aesthetic

5

6

7

‘There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved’ (Darwin, 1859, pp. 489–90). Butler (1879, 1880) protests that Darwin’s habitual references to the theory of evolution as ‘my theory’ denied that he had taken many of his ideas from his precursors; their ‘intertextuality’ (Bradley, 1994). Gaull (1979, p. 43) points out that both Wordsworth and Darwin were independently accused of being ‘egotistical’: ‘of treating the natural world as if it were an extension of themselves, of an excessive use of the first person which Hyman claims gives the Origin of Species a ‘‘prophetic quality’’, a ‘‘tone of personal testimony’’. When a potential reviewer of The Origin pointed out to Darwin that he had used some form of the first person forty-three times in the first four paragraphs, Darwin commented ‘‘I was dimly conscious of the accursed fact. He says it can be explained phrenologically, which I suppose civilly means that I am the most egotistically selfsufficient man alive; perhaps so’’’ (Darwin quoted in Gaull, 1979). Gaull goes on to say that ‘the intrusion of the first person is the best index of Darwin’s Romantic mode of perception, that interpenetration of the subjective and objective world, the productive identification of the self with the world, ‘‘the Mind and Man/Contemplating with the thing/Contemplated’’ that was the basis of Wordsworth’s response to Nature’ (cf. Beer, 1983, pp. 49ff). Consonant with Gaull, it has been suggested that the scientific attitude towards Nature that developed during the nineteenth century is perhaps the most durable manifestation of romantic thinking (Clifford, 1986). Compare the quote from Danziger (1990, p. 166) above: that the investigator becomes purely ‘a machine for analyzing data and drawing conclusions’.

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responsiveness. We find Darwin’s immediate successors in psychology also complaining that evolutionary theory requires the psyche to be made up of a universal and undifferentiated ‘mind-dust’, a basic material which, when compounded, is the basis of all mental states and faculties. Mind-dust theories obliterate distinction between the nerve-world and the mind-world, between matter and consciousness, a distinction which James (1890, p. 185) argued to mark a difference of kind, not of degree, so being fundamental to grounding a psychology which studied mental states. In Weiskel’s (1976, p. 59) words, the naturalistic sublime ‘melts the formal otherness of things and reduces them to material or substance. The formal properties of the perceived particular are cancelled and replaced by their ‘‘significance’’, values assessed and assigned by the [scientist’s] mind’. Danziger dubs these values the ‘pet ideas’ of the theorist. The top-down approach to psychological phenomena is thus built into the language which makes possible the sublime universalising form of knowledge about other people that Darwin and his contemporaries saw as the touchstone for modern psychology. The question is: how might we construct an alternative poetic that founds a more just, more democratic empiricism one according with the principle of equal respect and the right to free expression? Central to the re-orientation involved is a problematisation of the researcher’s own subjectivity (Bradley, 1993b). Recognition that there is a choice of poetics in psychology requires acknowledgement that there is also a choice of practical frameworks for researchers’ dealings with others: we can treat others as equals or we can treat them as objects. The following sections of this chapter aim to elaborate a less top-down more democratic framework for investigating mental life. This growing desire to treat people as equals is what fuels the most important arguments about research in psychology today. Selecting a topic Research methods are usually taught in a way that is independent of content. Indeed, since the triumph of behaviourism, ‘which saw the elimination of experience as a topic for psychology’, the whole project of research has been significantly depopulated, with the individualities of both researchers and their quarry being expelled ‘beyond the textual margins’ (Billig,1998, p. 128). This means that selecting topics for research is something that generally takes place beyond the scope of training. What people study and why they choose to study it is neither here nor there so far as tomes on methodology go. Not surprisingly, therefore, the selection of topics for investigation remains a mystery to

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many students. Yet, when we look at the kinds of research that our contemporaries do, the bulk of it is aimed at solving what are recognisably social problems – by governments and funding-bodies, if not by ordinary folk. More and more, researchers must be ‘socially accountable’. Another way of saying this is that the selection of topics for research has become externally driven. The government is launching an offensive on drugs? Well, let us study heroin addicts. These businesses want to re-train their workforce? Well, let us study organisational change. Or, more parochially: my supervisor is interested in sign-language? Well, I will do my Honours dissertation on sign-language. Part of my argument in this chapter is that a more intellectually and politically independent psychology needs to be more proactive and less reactive in its selection of topics for research. And principles of justice can be used to direct such selection. Steps have been taken in this direction by psychologists who choose to research topics which formerly have been ignored or pathologised by standard strategies of investigation. One idea is that the voice most conventionally heard in psychology is white, EuroAmerican, male, heterosexual, rational, expert, middle-class. Hence selfdefined critical psychologists have done their best to give volume to other (usually silenced) voices, including those of women, the working class, blacks, children, gays, schizophrenics (e.g. Labov, 1972; Gordon, 1973; Kitzinger, 1989; Walkerdine, 1997; Alldred, 1998; Blackman, 1998). As Haraway (1988, p. 584) puts it: ‘‘‘subjugated’’ standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world’. Even within a specific topic, efforts are increasingly made to accentuate subject-matter which has been rendered invisible by standard research. For example, research on early childhood typically presents a picture of the normal baby as one who is engaged in the most profound love-relationship of life (the prototype of all later relationships) and highly competent: socially, communicatively, cognitively, perceptually and as a learner (Bradley, 1991). The possibility that this is an idealization then becomes open to question and invites research that focuses on the more hellish aspects of our early years – showing for example that negativity and anxiety are intrinsic to early infant–mother relationships or how conventional research methods tend to eliminate miserable babies from analysis due to unrepresentative sampling methods or through ‘subject loss’ (Bradley, 1981, 1989; Morss, 1992). Likewise one might wish to bring into the domain of research the study of the darker aspects of adult being, including cruelty and deceit (Billig, 2003). At this point I re-emphasise the argument of Chapter 7 that, as soon as one adopts a democratic horizon for research, the problem of topicselection solves itself. The techniques of risk psychology, collective

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biography and public conversation mean that the psychologist’s job is to create a space within which others are empowered to bring to expression the experiences that define for them matters of psycho-social concern. It is primarily the matters which emerge in this space that should feed the mill of democratic psychological research rather than mere happenstance or the agendas of the powerful. Maintaining the distinction between events and their interpretation From the selection of topics for research we move on to the description of our subject-matter. One way in which psychologists may over-ride the voices and viewpoints of the people they study is through their traditional practices of description and interpretation. The fundamental democratic truth that different people can view the same event in different ways gives rise to a need for the interpretation of any action or event that falls under the psychologists’ gaze: the ‘same’ piece of behaviour, a smile or a look or a phrase, may mean different things at different times in different people (Selby and Bradley, 2003; Bradley and Selby, 2004). Hence, it is crucial to maintain a distinction between an event and its interpretation. Generally, this need is elided in psychology. Thus progress in psychology is often said to arise out of a chain of relationships: theory

! methods

! data

! phenomena (after Valsiner, 1991)

It is of note that neither language nor description nor observation nor interpretation take a place in this chain. One might presume, for example, that description fits in between data and phenomena. But in fact, description, or more precisely, definition, subsumes data, phenomena, language, interpretation and observation.8 It is only when behaviour is defined in a certain way that it fits in with the psychologist’s pre-arranged categories and can count as data. But ‘there is a certain arrogance in taking it for granted that, alone among a myriad alternative ways of speaking about individual action and experience, the language of twentieth-century American Psychology accurately reflects the natural and universal structure of the phenomena we call ‘‘psychological’’’ (Danziger, 1997, p. 5).9

8 9

Description and observation are treated interchangeably as synonyms in textbooks such as Myers (2001). Danziger (1997, p. 7) adds: ‘Every empirical description is an account that has been organised in terms of certain general categories. These categories define what it is that is being observed. For an observation to be psychologically relevant and interesting it has to be couched in terms of psychological categories. The report that the pencil in someone’s

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Psychology’s conflation of phenomena, data and definition has come more and more into question over the past thirty years. Formerly, psychologists had often treated the collection and the description of data as one and the same thing. The researcher decides what he or she is going to record and under what conditions, comes up with the requisite (operational) definitions and then either mechanically or by using trained personnel notes down how many instances of each pre-designated behaviour occur. This means that, as soon as the experiment is over, all that he or she is left with is this one pre-digested description of what happened. No one can re-inspect what happened to find what else might have occurred in addition to what the psychologist noted down – what was missed or mis-interpreted – because, if she or he was not interested in the behaviour, it would not have been recorded. There are no independent data to check the record against. This state of affairs is quite at odds with that in other sciences, where taxonomy depends on maintaining a firm distinction between the collection or observation of phenomena (animals, particles, chemicals, plants, microbes, polymers, stars) and their interpretation or description. Before zoological taxonomy matured in the hands of Linneaus, for example, there had been many centuries during which curious naturalists had shot, trapped, bottled, drawn or otherwise preserved a vast museum of different kinds of creature. Linneaus and his ilk then sat down to weigh the various characteristics of these animals, thus to determine which were related to which. For example, when the duck-billed platypus was first shot, biologists would not have been sure whether it was a mammal like an otter (it lived in burrows near streams, swam using its tail, suckled its young), a flightless bird like the kiwi (it was shy, had a bill and laid eggs) or something else. Over time, different interpretations of the animal could be tested out against the specimen on the bench, and eventually it was grouped with the monotremes. Presumably this can now be corroborated (or not) by DNA testing. Thus interpretation of what a platypus was could develop over a long period of time independently of the collected animal itself. The features now deemed decisive to the identity of this timorous wee beastie may well have been completely imperceptible to the naturalists who first shot it or the taxonomists who first tried to classify it. The advent of mass-produced recording devices, both video and audio, means psychologists are now in a position to develop a taxonomy in which the behavioural record is, for the first time, entirely distinct from its interpretation. Thus we typically find psychologists, who do their hand made contact with a piece of paper at a certain distance from the top of the page does not count as an empirical observation in personality psychology. The report that someone received a certain score on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale does.’

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research by conducting interviews, transcribe the whole interview before analysing it and then, when reporting on their findings, reproduce gobbets of the transcript in their text, interspersed with interpretation. They are then expected to keep these transcripts, and the tapes of their interviews, for five years after the interviews were made. Likewise, in the study of social behaviour in infancy, large archives of video-taped interactions exist in laboratories around the world, from which stills or sequences of stills are often reproduced when results are published. Whilst this is still not a fully fledged taxonomy, we now have the basis for such a taxonomy, one that does not conflate data with interpretation. Even prior to widespread use of tape-recorders, psychologists like James (1903) and Freud had based their analyses of the psyche on a richly worded portraiture of the phenomena they studied, often including extended verbatim quotes from their subjects. ‘The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets’ (James 1899, p. 240). This is the procedure commended by Geertz (1973) under the heading ‘thick description’: when describing human action in all its complexity, the observer must employ the full resources of language in a manner rich and redundant enough to shadow forth a great variety of different interpretations of the observed event, including, hopefully, ones that tally with the understandings of the agents involved in the action. Researchers wishing to interpret or explain can then take up such rich descriptions and test out on them different hypotheses about underlying ‘native’ constructions of the social world.10 Psychologists still opt primarily for thin description, a practice epitomised by ‘operational definition’. This term refers to the way in which a meaningful concept such as love or fear or intentionality is reduced to a small set of measures. It is a procedure that has ostensibly been borrowed from physics, although its supposed progenitor P.W. Bridgman disavowed the way his ideas had been taken up in the social sciences, apparently with good reason (Koch, 1992). As understood by psychologists, ‘operational definition’ assumes the meaning of any concept is synonymous with the operations used to measure it. And this kind of

10

‘The good ethnographic observer must therefore use categories and labels in an ambiguous manner, or use some that have a high degree of ambiguity already in his [sic] own language, and hope that by applying enough of them, he will enable the reader to create from their elements new combinations that will be closer to the ‘‘native experience’’ being recorded’ (Ardener, 1973, pp. 94–5). Being social anthropologists, Ardener and Geertz have a word for the task of someone who is a ‘describer’ of human action: ethnography. Not so oddly, perhaps, given the observations in this chapter on the conflation of terms relating to description in psychology, students of mental life have no equivalent word (psychography?).

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definition is seen as the indispensable basis for objective research. Hence only concepts that can be reliably measured are deemed accessible to psychological research. And, in order for a definition to be reliable, it must refer to a process that recurs, so that reliability can be demonstrated. This puts the study of unique and one-off events beyond the pale of psychology (Hetherington, 1983). It also tends to strip all complex significance from the concept being defined. Thus Koch critiques a textbook illustration for an operational definition of ‘love’. The definition instances three measures: that the lover (A) seeks their loved one’s (B) company above any one else’s; that the lover gives the loved one gifts; that the lover dates the loved one (Kasschau, 1980, pp. 27–9). The gain from such a definition is in measurability. Measurement is traditionally very important to scientific psychologists because it allows our data to be treated mathematically. For example, at the start of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant denied scientific status to psychology on the grounds that the mark of a true science is the mathematisation of its subject-matter. This explains why psychologists have been so keen to produce data that can be measured on linear scales, whether in the laboratory or in surveys, and therefore, why psychological categories are defined in terms of the operations that allow them to be measured. But is operational definition logically defensible as a scientific procedure in psychology? For example, how are we to know that Kasschau’s three operations really measure love? Presumably, to do so, we would need some independent standard for love against which Kasschau’s proposal could be assessed. But we do not have it, as any nonoperational definition is ruled out as non-scientific. So we are forced back on our own experience or other cultural resources, all of which are likely to suggest that this definition cannot register the kinds of distinction crucial to people genuinely concerned with love. Thus it is perfectly possible to imagine an A who wanted to get something out of a B (e.g. sexual favours, a business deal) fulfilling Kasschau’s three criteria while not being in love. Conversely, it is possible to imagine a shy or scrupulous lover like Pierre Bezuhof in War and Peace long loving someone (Natasha Rostova) but never seeing fit either to give her gifts or to ask her out (because he was married). Alternatively we can read of passionate lovers like John Keats, who found the stress of self-control in his fiance´e’s (Fanny Brawne) presence meant he quite often preferred his own or others’ company to hers. The point is that, while Kasschau’s three criteria may sometimes be culturally plausible, applied blindly, they deny the interpretive project of the psychologist and render irrelevant the multiple perspectives and interpretive powers of the people to whom they are applied, powers that are quite capable of falsifying the meanings which

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the psychologist has pre-defined.11 Operational definition, and the thin description it epitomises, ensure that once our data are ‘in’, there is no recourse to an independent record which might challenge the interpretive assumptions inscribed in those data. The collection of phenomena, their description and interpretation have merged into one and the same thing. And the way that thing is defined is exclusively the prerogative of the expert. Chapter 7 introduced a different, more democratic way of conceiving the descriptive task of the psychologist. Rather than the expert researcher deciding what will count as psychological phenomena, a procedure that invites Danziger’s censure as ‘arrogant’, we can see the move towards semi-structured interviews, focus groups, public conversations, action research and collective biography as a move towards a less pre-emptive more facilitative role for the researcher (Chasin and Herzig, 1992). The researcher does not prejudge what the psychical field may contain. Like a midwife, she or he simply undertakes to create the best possible conditions for others to articulate and clarify their preoccupations, ideas and perceptions. A later section of this chapter surveys in detail some of these techniques for a more democratic production of psychology’s raw material. It is this task that should preface the application of techniques for interpretation, data reduction, discourse analysis and measurement. Consequences of levelling in the process of inquiry Once we adopt a democratic framework for research, we recognise that the processes that are assumed to go on in the researcher also go on in the people he or she studies, and vice versa. Thus, according to those who adopt interpretive approaches to human action, the way in which one gains an understanding of others is by a repeated circular movement of 11

See for example Hollway and Jefferson’s (2000) magisterial deconstruction of the ambiguities squelched when the 1986 British Crime Survey asks ‘How safe do you feel walking alone in this area after dark?’: ‘Very safe’, ‘Fairly safe’, ‘A bit safe’, ‘Very unsafe’ (Mirrlees-Black et al., 1996). Such a question can be challenged on a number of grounds. First, it gives no way of understanding how any one respondent’s understanding of the phenomenon under investigation is related to their life-setting: when asked this question, an old woman may think of being mugged at night; a girl of being raped and a man of getting into a fight. Then, when survey results are aggregated, ‘treating diversity as an error variable, in search of what is common to all, we often learn about what is true of no one in particular’ (Josselson, 1995, p. 32). Thirdly, there is the dubious assumption that if the words used in a survey ‘are the same, and if they are communicated in the same manner, they will mean the same thing to numerous people in the sample’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, p. 8). As Hollway and Jefferson remark a great deal hangs on this last principle: ‘the possibility of reliability, and the validity of quantification, comparison and generalisation’.

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interpretation between the ‘whole’ of one’s initial understanding and the ‘parts’ of what one perceives the other to be doing or saying. As one travels round and round this hermeneutic circle, one’s initial understanding changes and it is this changed understanding which constitutes one’s new ‘discovery’. However, there is nothing in this formulation which ensures the researcher’s final interpretation is any truer than his or her first preconception. Unless, that is, there is some form of intersubjective connectedness between the process of interpretation going on in the researcher and the psychical goings-on in his or her informants. This possibility brings us back to the allegory of Maxwell’s demon. It will be remembered that Wiener argued that the task of a being on the same scale as those he or she is trying to investigate is impossible because the demon’s own temperature (speed) will be constantly changing as a consequence of trying to measure others’ velocity, making it impossible for the demon to judge others by an independent or absolute standard. Wiener called this the problem of ‘coupling’ or indissoluble connection between subject and object. I now want to argue that it is precisely this coupling that gives us grounds for optimism about the productivity of psychological research. Conventional psychological research, structured by the sublime, adopts vision rather than language for its model. From a position of transcendence it aims to gain an all-inclusive, monologic, totalitarian panorama of all things, particularly others, in a neutral impersonal light. Ideally, all otherness is absorbed into the author’s system of harmony and order. The breach dividing one mind from another12 is ignored. Everything can be comprehended in the psychologist’s categories. Everything fits with their theory. All that they see is one and the same. This is the opposite to Habermas’ (1970) ‘pure’ intersubjectivity which obtains when one understands the other’s otherness and does not mean everyone being the same or everyone having the same experience. Hence Levinas (1969) echoes Bion’s (1962; see Chapter 2 above) case for alpha-function: we only seriously take account of the other when we make our prime concern, not our own point of view, but his or her ‘otherness’ and try to apprehend the alien world s/he inhabits. In fact, it is only by making myself vulnerable to this world that I can become aware of the arbitrary views and attitudes to which my own uncriticised immediacy has led me. If psychologists wish to see others as equivalent to themselves, as centres of their own subjective worlds,13 then they will be subject to an ethical dynamic that will put their own self in question. It 12 13

Which James (1890, p. 231) called ‘perhaps the greatest breach in nature’. What James called ‘spiritually’ (1890, ch. X).

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is the ‘radically’ intersubjective stance of opening myself up to question that allows me to make my discovery: ethics, the proper treatment of others as such, is ‘the spiritual optics’, wrote Levinas (1969, p. 78). When I inquire about others, I am dealing with an entity that, from my finite point of view, must be deemed infinite, never fully fathomable by me. The bond thus established between me and the other is never a totality but a form of irrationality.14 For, whilst I cannot renounce the egoism of my existence in my conversation with the other, I can seek to give priority to the other’s transcendence, not to my own, as when I adopt the egotistical or totalitarian psychological sublime. ‘The very fact of being in conversation consists in recognising in the Other a right over this egoism, and hence [over] justifying oneself’ (ibid., p. 40). It is in acknowledging this right that I open myself up to question, and to change and discovery. In a non-totalitarian relation to the other, I learn both about my limitations and new possibilities. The unforeseeableness of the other is not revealed to me directly, however. She or he is not seen by me as such, for the other is always external to my subjective world. Yet, just as celestial bodies may, if they come close enough, influence each others’ gravitational fields, the other may alter my subjective field, not the contents but the form of my vision as a whole.15 Truth is ‘situated in a subjective field which deforms vision, but precisely thus allows exteriority [the other’s existence] to state itself’ (ibid., p. 291). There is no subject–object correlation in Levinas. There is subjectivity and something beyond subjectivity, separated from me – the Transcendent, infinity – which I can never pretend to possess, but which can disturb my subjectivity.16 In short, alteration in my subjectivity when in contact with an other is the best route to understanding the other because we are connected to each other in a field of intersubjectivity.

14 15

16

Not unlike the via negativa of prayer, says Levinas. Further, because my relation to the other is subjective, it ‘cannot be included within a network of relations visible to a third party’ (Levinas, 19 p. 121). Knowledge of a subjective relation cannot be gained by onlookers. Levinas assumes that the parallel for his vision of (in our terms) a psychology that refuses the sublime is ‘negative’ theology – as proposed by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the sixth century AD. Similarly, Kierkegaard (1846, p. 407) wrote, ‘Just as the highest principles of thought can for an existing individual be proved only negatively, and the attempt to furnish a positive demonstration of them immediately reveals that the proponent, in so far as he nevertheless really remains an existing individual, is about to become fantastic, so also it is the case that the existential relationship to the absolute good [infinity, in Levinas] is for an existing individual determined only through the negative – the relation to an eternal happiness only through suffering, just as also the certainty of faith which sustains a relationship to an eternal happiness is determined through its uncertainty.’

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How are researchers to understand and hence avail themselves of these disturbances? One answer to this question comes from the psychoanalytic theory of counter-transference. Freud (1910) first discussed countertransference as a source of error. Since then it has been urged that counter-transference ‘not only does not inhibit, but, on the contrary, actually facilitates analytic work’ (Hann-Kende, 1933, p. 167). This second meaning of counter-transference is what Relke (1993) calls intersubjectivity, intuition or empathy, as when people like Hann-Kende (1933, p. 164) speak of counter-transference as ‘the prompt correspondence between the analyst’s and the patient’s unconscious’. This is a fundamental form of unconscious communication, which many therapists recognise.17 Moeller (1977) defines the negative process that Freud called counter-transference as the analyst’s transference, reserving the word counter-transference for ‘an undistorted, appropriate (i.e. nonneurotic) response to transference’, a synonym for empathy or sympathetic understanding (Relke, 1993, p. 95). In the view typified by Moeller (whose terminology I will henceforth adopt) the analyst’s transference is an intrapsychic process whilst counter-transference is intersubjective or interpersonal. Both analyst and patient may experience both transference and counter-transference.18 According to this theory, an analyst’s first stab at interpretation is a provisional analysis of his or her own subjectivity: ‘Any analyst who believes that he [sic] perceives directly his patient’s unconscious, rather than his own, is deluding himself . . . It is the analysis of his unconscious which he presents to her as an analysis of her unconscious’ (Devereux, 1968, pp. 304–5). There is no firm way to know beforehand which interpretation is going to be on target and which wide of the mark. The definition of what is true and false about an interpretation can only be determined after the client has reacted to it (as Freud, 1937a, argued).19 What Relke and Co. call the counter-transference is simply a way of

17

18

19

Including Freud: ‘To put it in a formula: [the analyst] must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound-waves the electric oscillations in the telephone line which were set up by sound-waves, so the doctor’s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconscious which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient’s free associations’ (Freud, 1912, pp. 115–16). Likewise Freud (1913, p. 320) had remarked when discussing a piece of unconscious communication between a wife and her husband: ‘I have good reason for asserting that everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people.’ Sometimes decades after, according to Freud (1937b).

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registering that interpretations, which are inevitably based on the analyst’s self-analysis of his or her own feelings and thoughts about the clientsubject, sometimes work. Or in Relke’s language, the analyst’s intrapsychic reactions to the client (transference) sometimes have interpersonal validity. But the analyst-researcher cannot know in advance of any particular interpretation when or whether this will be the case. They must adopt the kind of not-knowing approach Levinas likens to prayer and Selby (1990) to Keatsian negative capability. Devereux (1968) has explored at length the methodological consequences of this not-knowing approach for the process of research. According to Devereux, a fundamental anxiety structures behavioural research surrounding observers’ wish to ward off the awareness that they are themselves observed by the subjects of their research. Unconsciously the observer knows they cannot subordinate the subject’s mental life to their own scheme of things. Devereux called his book From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioural Sciences because he believed that most of the science-like methods used in disciplines like psychology are defences, attempts to deny and repress the anxiety of being observed and interpreted by others when one is ostensibly being a detached and invisible observer. Such defensiveness is, if you like, the subjective cost of the sublime. Within psychoanalytic theory, this anxiety can be glossed as the researcher refusing to experience the subjective uncertainty of not knowing about others, of not having the same kind of epistemic authority that scientists have over microbes. Instead of experiencing this uncertainty, the researcher acts out a controlling role that highlights ‘those moments of research when you feel like a disinterested scientist, secure in the knowledge that by following agreed-upon methods you are a part of discovering the world in an unbiased and objective way’ (Selby, 1999, p. 173). Devereux challenges us to ask what would happen if behavioural scientists became more aware of the fluidity of their own often unpleasant and unsettling experiences of others whilst doing research. Devereux’s (1968, p. xvii) constructive move is to urge that the disturbances, anxieties and distortions produced in the observer in the process of observation are ‘the most significant and characteristic data of behavioural science research’. The intersubjectivity that structures any observation must be used as the royal road to an authentic method for the behavioural sciences: Time and again it becomes evident that many difficulties in behavioural science are due to the warding off and ignoring of such interactions [between observed and observer] and especially of the fact that the observation of the subject by the observer is complemented by the counter-observation of the observer by the subject. This insight forces us to abandon – at least in a naı¨ve sense – the notion

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that the basic operation in behavioural science is the observation of a subject by an observer. We must substitute for it the notion that it is the analysis of the interaction between the two, in a situation where both are at once observers to themselves and subjects to the other (ibid., p. 275).

The two key moments of this horizontal interaction are, first, the moment at which ‘the subject is permitted to say – the moment one is willing to hear the subject say – relevantly: ‘‘And this I perceive’’. And, second, the moment when the behavioural scientist says: ‘‘And this I perceive’’’ (ibid., p. 288). Devereux, who was trained and practised both as an anthropologist and as a psychoanalyst, draws his epistemology of the interaction between observer and subject in the behavioural sciences from psychoanalysis – because, he says, only the didactic analysis of the trained psychoanalyst can ‘enable [one] to tolerate such subjective information as behavioural research throws up’ (ibid., p. 302). On these grounds he deduces that the key to authentic behavioural research is that the researcher ‘says: ‘‘And this I perceive’’ only in respect to . . . reverberations ‘‘at himself’’’ (ibid., p. 301). Such reverberations occur ‘at the point where one runs out of ‘‘out there’’ explanations’ (ibid., p. 302). But, and this is a crucial point for psychoanalysts such as Devereux, in interpreting these reverberations within himself, ‘the analyst professes to interpret also the unconscious of the patient’ (ibid., p. 304): Whenever a patient makes a seemingly irrational or inappropriate remark, the analyst’s logical mind perceives only its formal irrationality. However, almost at the same time, the analyst has a brief affective reaction and/or a short, irrational fantasy of his own. This fantasy is the disturbance discussed previously. The analyst’s logical mind then analyzes his own fantasy, treating it as a response (= ‘association’) to the patient’s irrational statement. It is, in a sense, the analysis of his own disturbance (fantasy) which the analyst then communicates to the patient, calling it an analysis of the patient’s fantasy. (ibid., p. 310)

Of the eight cases Devereux gives to illustrate this point, I will take one of the simplest: Case 431: A Sedang woman informant told me that the unmarried men practiced anal coitus in the men’s club house; this my male informants denied strenuously. One day one of my best informants, Mbrieng, was telling me a tale about leeches forming a bridge over a river, each leech attaching itself to the posterior part of the leech in front. His account was vivid and picturesque and my unconscious responded to it with a fantasy, inspired by the fact that, some years earlier, I had heard of a homosexual nightclub in Berlin, in which the actors formed an obscene circle. I referred this fantasy to the story I had just been told (linking it also with what my female informant had told me) and said: ‘Just like the young men in the club house!’ Mbrieng burst out laughing and said: ‘Yes – just like that!’ Confronted with his unwitting self-betrayal, Mbrieng then provided detailed information about homosexual activities in the club house. (ibid., pp. 309–10)

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This example impresses because it shows how the counter-transference may work through a memory or fantasy that has nothing to do with the current situation: presumably Mbrieng had no idea that there might be a large northern city in which there were homosexual nightclubs. Less exotic examples are to be found in Hollway and Jefferson (2000, pp. 44ff; see also Walkerdine, 1997) where, for example, Hollway was conducting an interview with a younger woman ‘Jane’ and finds herself smitten with ‘very strong feelings . . . that were not typical of most of my research relationships’ and making what later seemed to her unusual ‘leading’ comments during the course of the interview. Afterwards, when trying to understand why she made these comments, Hollway put them together with her unusual reluctance to leave the interviewee and a final aside by Jane equating Hollway with Jane’s mother to suggest that, during the course of her dealings with Jane, she had become positioned by the interview-dynamics as ‘mother’ and Jane as ‘daughter’: an insight which cast crucial light on the rest of the interview. Hollway and Jefferson conclude that all interview-studies are ‘co-productions’ of both conscious and often-unconscious intersubjective dynamics.20 Notably, Hollway and Jefferson were only able to pick up dynamics of counter-transference because they had deliberately designed their interviews in a way that allowed them to reflect on the intersubjective dynamics their study produced.21 This underlines the point that only when efforts are made to level the power-relations normally tilted in favour of the psychologist can researchers make the kinds of discovery about which Levinas and Devereux speak. Selby (1999) describes how 20

21

For a sustained analysis of how one ‘later makes sense of’ one’s initially troubled reactions to one’s research informants, see Selby’s (2004) analysis of Patti Lather’s work on HIV/ AIDS. It is perfectly possible to set up interviews in a way that is as top-down as you like. Thus Piaget (1929, p. 39) reports an interview with a nine-year-old in a study aimed at seeking evidence for Piaget’s early stage-theory of children’s thinking about thinking. (First children think thinking is with the mouth and then, in stage two, they think it is done with the head.): ‘PIG (aged 9y 6m; ‘‘backward’’): You know the word ‘‘think’’? – Yes. – What does it mean, to think? – When someone is dead and you think of them. – Do you sometimes think? – Yes, of my brother. – Do you think at school? – No. – And here? (we were in the school office). – Yes, I think because you have asked me things. – What do you think with? – The mouth and ears. – And do babies think? – No. – Does a baby think when its mother talks to it? – Yes. – What with? – With the mouth.’ It is quite clear that Piaget’s sole focus here is to extract answers that relate to his own agenda. Concentration on this agenda means Piaget shows no interest in the way Pig links thought to death, possibly the death of his brother. Nor does he pick up Pig’s potentially critical comments that he does not think at school and is only thinking now because forced to by the researcher. Piaget’s inflexible approach means his questions are jarringly at odds with Pig’s responses and hence provide no genuine interface for the child’s own perspective on thinking about thinking to emerge.

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equity and therefore insight may be maintained in interactions that depart from an ideal speech-situation in white research with Aborigines in Australia. She points out that such research takes place between cultures of significantly different material power over each other. As the theory of intersubjectivity would predict, this means that misunderstandings are common. She instances ‘misheard’ questions followed by ‘irrelevant’ answers, arguments over when to help a bleeding drunk and over respect for indigenous elders. Selby argues, however, that these glitches in communication are potentially a rich source of insight about cultural differences. She therefore advocates an approach in which the responsibilities of the materially advantaged researcher ‘include the task of containing and making visible the axes of power at work in collaboration, as the researcher is aware of them’ (ibid., p. 174). By providing strategies which ‘contain’, she refers to a model of mothering drawn from the work of Winnicott, who described the role of the mother as being one of psychical ‘holding’ whereby young children are cared for in a way that lets them feel safe enough to experience their anxieties and so learn from them. This means that the mother (researcher) must also be able to contain their own anxieties: In turning to ‘containment’ through the researcher’s perspective, I refer to the ability symbolically to hold together disparate aspects of a relationship or personal impulses which provoke vulnerability experienced otherwise as anxiety or as the denial of the significance of what is happening . . . representatives of the disempowered group are [then] better placed to negotiate their needs. And it is their experienced needs which in contemporary cross-cultural research have to be represented. (ibid., p. 174)

In short, unless the psychologist is capable of maintaining a space for intersubjective insight, play and creativity, the most pressing differences between cultures will not emerge. On the other hand, if such a space is maintained, then that space becomes the main site for discovery. Hence Selby (2004) argues Lather’s initial recoil into angelology from the culture of women dying from AIDS eventually, through negative capability, produced insight. Generalisation Traditionally, the production of knowledge that can be generalised to any situation has been the hallmark of a valuable scientific discovery. My argument ties discovery to the alteration of particular intersubjective dynamics in a specific cultural location, alteration that is ultimately productive of insight (cf. Chapter 7). Does this mean that research can no longer produce psychological findings with general significance? Is psychology hereby condemned to relativism? It is not. Relativism is not

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the only alternative to totalisation and single vision, ‘whose power depends on systematic narrowing and obscuring. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 584). What is the value of such ‘situated knowledges’? They are valuable because they are knowledges about particular circumstances, particular communities with particular historical conditions, not abstracted unlocatable isolated individuals. The hermeneutic take on research might imply that one’s findings are personal and idiosyncratic because they only have meaning by virtue of their impact on the particular researcher who undertakes a given inquiry. But no one is an island. Research as described here is always a co-production of individuals who meet in and reflect upon the same psycho-social simultaneity. Hence a finding will be of direct relevance to those who share or can empathise with the circumstances of its production. Findings will have supra-individual significance insofar as they represent ‘the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions – a view from somewhere’ (ibid., p. 590). Undoubtedly this is a different kind of significance from that of a statistical generalisation. It is more akin to the kind of universality Aristotle defined as poetic truth: ‘It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened’, wrote Aristotle in The Poetics (1898, IX, 1–3), ‘but what may happen – what is possible’. Writing that aims primarily at the presentation of facts ‘as they really occurred’ has no need to rise above particulars. Writing that intends to illuminate general truths must do more than average or summarise. A poet concerned solely with a Pecksniffian hand-to-mouth fidelity to observables will be merely banal (Baudelaire, 1965, pp. 159–60). True poetry is ‘language into which rhythm, ‘‘harmony,’’ and song enter’, language which takes care to furnish forth its world in a manner that is distinctive and unusual, by use of metaphor, ‘with the utmost vividness’.22 It is through form, of which the two mainstays are for Aristotle an artistically arranged plot and the characters subsidiary to it, that poetry rises above the particular to suggest what is universal. General significance is hence a poetic achievement.23 We do not go to see Shakespeare’s Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland, as Northrop Frye once said. We go to Macbeth to discover what it is for a man to gain a kingdom and lose his soul. When we meet

22

Aristotle, VI, 3; XVII, 61; XXII, 9.

23

Aristotle, IX, 4.

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Micawber, we do not feel that Dickens must have known a man who was exactly like this. We feel that there is a bit of Micawber in almost everyone. This is what Aristotle (IX, 4) meant when he said: ‘By the universal I mean how a person of given character will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity.’ It is what Shelley meant when he said Shakespeare created ‘forms more real than living men’.24 It is this Aristotelian sense of universal significance that makes casestudies vehicles of biological, medical and psychological insight. As my doctoral supervisor liked to say: you only need to see one acorn grow into an oak tree to appreciate that acorns grow into oak trees. Every experiment is in fact a case-study, an active intervention that alters an intersubjective field, and it is only by the reductionist techniques of depopulation reviewed by Billig (1998) – the fewer identifying details, the better – that we are able to ‘generalise’ experimental findings. Alternatively, Brown and Gilligan’s (1993) detailed study of girls growing up in one American school during the 1980s illustrates processes of identity-formation that may illuminate the experience of women from many different places and different eras: the more telling details we hear, the better. In Haug’s words (1987, p. 44; see below): ‘It is within the domain of collective production that individual experience becomes possible. If therefore a given experience is possible, it is also subject to universalisation.’ Techniques for the democratic production of data There is now a growing number of research techniques that move directly against the equation of the scientific value with peeling away ‘irrelevancies’ (the scientist’s and informants’ gender, motivations, political commitments and private agendas) in order to arrive at a valid picture of ‘reality’ (Davies, 1994, p. 83). These new techniques conform to the idea that immediate experience is intersubjectively constituted: though at first one finds it easy to think of one’s experiences as entirely unique because being or having been peculiar to one’s own here-and-now, such a sense is but the end-product of a set of societal processes that we might call ‘individualization’.25 Hence, to uncover the collective significance of individual experiences, we need to work backwards from individual 24 25

Quoted in Bloom, 1998, p. 7. Ulrich Beck’s view that we live in a ‘risk society’ means individuals no longer inherit established traditions for understanding who they are. Instead we must forge our own identities with regard to occupation, gender-roles, political affiliation and family structure. Hence, socialisation paradoxically becomes synonymous with individualisation: ‘Individualization is a paradoxical compulsion for the construction, self-design and

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experience to psycho-social process. Frigga Haug’s (1987) procedures for memory-work are one example. Memory-work is a strategy that involves a collective of co-researchers who meet on a number of occasions. All are treated equally as co-researchers in the group. Thus even those who are ‘conducting’ or ‘convening’ the research act as participants. Memory-work has three phases. First comes the writing of memories by each participant according to certain rules. Rules of participation are: write a memory on a given topic or to a cue – the topic/cue itself may be selected by negotiation within the group. This should be of a particular event or episode that you have experienced. The account may be written in the third person, although not all memory-work follows this rule (Davies, 2003). It should be as detailed as possible, including ‘inconsequential’ or apparently trivial detail, but without importing interpretation, justification, explanation or biography. The viewpoints of all protagonists should be fleshed out. In phase two, the group reads out and subjects these first accounts to analysis and challenge with the aim of clarifying the memories but also of seeing how the stories played on or were informed by social values, stereotypes, cliche´s, cultural imperatives, theories, popular images and sayings that make them ‘mass produced’. Members should focus both on similarities in the memories, binary oppositions and particularly on events that do not appear amenable to comparison. Everybody then re-writes their accounts. Phase three maps the understandings reached in phase two back on to the initial memories and on to the process of the research-group, allowing conclusions to be drawn about how the given topic figures in the negotiation of conflicting subject-positions that intersubjectively constitutes its social reproduction. Haug et al. (1987, pp. 43–4) comment: Since it is as individuals that we interpret and suffer our lives, our experiences appear unique and thus of no value for scientific analysis. The mass character of social processes is obliterated within the concept of individuality. Yet we believe that the notion of the uniqueness of experience and of the various ways in which it is consciously assessed is a fiction. The number of possibilities for action open to us is radically limited. We live according to a whole series of imperatives: social pressures, natural limitations, the imperative of economic survival, the given conditions of history and culture. Human beings produce their lives collectively. It is within the domain of collective production that individual experience becomes possible. If therefore a given experience is possible, it is also subject to universalisation. self-staging of not just one’s own biography, but also its commitments and networks as preferences and life phases change . . . even the traditions of marriage and family are becoming dependent on decision-making’ (Beck, 1997, p. 96). As a consequence of this do-it-yourself quality, the production of social positions is brought increasingly into the ambit of psychology.

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In short, as personal experience is intersubjectively constituted, the analysis of experience must aim to uncover the relevant intersubjective dynamics. Memory-work facilitates this process in a number of ways: memories on ‘the same’ topic are produced, discussed and analysed as part of a group exercise; memories are also social in content – they entail a plurality of subject-positions and viewpoints which exist in tension with each other and are socially provided, bearing testimony to ‘the way individuals continuously reproduce society as a whole: the way they enter into pre-given structures, within which they reproduce both themselves, and the categories of society’ (ibid., p. 40). Even the fact that a particular event is remembered is socially constrained. ‘What is remembered is remembered because it is problematic or unfamiliar. What renders something unfamiliar, enigmatic, problematic, complex or contradictory is its difference from the taken-for-granted, the everyday. The problematic or unfamiliar is not a ‘‘natural’’ given but is socially defined’ (Stephenson et al., 1996, p. 183). Risk research captures a new approach to investigating in a way that extends the principles of memory-work and gives them an orientation to the future. It is derived from the work of Ulrich Beck and his followers (Bradley and Morss, 2002; Bradley et al., 2004). According to the standard forms of empirical psychology, the concept of ‘risk’ has become a useful addition to discourses which construct and fix the social boundaries between ‘abnormality’ and ‘normality’. This was discussed in Chapter 2. Research focused on ‘risk factors’ adds a dimension of predictive calculability to discussion about who is or is not ‘problematic’ (abnormal). It allows the psychologist and the policy-maker to answer the question: who will become problematic, that is, for example, aggressive, under-confident, criminal, alcoholic, addicted to drugs, unemployed, mentally ill, injured in accidents at work or on the road, divorced or too early dead. The ‘at risk’ idea enables psychologists to conceive of problems prospectively. This has been particularly important for the study of children and adolescents (Rutter, 1988; Jessor, 1998). More recently, coeval with the rise of health psychology, the vocabulary of risk has been extended into what was formerly the domain of medicine as it has been shown that psychological and behavioural characteristics can be used to predict the incidence of a wide variety of illnesses, from cancer and heart disease to ante-natal depression. Courtenay (1998), for instance, has shown that in the USA traditional beliefs about manhood are associated with relatively unhealthy life-styles in men. Standard research on risk adopts a design that uses correlational or multiple regression techniques to identify the factors associated with the problematic outcomes of interest to the psychologist. Hence ‘risk factor’

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becomes synonymous with ‘independent variable’ in such a way that the new vocabulary of risk simply re-glosses a long-standing then!now diachronic approach to research on vulnerable populations, one based on the model of cause and effect that underpins classic accounts of experimental and quasi-experimental design (e.g. Campbell and Stanley, 1966). As a result, the line of action predicated upon this species of risk research is not hard to deduce. It requires the psychologist to alter the independent variables ‘causing’ the problem behaviour. From the viewpoint of Beck’s risk theory, however, there is a number of problems with the conventional approach to risk. The first is that analyses of ‘risk factors’ are inevitably post hoc. Hence they cannot address that aspect of risk society which is preoccupied by threats of which the effects are still in the future, threats like global warming, terrorism, pre-emptive wars or economic globalisation (Beck, 1998; Reith Lectures, 2000). If they adopt a traditional approach, psychologists play no role in identifying new risks as they emerge in society. They can respond to social problems, but not identify them. This is one explanation for the fact that the widespread occurrence of wife-battering and child abuse, which is now described by the American Medical Association as an epidemic (Gilligan, 1994), had to wait for the democratic experience-based consciousness-raising techniques introduced by second-wave feminism before it became a recognised problem for psychology. As a result of the inevitably reactive quality of traditional research on risk, psychologists inflame rather than soothe the uncertainties and anxieties that constitute what Beck (1992) calls ‘risk society’. Studies of adolescent pathology link it to discontinuous parental care in early childhood, adding to the anxieties of working mums and dads (e.g. Rutter, 1988). Dunn (1988) reports that such ordinary events as moving house or the birth of a sibling constitute serious risk factors for young children, once again potentially upping everyday parental concerns. Viewed in this light, such traditional research is part and parcel of a society that has increasingly become obsessed with trying to calculate and control the problems it ‘reflexively’ produces for itself. This obsession is unlikely ever to yield happy results. In the first place, standard risk research conceptually splits off a deviant ‘vulnerable’ group from the ‘normal’ population for its attention in a way which implies that, normally, people are not at risk. As a result, researchers have little leeway to deal with the possibility of threats that may preoccupy a whole population, threats like systemic oppression or mad cow disease. Secondly, the traditional approach ties psychologists to a narrow political vision in which ‘social problems’ are identified as such because they threaten what the psychologist takes to be a pre-existing and

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unquestionable social order (cf. Ingleby, 1974; Franklin, 1998). The assumptions of such research hence resist social change. They build on an idealised notion of a secure society with traditional institutions that they are constantly trying to restore. From a risk theory perspective, however, these traditional institutions cannot respond as we imagine they used to. Today’s ‘risk society’ is ‘after tradition’ (Giddens, 1994) in the sense that class, labour, gender roles, the family, marriage, childhood, education, scientific knowledge, political action, the distinctions between nature and society, private and public, all have undergone such significant transformation that they pertain more to social arrangements of the past than the present. Hence any analysis of today’s society cannot take a nostalgic idealised past as its starting-point but must start from the realities of everyday life, here and now. Another implication of the contrast between standard research on ‘risk factors’ and risk research as perceived by people like Beck is, therefore, that what psychologists call ‘normal’ experience is never innocent of anxiety, uncertainty or concern. The very existence of what we call experience is predicated on individuals’ recognition of the vulnerability of ordinary life to adverse social circumstances, shades which no amount of normalising psychological ‘healthy-mindedness’ can cleanse (Pandora, 1997). See for example a report by Parker et al. (1998) on a five-year longitudinal study of drug-taking in 773 teenagers from England during the early 1990s. Parker et al. pointed out that half their sample had tried illicit drugs by the end of their adolescence and around a quarter were regular recreational users. These users were as likely to be female as male and came from all social and educational backgrounds. Parker et al. pointed out that the sheer scale of illicit drug-use in the 90s meant that the traditional psychological approach of demonising drug-taking as drug ‘abuse’, and equating it with abnormality, pathology or delinquency no longer worked. In statistical terms, this problem shows up in the psychologist’s inability to find ‘risk factors’ which explain very much of the variance of self-drugging. The causal approach also rules out choice and decision-making, failing to explain how many adolescents leave their ‘problem-behaviour’ behind when they make a transition into adulthood (Moffit, 1993). Parker et al. conclude that drug-taking in adolescence must be seen as the outcome of normal psychological processes. Their informants link smoking cannabis and popping pills with a rising sense of uncertainty about the future in their generation, a sense supported by unemployment statistics and the other trends theorised by Beck (1992) in his conceptualisation of the risk society. The resultant stress of constantly needing to make risky individual decisions in order to put together a life, of decisions

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with no certain pay-off, of never-ending bricolage, brings with it a need for ‘time out’ as an antidote to struggles at home, at school or college or in the job-market. Increasingly, the young ‘do not feel confident that the right opportunities, jobs and relationships will fall into place’ (Parker et al., 1998, p. 157). Whether you get on is up to you: These subjective experiences, the feeling of negotiating in uncertainty, in a ‘risk society’, are the result of individualisation (Beck, 1992) whereby young people accept success or failure, prosperity or poverty as indicative of their own performance . . . risk management has become routinised. Because the world owes you no favours and cannot tolerate indecision then perhaps taking no risks is simply too risky. (Parker et al., p. 158)

The ‘risk-taking’ of drug use is of a piece with the larger strategy required of young people: managing risks. And the rewards are far more immediate and hence predictable. Thus we are led to conceive of a form of research that consists in public projects which have a very different orientation from those conventionally focusing on ‘risk factors’. Rather than taking from the authorities what constitutes the problems we are expected to solve (e.g. teen drug[ab]use) and then trying to find antecedent ‘causes’ for these problems, the new research aims to create a space in which ordinary folks’ definitions of reality and of the threats they feel they face can emerge into public view and serve as a basis for communal decision-making. The key shift is from an empiricism based on the methodologically constrained experience of experts to one setting out from the collected personal experiences of nonexperts. The main aim of risk research is to be forward-looking: to use a democratic process of collective discovery as a foundation for communal action (or further research) aimed at advancing the common good. As such, it is a form of action research. Action research is a research strategy which ‘places value on the experiential basis for knowledge’ possessed by those involved in the situation under study, so that ‘knowledge can be action based and derived from practice in the real world’ (Winter and Munn-Giddings, 2001, pp. 7–8; Walker and Haslett, 2002, p. 2). Action research combines both research and intervention in a way that uses the voices, skills and experiences of the target-group to help create and direct intervention. This is what Kemmis and McTaggart (2000, p. 567), in their comprehensive taxonomy of action research, call collaborative or participatory action research: inquiries which aim ‘to avoid privileging the perspectives of professional researchers in favour of the perspectives of the ordinary participants in social settings’. Clearly the heterogeneity of any one target-group’s circumstances and the inherent individuality of their problems precludes overarching solutions or approaches. But this is generally the case where

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research is intended to solve a given social problem where ‘complexities involved in the individual case make it difficult to provide a comprehensive response to the issue’ (Dwyer and Wyn, 2001, p. 162). This specificity is consistent with Beck’s approach in that the ‘public discursivity of experience’ he recommends will inevitably reflect issues arising locally, in the immediate setting for the public discussion. Action research embraces a theoretical orientation that remains unusual in psychology in that, as advocated in the previous chapters, it prioritises the present over the past in the analysis of social events. This prioritising is encapsulated by Lewin’s (1936, pp. 33–5) ‘principle of contemporaneity’ which rests on the thesis that ‘neither past nor future psychological facts but only the present situation can influence present events . . . In representing the life space therefore, we take into account only what is contemporary.’ This is the basis of Lewin’s (1948) ‘field theory’ wherein the present is seen as a field that is collectively constituted and has synchronic dynamics which require a different kind of analysis from diachronic change. According to this conception, action research is an intervention into the field of the present which, by changing the field, informs us about the intersubjectivity which constitutes it. Action research is reflection-upon-alteration in action (see Chapter 7). On this basis Kemmis and McTaggart (2000, p. 592; my emphasis) argue that action research ‘transforms reality in order to investigate it’. Thus, the history of action research is littered with examples where an intervention in one part of the field produces an unexpected response in another quarter. For example, Friedlander (1983) attempted to solve an organisational problem (an epidemic of repetitive strain injury in a large electronics corporation) by convening a small representative group to discuss it. The group was made up of five workers, two foremen, the researchers and the personnel manager. This group quickly identified the company’s style of management as a likely cause of the problem, which, in its turn, produced a strong negative reaction from management that no one had anticipated – but which nonetheless confirmed the depth of the gulf between workers and managers in the company, and helped to guide the group towards remedial action. This kind of observation reveals the synchronic interconnectedness of the elements which make up a simultaneity such that, if one of its elements changes value, all the other elements change value too. Deighton, Selby and I (Bradley et al., 2004) have recently published an illustration of the practical significance of this synchronic interconnectedness as we strove to alter the dynamics surrounding youth at risk in a regional Australian town: a public performance by a new youth theatre group producing an unprecedented change in Council policy regarding young people.

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Typically action research is seen as having four phases: planning, acting/observing, reflecting and producing a revised plan (Kemmis and McTaggart, 2000). First is an examination of the research problem with the aim of forming a plan with practical objectives, including more factfinding about the problem if necessary. Then comes the proposed action and its evaluation. Next comes the reconsideration of the plan in the light of the new data. Finally comes formulation of the next step. But a key feature of participatory action research is that it is ‘democratic’: it is assumed that all stakeholders should be actively involved in the research process. In this connection, it requires researchers to generate and maintain something approximating an ideal speech-situation in which different viewpoints and otherwise-repressed feelings can be brought into public awareness. For, as has already been pointed out, group discussion is usually significantly distorted by asymmetries of power and social status. Essential, therefore, is a maieutic (obstetric) process of levelling that grounds research by safeguarding a ‘transitional’ or ‘liminal’ space in which repressed uncertainties (risks) can find articulation and differing realities can be collectively negotiated (cf. Winnicott, 1974; Turner, 1982; Boal, 1992). Once articulated, these perceptions can become the basis for concerted public action (as well as further research), thereby proving the validity and generalisable significance of an inquiry by its practical effects, rather than by reaching arbitrary levels of statistical improbability. Conclusions This chapter has argued that a framework for research that is based in principles of justice, treating others as the equals of the psychologists who study them, entails a considerable departure from traditional methods of investigation. Hierarchy is intrinsic to psychological concepts of normality, to psychological language, to the practice of operational definition and to the division of labour within experiments and quasi-experimental research (e.g. surveys that used ‘closed’ questions). The more equitable framework for research upon which this chapter has focused changes the way we think about choosing topics for investigation, about maintaining distinctions between events and their interpretation, about the dynamics of discovery and about the significance of our results. Increasing numbers of psychologists are now working within this democratic framework, a framework which draws its intelligibility from the theoretical notions of intersubjectively constituted experience canvassed in previous chapters. My argument describes a new obstetric role for psychologists of which the ideal is maintaining a speech-situation within which the experiences of

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others can find undistorted articulation. This democratic process then becomes the basis for further action and further research. Insofar as research methods are viewed as the backbone of psychological training, the claim that research findings are to be produced in a more democratic way inevitably changes how we think about the psychological curriculum. It is to this topic I turn in the next chapter.

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Validating the curriculum

There are actually two types of science which are beginning to diverge in the civilization of danger: the old, flourishing laboratory science, which penetrates and opens up the world mathematically and technically but is devoid of experience, and a public discursivity of experience which brings objectives and means, constraints and methods controversially into view. (Ulrich Beck, 1997, The Reinvention of Politics, p. 123)

A colleague and I are currently in the midst of an interview-study which examines the experiences of people who have just made their first steps into the workforce after graduating in psychology.1 Already, concerns are emerging. The strongest is the graduates’ sense of being seriously underprepared for the challenges of working as a psychologist. For example: ‘At the end of my honours year I really wasn’t qualified to do anything much’ (#6). ‘I really found that in my first three years . . . it was so theoretical, I didn’t feel like there was anything practical whatsoever, which is . . . what psychology is all about, you know, the hands on dealing with people kind of thing’ (#7). Another says: ‘The psychology course . . . really didn’t provide me with any sort of skills that I could see could be useful to me in the workplace’ (#3). A woman four weeks into a job with a government-run Employee Assistance Programme illustrates the point: ‘In terms of you know doing the vocational assessments and actually being able to conduct those assessments and report them, I haven’t done anything like that in my course so, no, my course didn’t prepare me to do that’ (#6). Not surprisingly therefore: ‘People seeing clients for the first time are petrified, because it’s all very well in theory but how do you actually do that when you’ve got someone sitting across from you and they’re telling you that they’re suicidal, you’re the psychologist, you’re supposed to deal with it?’ (#8). The graduates are not just concerned about themselves. They worry about their clients: ‘And that worries me, that really worries me, that people are coming out after four years, and 1

With Danielle Every.

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sure you go on and do supervised practice for two years, but what about your poor clients that you see in those two years, while you’re practising on them?’ (#3). These answers are to be expected given psychology’s curriculum. As discussed in Chapter 2, the curriculum is currently designed to be ‘technical-rational’: pure science first, practical applications second. It is this technical-rational model that underpins psychologists’ adherence to the ideal of evidence-based practice. Capacity for evidence-based practice is the hallmark of the ‘scientist-practitioners’ which degrees in psychology aspire to produce. According to this ideal, the logical response to graduates’ concerns about being under-prepared for work is ‘do more study’: do a clinical Masters or professional Doctorate in which you learn to apply your theoretical knowledge. Yet, despite espousing the ideal of evidence-based practice, the promulgation of the psychology’s preferred pedagogy is not based on evidence. Indeed the evaluative study Danielle Every and I are conducting is one of the first to seek to validate the current curriculum by examining the experiences of those who are trying to reconcile their training with the demands of the workplace. The solutions suggested by the graduates themselves had varying rationales. Most felt that they had a sufficient training in research skills and these skills were often useful at work. But those were the only skills of which they felt confident. They all agreed that ‘there should be a much larger practical component’ (#7), demanding more ‘person-based skills’ (#4): ‘placements are essential’ (#6). This was partly for pedagogic reasons. ‘I would actually like to see the practical go hand in hand all the way without just sticking to theory’ (#4). This would make the theoretical knowledge more ‘relevant’ (#3). It would also ensure that graduates were better prepared for ‘work with the kinds of people that psychologists would work with’ (#4). Practicums and person-based skills would remedy the fact that ‘the one thing that you’re not taught and didn’t get any opportunity to do was how do you actually do this when you get out there’ (#8). But practical work was also seen as a route for ‘more examination of my own personal experience and attitudes’ (#4). This was another area of agreement. Some saw that their peers ‘have got no people skills whatsoever’ (#7). Hence, systematic practical work could serve as ‘a big screening process’ to see ‘how you’re going to act around other people’ (#7). They were also worried about themselves, fearing stress, vicarious trauma and burnout: ‘I’ve come from a very very protected background and I have not been open to practically everything that I will be dealing with on a day to day basis. And how to manage that, basically, has been one of my concerns’ (#7). Hence students need ‘some practical experience of what it’s like listening to other people’s problems

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day in day out because that is going to be your job . . . People have horrendous stories. You know, the things that happen to people are just terrifying, really, when you sit down and talk . . . Personally I know I wouldn’t be able to deal with it’ (#3). The argument of this book has been to promote experience-based pedagogy as a complement to the technical-rational curriculum. Chapter 2 made a prima facie case, but argued that a self-consciously psychological psychology that set out to base itself on experience needed to be as clear as possible about what it took experience to be. Subsequent chapters then argued that experience has a synchronic, intersubjective constitution and went on to examine the implications of this argument: for theory, for explanation, for understandings of change and development and for research. This chapter returns to the question of the curriculum. A technical-rational curriculum for psychology may well have ‘internal’ validity in that it produces the effects in students that it intends to produce. But it may still lack ‘external’ validity: the knowledge it confers may not generalise to the world outside the classroom – as suggested by the examples presented in Chapter 2 and above. One solution to this problem is to develop a curriculum that validates itself as it goes along, being continually tested for relevance against students’, lecturers’ and (potentially) clients’ experience. After all, now that we have a clearer understanding of the principle that any psychological intervention reflects back upon the intersubjective space into which it is made, the idea of validation is an indispensable phase of the process of learning from experience. Because interventions, whether pedagogical or investigative, are always intersubjective as well as instrumental, the process of validation has just the two-sided character sought by the students interviewed by Every and I: knowledge must needs be questioned for its relevance both to the investigator/learner and to the ‘other’ of psychological practice. Two takes on content The ‘what’ of psychological education is traditionally made up of theories, methods, procedures, techniques, calculations and the findings of well-vetted research. Matters that do not fall into these categories such as cultural products, public issues, anecdotes or personal observations may be discussed by way of humour, enlivenment, contrast or illustration. But they will not be presented as forming part of the real contents of the discipline. In particular, the students’ own observations, experiences and ideas are likely to be bracketed with old wives, tales, speculation, superstition, prejudice and myth, as documented in Chapter 2. Yet, as

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Gadamer (1989) and Joynson (1974) have argued at length, the scientific case against prejudice is often itself a prejudice.2 As Joynson illustrates with research on the so-called ‘risky-shift’, common sense may ultimately provide a more flexible and realistic understanding of psychological phenomena than laboratory-based knowledge.3 The assumption that anything which has not been found out by sanctioned methods cannot be grist for science’s mill is often profoundly discouraging for students. The imagery students bring to psychology is predominantly of a course that will help them to help and understand others and, incidentally, themselves. If you start by asking your first-year class what gave them the idea of studying psychology, it is often this sense of vocation and/or some challenging personal event such as their parents getting divorced, the suicide of a friend, a struggle with drugs, helpful dealings with a school-counsellor, their own depression. So it can be a major let-down when they realise both that the way psychology is structured means they will not be learning how to help people for their first four years and that their personal experiences are irrelevant to the way the subject is taught. And the thing that I found was that when I did raise the question with lecturers and stuff over the time, like, ‘Well this is great but when do we actually get to learn something useful? We’re learning lots of interesting things, and its fascinating, but . . . you know I need to actually know something that’s going to help me so I can start working.’ And they would say, ‘Oh well, in your third year you’ll do . . . ’ or ‘In your fourth year you’ll do . . . ’. And when I got to my fourth year, it was ‘In your Masters’. And I just went, ‘OK, I’m not buying that any more, all right?’ (#3)

To have a valid curriculum requires that the knowledge it purveys addresses problems of the kind that are faced in daily life, not just in the laboratory. If psychological knowledge is applicable to real-life problems, as technical-rational pedagogy proposes, it can presumably be applied to such problems at any time. Hence there is no reason why entry to the ‘pure’ world of psychological research and theory should not be through the doorway of students’ experiences. So we come to the idea that the content of the psychological curriculum might be approached along a 2

3

Gadamer points out that it is impossible to embark on an investigation or interpretation without some pre-existing idea of what is likely to be going on (i.e. a pre-judgement or prejudice). These preconceptions often have considerable heuristic value. The ‘risky shift’ was a ‘discovery’ by social psychologists being publicised in the 1970s which suggested that individuals tended to take riskier decisions when in groups than when on their own. These findings were taken to impugn jury trials, amongst other things. Joynson reviewed common-sense understandings of decision-making and showed that ordinary folk suggest a risky shift was only likely to take place under very particular conditions. Later research by social psychologists eventually came to the same conclusion.

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different route from the conventional one. Just as has been argued for research in Chapters 7 and 8, the first step – though only the first step – in the learning-teaching process would thus be for the teacher to set up a speech-situation in which all those in the classroom can review and give illustrations of how their own experience bears on the topic of autobiographical memory, moral development, problem-solving, peer pressure, sensation, perception or whatever. Other techniques can subsequently be used to bring out themes relating to current literature which become means of settling matters of fact or solving real problems, and ultimately to the discussion of theory. Hence the experience-first approach links with the pedagogy of ‘problem-based learning’ that has made considerable inroads into higher education over the past decade (e.g. Wilkersen and Gijselaers, 1996). The advantages of this approach are not solely giving the students a greater sense of relevance by providing at the start grounds for a reality check on the external validity of what they are learning. It also teaches them how to reflect on their own experience, a skill which students value highly when they get into the workforce, as has already been illustrated and is central to Scho¨n’s (1987) concept of the ‘reflective practitioner’. Furthermore, it addresses I. D. John’s (1998, p. 159) worry that ‘the most esteemed method of scientific inquiry is understandably the experiment, but it is not quite so understandable that the social relationship usually associated with this method in psychology should, either implicitly or explicitly, be held up to aspiring practitioners for emulation’. For traditionally the experimenter has absolute control over his or her experimental subjects and is the sole arbiter of what is significant about what they do. There is a haughtiness about this role which can easily spill over into the lecture theatre where it is assumed that students’ personal experiences are irrelevant compared to the expert knowledge of the fully fledged psychologist. Observational learning and identification may potentially lead to a reproduction in graduating students of this belief in the superiority of psychologists over ordinary folk. The approach to content being advocated here levels the playing field. The psychologist’s experience of childhood or learning something or getting married or remembering is of no greater worth than any student’s. Hence in the procedure for collective biography I described in Chapter 2 I emphasised that both lecturers and students produce material for the exercise. This tends to inculcate a more democratic ideal of practice in students and introduces a salutary demonstration of the challenging differences between truth as detached objective pronouncement and truth as honest disclosure. The next section describes some further techniques for experience-based learning.

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Further techniques for experience-based learning An experience-based pedagogy aims to give students hands-on experience which will pose problems that will motivate them both to reflect on their experience (with the help of someone more experienced; their ‘guide’) and to deepen their knowledge from existing literature. One powerful technique is well known: the research project. This project is often the first time that students have undertaken a practical project largely under their own initiative though with close supervision – and it is undoubtedly an invaluable learning-experience. There is now a variety of other techniques to be used in learning reflective practice, with different strengths and points of purchase. I have already discussed collective biography (in Chapter 2) and the ‘memory-work’ from which it derives (last chapter). Here are some further illustrations. The reflective practicum Scho¨n makes the reflective practicum the cornerstone of his pedagogy for the education of practitioners. He describes a variety of different kinds of practicum. Their hallmark is that they set a task that affords learning while doing. Most often, he suggests, the practicum will approximate the real world but fall short of real-world work: ‘the practicum is a virtual world, relatively free of the pressures, distractions and risk of the real one to which it nevertheless refers. It stands in an intermediate space between the practice world, the ‘‘lay world’’ of ordinary life, and the esoteric world of the academy’ (Scho¨n, 1987, p. 37). While the APS guidelines do include the possibility of a placement in the fourth year of a four-year undergraduate degree with a maximum of 10 per cent weighting, most psychologists feel that this is ‘too early’ (if not too timeconsuming) to let students loose as real-world practitioners, even under supervision – although I would argue that this is largely because students have not been given an experience-based education in psychology from their first year on. Enterprising students and staff do sometimes manage to arrange undergraduate exposure to psychological practice, though usually outside the formal syllabus. The most popular way I know is to get trained as a telephone counsellor and then work as a volunteer for Lifeline or a similar charitable emergency help-line. Students, and the agencies they help, generally find this experience very valuable. Hence it is certainly not impossible to expand this kind of practicum and integrate it into the undergraduate degree. However, such a step needs to be prefaced by other less risky ‘virtual world’ forms of experience-based learning.

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Role-play One popular way to create low-risk forms of learning from experience is by conducting role-plays. Scho¨n and Argyris (Scho¨n, 1987) illustrate this approach in their training in interpersonal skills for business-managers and the like. Their method is to present students with case-studies of interactions between business-managers and the people they supervise made up of verbatim transcripts from interviews aimed at improving the supervisee’s interpersonal skills. They first of all get students to draw out the implicit theories of management used by the manager in question, having primed students to look for two contrasting models of management: supervisor-centred (vertical) and supervisee-centred (horizontal). Students are then challenged to contrast these models by having the more ‘common-sense’ supervisor-centred model (illustrated by the casematerial) challenged by Scho¨n and Argyris. They are then asked to rescript the interaction as it might have been run according to the second model, justifying their changes. Throughout this process students are asked to act out the roles as scripted. Using a technique Augusto Boal (1992; Wyn and Dwyer, 2001) calls ‘forum theatre’, these role-plays can then be repeated in a slowed-down form with spectators (or what Boal calls spectactors) being encouraged to make suggestions for improvements and even step into the role-play to illustrate what they mean. Role-plays have the advantage of giving students a more active role in the educational process and at the same time of initiating learning-by-doing in a protected environment which thus enables ‘coaching’ rather than ‘teaching’. They allow students to experience the different sides of interactions between counsellor and troubled child, psychologist and depressed mother, supervisor and supervisee. They have the further advantage of increasing group-learning, something that is likely to have the advantage of carrying outside the classroom into the group’s collective memory. There are of course many excellent treatments of role-play as a teaching-method in the caring professions – though these are not commonly used in all psychology departments. Interviewing The most widely used form of experience-based learning in undergraduate psychology courses is the research dissertation. Final-year students are expected to do a research project in which they take part in conceiving and planning the project, reviewing the relevant literature, designing the method, collecting the data, analysing it and writing it up. They are closely supervised in this. The gold-standard for such projects is

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traditionally the experiment. But increasingly, as qualitative methods spread through the social sciences, students are wanting to use more democratic forms of data-collection (Stoppard, 2000). This implies that the practical training for research they do throughout their undergraduate course should introduce qualitative as well as quantitative methods. The most popular method of qualitative research is interviewing. Many lecturers now include interviewing as one method for data-collection in practical assignments from the first year on. Thus, rather than getting students to administer a survey to children in a developmental psychology course, they can be asked to find and interview a child, thus getting first-hand experience of some of the difficulties of conducting ethical research with vulnerable populations, of communicating with children and of understanding how children perceive their worlds. Journalling One useful technique for tying together what may from a student’s viewpoint seem to be an almost incomprehensible diversity of abstract material is to educate students in journal-writing (Progoff, 1975). This technique has been mostly used in teaching students how to conduct research projects, but it can be extended to any subject. The advantage is that, if journalling is included in the curriculum, the student has a chance not only to document their own take on the material they are learning but they get the ‘thinking space’ to reflect on what they have been learning and then raise their own concerns and puzzles within the classroom – where discussion will therefore be less dominated by the lecturer’s viewpoint. A further advantage is that, as with collective biography, one student’s concerns are likely to trigger related experiences from their peers, opening up discussion of both content and pedagogy. Case-studies As mentioned when discussing role-play, a useful way of getting students to address issues of experience is to use detailed case-histories as subjectmatter. This can be done as described by Scho¨n and Argyris (see above). It can be done by bringing students into contact with client-groups in the classroom – for example ‘youth at risk’ or the elderly. It can be done by making sure that students are taught in part by practitioners who use – and can be questioned about – their own case-material in teaching. Or it can be done less directly, by means of viewing video-taped counsellingsessions, for example, or indeed films. Thus Davies (1994) illustrates how to use the film Pretty Woman to explore how women are constructed as

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subjects. Davies (1989) has also written about the use of fairy-tales to explore similar questions. I have used Pink Floyd’s musical film The Wall to examine tensions between individualistic-developmental and sociohistorical accounts of adult crisis and creativity. Squier (1998, p. 128) and other contributors to Narrative Based Medicine (Greenhalgh and Hurwitz, 1998) argue that literary writing can be an invaluable resource in complementing factual learning with ‘the kind of integrative, imaginative skills that a physician needs to actually apply’ rote-learned knowledge: ‘Carefully selected, realistic readings chosen for their relevance to student experience and background can help bridge the gap between knowing the facts about disease and understanding the patient’s illness experience.’ The literature used may include both fictional accounts that relate to questions in psychology and accounts of first-hand experience by professional psychologists or their clients. Local tie-ins The power of all these techniques depends to a significant extent on their place in the life of the scholarly community in which they are used. If journalling, case-studies, student research, interviewing and so on are used simply as free-floating techniques whose relevance is confined to the classroom and students’ grade-getting, these techniques will certainly add value to existing pedagogy. But if they are tied in with a philosophy of local engagement that permeates the whole learning-community of which the students are members, they will have far greater significance. Case-studies of significant figures in students’ lives or of people who represent significant problems in the community which local psychologists serve will not only teach students academic lessons and further their powers of reflection. They will fuel debates relevant to the practice of psychology by fully fledged and trainee psychologists alike. Interviews which create space for those ‘at risk’ in students’ neighbourhoods to voice their perceptions will confront students and staff with immediate ethical and political challenges that press further action as well as fuelling debate on the rights and wrongs of professional conduct. Placements in community health centres, homes for the aged, youth centres, local businesses and help-lines gives deeper meaning and more critical understanding of the skills and knowledge students are acquiring in the classroom. The critical curriculum A common way of justifying the standard psychological curriculum is that students need to be educated to ‘think critically’ (e.g. Myers, 2001, ch. 1).

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This means that students should be made to realise there are alternatives to common-sense ways of answering psychological questions. Hence the attacks waged on common sense from the first week of students’ first year to the end of their degrees. The nub of these attacks is that the usual sources of common sense are unsecured, the message being that only when we are sure how knowledge has been gained, and are assured that it has been rigorously tested, can we be certain of its validity.4 Here I want to argue that there is now a large and growing body of work which enables us to envisage a syllabus for psychology that raises critical questions about the provenance and limitations of psychological knowledge that go far beyond the unilateral (i.e. uncritical) identification of critical thinking with adherence to certain given methods for acquiring knowledge, most notably, the experimental method. This new work forces us to recognise that there is always an alternative to any given way of construing a psychological topic or question – and that these alternatives often have very different profiles in the body politic where questions of justice are concerned. Data is only evidence ‘for’ a particular belief or hypothesis when viewed from a given perspective. Knowledge is always embedded in human interests (Habermas, 1972). There is always an angle. Thus students need to be taught in a way that leads them to become aware of the political interests and social perspective a given piece of knowledge has or implies. Because no society is a monolith, there is always an alternative perspective on a psychological problem. And, if we are to train critical thinkers, awareness of alternatives should go as much for the topics covered by the traditional psychology syllabus as for the way they are taught. I will now briefly sketch one way to conceive the discipline so as to keep alive debate about how the discipline would best be conducted – in the interests of justice as well as truth. There is at the moment much uniformity in what is taken to be the proper syllabus of undergraduate psychology. This is largely because the professional guilds that accredit psychology programmes prescribe the subject’s ‘core’ (APS, 2002). Thus the three most commonly used introductory textbooks for Australian psychologists (texts which are all published in the US and written by Americans) cover almost identical topics in almost identical order: psychology’s history and key issues; research methods; biological bases of behaviour; sensation and perception; learning; memory; thought and language; intelligence and 4

Unless we have independent ways to check the ‘external’ validity or ‘whatness’ of such knowledge, this message may lead us to commit the genetic fallacy. For example new tests of IQ are often ‘validated’ against old tests for IQ – a circular procedure that does not ensure IQ measures ‘what intelligence really is’.

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mental testing; consciousness; motivation; emotion; personality; child development; psychological disorders; treatment of disorders; stress and health; social behaviour. This way of presenting psychology’s subjectmatter is ‘genetic’ in that it implies one understands what is complex (fruit) by starting out from what is simple (roots). At the same time it implies that biology is more fundamental to understanding the psyche than society. Certain topics do not figure at all in the discipline’s content: for example, neither the will nor the imagination gets a mention in the index of Weiten’s (1998) textbook, let alone a chapter or a part of a chapter to itself. Fantasy gets four sentences in a book of 700 pages. For the purposes of what follows, I will suggest an alternative ordering of the current ‘core’ content of the syllabus, along with a few comments on material that could be used to complement and raise questions about each topic, once relevant raw material has been produced through an experience-based pedagogy. History Introductory texts almost always present the history of psychology in an internalist way, as if psychological knowledge is cumulative and today’s students benefit from following in a long line of giants, upon whose shoulders they inevitably stand through the good fortune of coming after them. The idea that the profession of psychology might serve a societal function and therefore have a social history is rarely broached. Yet a great deal of contemporary historiography in the social sciences focuses on precisely this issue – raising questions about the politics and values embedded in the job psychologists do (Ingleby, 1974; Rose, 1985, 1999; Danziger, 1990, 1997). If these two kinds of history were introduced alongside each other, students would be encouraged to raise their own questions about how psychologists might best address the issues that are evoked in the discipline by society and vice versa. Social and organisational aspects of mind The idea that some behaviour is social and is dealt with in one chapter at the end of the year (and hence, by implication, the rest of behaviour is not social) is one of the rhetorical sleights of hand characteristic of the current balkanised presentation of psychology’s subject-matter. An alternative point of view is that all ‘behaviour’ and knowledge about it is culturally conditioned and socially identified, if not socially constituted. There is a host of work that could be accessed here that would throw into relief and complement the traditional introduction to social behaviour. This

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includes work on the social construction of science, the construction of audiences by film and TV, ethnographic and cultural psychologies (e.g. Habermas, 1972; Heelas and Lock, 1981; Stigler et al., 1990). Furthermore, as the very syllabus of psychology, not to mention the ways it is taught to any given cohort of students, is organisationally constrained, this would be a fine opportunity to explore students’ own experiences of organisational constraint, both currently, within the classroom and further afield (e.g. from their experiences at work, in school and university). Psychopathology This topic is usually taught without any theoretical or historical discussion as a descriptive taxonomy or nosology of mental illnesses and disorders. But, if taught historically, it also provides a useful site for illustrating in concrete detail how psychology has grown up as a profession which regulates normality and abnormality (Foucault, 1961; Rose, 1999; Seligman, 2002). Here is a place for the branch of psychology that turns to the DSM as its Bible to meet with those psychologists who have been influenced by Foucauldian accounts of the birth of the ‘psy’ disciplines. Theory One neglected key that is nevertheless implicit in the standard curriculum’s early introduction of ‘research methods’ is the idea of theory. Some would doubt the possibility of talking comprehensibly about how to answer research questions in a hypothetico-deductive manner without a prefatory discussion of theory. Once again, theory can be understood as a purely scientific phenomenon as in the theory of evolution or learning theory – something that is entertained by psychologists about the world of mind and action. Or it can be understood as social theory, that is theory about psychologists and how they fit into society. Or we can talk about theories of knowledge (epistemology). This in turn, along with the historical issues raised above would lead nicely into a discussion of the very ideas of social versus realist epistemologies without which students will be ill-prepared to justify their responses to the kinds of conundrum this critical syllabus would be designed to throw up (Stoppard, 2000). Lecturers may feel that it would be a hopeless task to introduce firstyear students to such abstruse notions as realism and relativism. Yet complex ideas about epistemology are already implicit in most of what current first-year students – and even sixth-formers – learn and it is

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certainly not impossible to find vivid ways of opening up such questions with first-year students by focusing on practical dilemmas as, for example, innovative teaching of first-year philosophy students shows (Lindley, 1978). In short, building on the previous two topics, how we make sense of societal structure determines how we think about psychology’s place in society, which in turn determines the extent to which psychologists’ work can be epistemologically divorced from questions of social justice to become value-neutral. It is important to raise these general questions early on in an introductory course as any experience-based pedagogy depends for its effectiveness on creating a link to relevant (social and psychological) theory that can be used to analyse and so make more systematic sense of the students’ reflections on their personal experiences. Language Language is a topic usually dealt with under the aegis of cognitive psychology. Thus chapters on language typically treat it as an object of inquiry in much the same way that they would treat memory, personality or the brain. Questions raised are Chomskyan: language-learning in the great apes, phonemes and grammar, language acquisition by children. This is clearly essential material. However, over the past three decades a quite different vision of language has become important in psychology where it is recognised that language is also the practical medium in every walk of psychology: diagnosis, research, therapy, teaching, testing. Thus we have so-called ‘discursive’ psychologies which assume that all psychological qualities are epiphenomena of discourse and that the primary topic for psychological research should therefore be discourse, not some spurious referential world which such discourse supposedly represents. Under this aspect, language includes any semiotic system, including TV, advertising, literature and fashion. Beyond this, students can be encouraged to reflect on the ‘speech-situation’ that constitutes their own learning environments and thus to become more reflexive both about how they use language and how language – or discursive practices – uses (constructs) them. Experience While ‘states of consciousness’ is a typical chapter heading in introductory textbooks, experience does not normally figure at all (even in the index). Yet, as this book has shown, experience is an important topic in both science and psychology. Furthermore the approach to

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‘consciousness’ conventionally taken links it primarily to brain-function. In the chapter on consciousness we get sections on circadian rhythms, levels of brain activity, cycles of sleep and waking, dreams (not Freud but REM-sleep), hypnosis, meditation and a brief taxonomy of psychotropic drugs (not as they affect experience but with regard to the physiology of drug action). By introducing the topic of experience, we would be able to raise the possibility that experience has a synchronic structure which is underpinned by intersubjectivity, and ask how that formulation might help us to understand all psychological phenomena, including dreams, emotions, and chemical intoxication as a social phenomenon (e.g. Berger’s observation that you have to be inducted into the customs of ‘getting high’ before you get high). Put this alongside the standard ‘biological’ approach to consciousness and students would begin to see the different kinds of validity psychological knowledge may have. Methods for research With this background, an introduction to research methods which does not divide off the study of qualitative and of quantitative forms of data and which introduces students to the relative strengths of grouped versus individual data could be undertaken. As Stoppard (2000) argues, students could be introduced to the pros and cons of different research methods for addressing different kinds of psychological question: for example questions about the description of phenomena versus their explanation. Likewise, the different approaches to experience – the empiricism that informs laboratory experiments versus say interviews or collective biographies – could also be broached. Intelligence and mental testing Standard material on the construction of intelligence tests, nature versus nurture, reliability versus validity, racial stereotypes and definitions of intelligence could be inflected by a cultural history of mental testing that substantiates points made earlier about the use of psychometric measures in the service of social administration. Cross-cultural research on the different meanings of intelligence in non-European language and the use of intelligence testing to control access to life chances in the USA would raise questions about the possibility of objectivity in psychology and controversies over the discipline’s political investments and (ab)use of mathematical formulae (e.g. for heritability) (Gould, 1981; Heelas and Lock, 1981; Rose et al., 1984; Hernstein and Murray, 1994; Rose, 1999). Furthermore, training in the administration of psychological assessment

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requires students to be aware of the intersubjective context in which the test is made. As in medical diagnosis, success is likely to have as much to do with the quality of information practitioners can glean from what their clients informally tell them as with their formal capacity to conduct the test (Casement, 1985; Holmes, 1998). It is this informal information which allows the good practitioner to build up a holistic picture of their clients and hence to interpret test-results in a way that is sensitive to the particular character and circumstances of each person they assess (McWilliams, 1994). The trick is to incorporate a training in ‘listening to the patient’ in the undergraduate curriculum. Perception Sensation and perception are typically introduced together, a great deal of attention being paid to the physiology and anatomy of the sense-organs. This gives the idea that perception is largely a biological process. Yet, as the debate on intelligence will have shown, visual illusions are but the tip of an iceberg of the partial, biased or distorted forms of perception of others which links to those aspects of person perception that might conventionally have been dealt with (or passed by) under social psychology – empathy, intersubjectivity, fantasy, social stereotypes – alongside the Necker cube and the illusion that the moon is larger when near the horizon than when overhead. It would also be possible to include the increasingly dubious status of eyewitness testimony that is now being revealed in research by forensic psychologists. All in all I believe there is some important reconceptualisation of this topic to be done if the debate about perception is to make any significant contact with what we might normally understand by that term in common language. Learning The standard approach to learning is to interpret it by means of animal models for conditioning and reinforcement. This is clearly a classic site of psychological endeavour and allows us to make a number of distinctions important for the analysis of learning. It would be well to complement this standard approach with some of the issues raised in this book about how humans best learn (Lave, 1993). Thus models of learning that are drawn from the study of animals are largely based on an image of learning in which the teacher (psychologist) has almost absolute power over the ‘pupil’. This ‘vertical’ model of education could be compared with democratic models (Freire, Scho¨n, Dewey) to raise questions about admitting or denying the ‘other’s’ experience in psychology, as discussed in Chapter 2.

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These questions may well be forcefully raised for students in private when discussing the pros and cons of the ways they are being taught but never voiced if lecturers assume that bestial models ‘obviously’ explain human learning. Change and development Some of the themes raised in Chapter 7 could be developed here. In standard texts, subject-matter on children is a recapitulation in small of the content imputed to adult psychology, with perceptual, cognitive, emotional, moral and social development being treated in turn. Alternatively we get a brief stage-like synopsis of the ‘lifespan’ approach, with topics on adolescence, Erikson and ageing. But psychical alteration can be thought of both externally/embryologically (a` la Piaget and Bowlby) and internally/existentially – transformations that are experienced as transformations not necessarily being predictable or law-like at any age. Hence psychological questions about change and time can be separated from questions of what childhood is like and how children acquire knowledge. This last question is a classic locus to instantiate individualistic/monadic conceptions of person-world relations (a` la Piaget) with more collectivist intersubjective ones (a` la Vygotsky). Personality Personality is supposedly a situation-independent constant: it is what does not change or develop over one’s life-course. It is a topic usually dealt with by plodding through four of five key approaches to personality psychology (e.g. psycho-dynamic, behavioural, humanistic, biological, contemporary). This approach conflates two kinds of issue: how is the self best understood, and and how/why has personality been assessed? The former question is typically not asked – for some reason the concept of personality (which can be thought of as a biological entity) has subsumed or obliterated questions about the self and identity (which might have been thought of as better dealt with under social psychology, were more space devoted to social psychology in introductory texts). At back of this conflation is an externalist versus internalist account of personality, with the externalist ‘objective’ measuring of personality being given priority. But a great deal of recent work on the ‘narrative construction’ of self and personality could be used to draw out the internalist account (e.g. Raggatt, 2000) versus for example symbolic interactionist and situationist accounts of individual consistency. The fact that certain biological markers are associated with certain kinds of personality-type could then

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be used as evidential grist for a debate about relativistic ‘subjectivist’ conceptions of self versus realist or ‘objectivist’ theories and measures of personality. Body The body seldom becomes a discussion of first-year texts – except in exploded form as ‘the brain’, ‘the synapse’, ‘hormones’, ‘the gene’. The mind–body problem may be introduced as a philosophical curiosity in Chapter 1 in a box that mentions Descartes and the pineal gland. Meanwhile, scholarship in the social sciences has been prolifically interested in ‘the body’, both theoretically and empirically, particularly stress, anxiety, sex and spirit. Elsewhere, the rise of health psychology has reanimated interest in mind–body relations as placebo effects, stress and auto-immune responses, reminding us that how we live affects how our bodies function just as much as the reverse. Likewise, what is usually dealt with under ‘sensation’ could be revisited here with reference to a panoply of pains, pleasures, tastes and more subtle frissons. Currently there is an odd divorce between sensation qua neural stimulation5 and sensation as we might ordinarily talk of such things: an odd sensation in my leg, a dry wine, an arousing caress, chronic back pain – the second kind rarely rating any space in the curriculum. This underlines that the body is a crucial site for developing a more integrated approach to a topic that has formerly been dealt with in a fashion that skates past a variety of issues that are crucial to our understanding of experience. Cognition, memory, problem-solving Once again these are classic sites of psychological inquiry. At the same time they have been sites of intensive reconceptualisation since critics like Neisser (1976; cf. Claxton, 1980) complained that cognitive scientists seem not to ask the most interesting questions about our cognitive capacities and powers. Not only has cognitive science responded to this challenge but a host of studies of ‘real-world’ cognition have been undertaken which set out to show how people solve real-life problems (Lave, 1988), how social groups collectively sustain memory (Middleton and

5

Since its inception, nearly all modern psychology textbooks have introduced students to the ‘contents’ of the discipline with a chapter on sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. ‘But this’, warned James (1890, p. 219), ‘is abandoning the empirical method of investigation’ at the outset because the very idea of a ‘simple sensation’ is an abstraction (see p. 26 n. 6).

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Edwards, 1990) and how indeed rationality is in large part itself a form of gendered subject-position based on a fantasy of control (Walkerdine, 1988). Here would be the place to talk of imagination and creativity too. Putting together these two bodies of literature would provide a useful starting-point to tackle questions of scientific validity as they apply to the contemporary study of cognition. Practice Practice is of course not a topic in introductory textbooks as they are now. The closest we get is a late chapter on psychotherapy, largely consisting of a taxonomy of kinds of psychological ‘treatment’. In my view it would be remiss in a first-year course on Psychology not to give space to a discussion of practice, not just psychotherapy but the full range of kinds of practice for which the profession imagines itself to be equipping its students – and the practical principles which students are supposed to be acquiring (see Scho¨n, 1987, and above). These link to the kinds of narrative understanding discussed in Greenhalgh and Hurwitz’s (1998) collection, the need to understand one’s own experience and the need for moral imagination in addressing others’ ‘symptoms’ emphasised by Scott (1998). Conclusion This chapter draws together the case for psychology to adopt an experience-based pedagogy to complement the existing syllabus. The current style of curriculum can deliver students into the work force scandalously under prepared for the jobs they get. In this sense, it is not valid because it does not have real-world relevance. This is because psychology has adopted a technical-rational approach to training which does not put its priority on equipping students for practice but on scientific training. So, for example, four-year graduates in Australia often go out into the workforce with scant preparation for practical work and with a sense of disillusionment about the relevance of the knowledge they have acquired. The remedy to this predicament is to develop a curriculum that is constantly validated by reference to students’ experience, both personal and practical. In making this argument, I have availed myself of debates that are already well-advanced in cognate disciplines in the helping professions. Perhaps most notable are the efforts by medics to rethink the way that students are trained for general practice discussed in Chapter 2. This is especially germane as psychologists have largely adopted a six-year

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training for practice in emulation of the medical syllabus. This syllabus has now changed. Medical doctors are trained in less time and in an increasingly experience-based way. I suggest that psychology should learn from the experience of other professions, not to mention that of their own students, and adopt a more experience-based approach to educating their heirs. Such a move would require exploration of a different, more democratic relationship between students and staff than is now the rule. It would also require a substantial revitalisation of the normative curriculum to allow points of purchase for experience-based, problemposing pedagogies to engage with the discipline’s traditional subjectmatter. The final section of the chapter provisionally sketches one way of conceiving this revitalisation.

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Rouse the dull ear, the hoodwink’d eye unbind, And give to energy the public mind. (Erasmus Darwin, 1803, The Temple of Nature or the Origin of Society, Canto IV, lines 277–8).

This book has two main themes. One argues the need to reverse the traditional priorities of psychology, arguing that the discipline’s primary goal must be ethical and political: the practical promotion of human welfare and social justice. It is this practical priority that should guide the subject’s scientific activities, its aim to advance our understanding of the mind. And it is this priority that best justifies psychologists’ need to base their knowledge of the psyche upon experience, particularly the experiences of others. This is my first theme, one that sets psychology apart from the ‘pure’ sciences that have for a century provided its models, and requires psychologists to do something other than mimic the ideals and methods of biology or physics when they set out the conceptual justification for their inquiries. Hence we arrive at the book’s second theme, the need to reconsider the concept most fundamental to the development of a genuinely empirical psychology: experience. The fruit of this reconsideration has been a picture of the mind that markedly differs from the way the psyche is usually drawn in psychology and most common sense. Psychologists have long held the view that their job is to unravel what ‘lies behind’ or ‘underpins’ everyday experience. It is the hidden structures supporting consciousness that comprise the mind and the mind’s foundations. These are usually held to be ultimately biological, either analogous to or synonymous with the brain. So researchers focus on what Hebb called the conceptual nervous system and devise hypotheses about forms of mental process going on ‘inside’ the mind-brain. Models can then be built, usually comprising flow-diagrams, linking boxes which represent information passing over time through a sequence of identifiable phases of cognitive processing. These models have a similar 205

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form, whether they relate to the creation and storage of memories, language-production, visual perception or problem-solving. Even the genesis of social behaviour may be pictured in this way, as in Bowlby’s (1982) diagrams of the ‘working models’ that underpin children’s attachments. The imagery upon which this approach draws is of the mind as something that grows up and operates inside what Lukes (1973) called an abstract individual, an entity having no necessary links to other people, whether social, emotional, cultural or historical. Mental activity is generated from the isolated brain-mind as from a point-source, like light shining from a bulb. Although originally isolated, the mind may be ‘socialised’ over time and so learn how to communicate with and understand others. But the cognitive machinery which generates conscious experience is primarily asocial and individual. Hence changes in experience, whether these be ephemeral or long term, are traced to ‘diachronic’ changes in the constitution of the individual mind. The picture of the mind drawn in this book is different. What underpins my experience includes but cannot be limited to the functioning of ‘my’ individual brain-mind. The sense I make of the world depends on my participation in collective structures of meaning, structures that are primarily organised synchronically rather than diachronically. The light-bulb only sheds light because it forms a link in a circuit that is part of a huge grid of connections. Likewise, the mind-brain only generates experiences as it does because it is plugged into an immensely complex supra-individual web of active interconnections. In recent years, the technology of information has given us increasingly elaborate imagery that can serve as an analogy for the mind as a synchronic entity. At any moment, I can plug into the World Wide Web and be instantaneously immersed in a multiplicity of different debates, intrigues, games, chat rooms and knowledges. All these arenas are collective products par excellence and are ‘there’ whether or not I am taking part in them. Moreover, they transcend distance: I can pluck information just as quickly from the other side of the world as from next door. Parallel imagery has been mooted in quantum physics, in the form of a quantum field which enfolds individual particles in universe-wide wave functions that contain a stupendous number of correlations. This implies in turn that the very reality of any given particle is instantaneously interwoven with that of the rest of the universe. Given that society and its institutions are themselves value-laden synchronic structures, it is not a new idea that, rather than an initially isolated individual being ‘socialised’ over time, human individuality differentiates out of sociality. Freud (1922b), Durkheim (1903), Saussure (1974), Mead (1932, 1934) Lewin (1948) and perhaps most famously in

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psychology Vygotsky (1978) have all advanced versions of this view. The problem has been how to conceive psychologically (rather than sociologically) the connectedness that is hypothesised to underpin personal experience. This is the problem preoccupying the central chapters of this book. The study of how language makes meaning introduced the idea that human sense is primarily structured synchronically, in the form of simultaneities (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 argued that synchronization, whether intra- or supra-individual, is fundamental to many aspects of mental function, from perception to the coordination of movement to participation in complex social systems, including language. This implies that meaning-making, however uniquely and individually it is experienced as being, takes place in space that is intersubjective. We saw how this concept of intersubjective space is required to make sense of such diverse phenomena as group fantasies, everyday conversation, infant–infant communication and experimental artifacts (Chapter 5). As such, a psychological understanding of a meaningful action cannot be arrived at diachronically unless there has been a prior synchronic analysis of the intersubjective space within which the action took place. To vault over explanation in terms of an experienced event’s intersubjective constitution is to commit a fundamental fallacy in reasoning about the psyche: the genetic fallacy (Chapter 6). Conversely, the traditional psychological approach to ‘change over time’ must be thoroughly reworked when it is recognised that the ‘what’ of change must be determined before tackling the question of how change is brought about ‘over time’ (Chapter 7). Chapters 8 and 9 then examine how a synchronic conception of experience provides an alternative framework for understanding psychological research and pedagogy. Finally, in this chapter, I explore what kind of implications the prosecution of a more psychologically informed experience-based psychology has for the discipline’s place in the body politic. A force for enlightenment Despite its protestations to the contrary, psychology is crucial to the running of society. This is a matter of observation. Whether we look at political campaigns, medical practice, businesses, the military, sports teams or just the role of stress and mental illness in everyday life, psychology’s importance is growing. It is also a matter of logic. Psychology, the study of how people act, think and feel, is logically the discipline that underpins a rational approach to both policy-making and scientific inquiry. Hence, for the enlightenment thinkers who dreamt it up, psychology was to be the strategic science. It would not only define the

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limitations and potentials of all other disciplines.1 It would direct and guarantee political progress (Cahan and White, 1992). It was thus to be doubly critical. It would provide an indispensable reflexiveness about what an ‘empirical’ (experience-based) science would be. This meant that psychology could not ape the posture of natural science because it had more fundamental aims. Moreover, its priority was not just to describe reality but to improve it (Miller, 1969; Shotter, 1975). This meant that it needed to take an independent ethical stance that was potentially critical of current social arrangements. No one could hope to advance the common good without first seeking to understand what was wrong with the status quo. During the Victorian era Charles Darwin (1859), his contemporaries and successors undertook to set psychology on a new foundation, positivistic and professional. This meant the strategic ambitions of the discipline as first conceived were considerably curtailed. Psychology would still challenge the authority of church and king, putting in their place the authority of scientific methodology. In this sense, experimental psychology remains critical: struggling against the pull of thinking influenced by myth and religious dogma, old wives’ tales, advertising and propaganda. But the Victorians’ ‘new psychology’ from which today’s psychology descends stood back from the need to criticise and improve society: ‘vigorous as the Victorian scientists were in the quest for facts, theories, and laws in the realm of animate and inanimate matter they were at best timid and at worst blind with respect to the social facts of their day’ (Ginzberg, quoted in Pandora, 1997, p. 95). So, as Miller (1969, p. 1063) saw it: ‘there is nothing in the definition of psychology that dedicates our science to the solution of social problems’. Following other scientists, psychologists observed and advised but did not act. ‘In fact there has been a norm established among the scientific which equates objectivity with lack of action and non-intervention in social process’ (Fairweather, 1979, p. 306). Modern psychology’s rejection of a proactive stance with regard to social problems means that it easily becomes subordinate to the political aims of those who fund and apply it, whether in Nazi Germany or contemporary societies (Habermas, 1972; Ingleby, 1974; Geuter, 1992; Rose, 1999). So we now have a ‘critical psychology’ whose main aim is to 1

‘Explication of the elements of laws natural and politic’, wrote Hobbes, ‘dependeth upon the knowledge of what is human nature’ (quoted in Saedi, 1993, p. 70). ‘General psychology’, Dugald Stewart wrote, is ‘the centre whence the thinker goes outward to the circumference of human knowledge’ (quoted in Cahan and White, 1992, p. 225). ‘The science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences’ (Hume, quoted in Saedi, 1993, p. 70).

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be critical of psychology, bringing to light the ways that it condones ‘exploitation and oppression’ (Burman, 1994, p. 188).2 A key note in the rhetoric of this new ‘critical’ psychology is that the grand old enlightenment projects for human self-improvement have proven fatally flawed, imperialistic, soul-destroying and should henceforth be rejected: As many feel, the traditional Western beliefs – for example, in truth, rationality, and the self – are severely delimited. In the globalised world of today, they seem increasingly parochial, and possibly deadly in implication. Further, the grand institutions of science, religion, government, education – designed for the benefit of all – have not only fallen dramatically short of their aims, but often seem to generate oppression, environmental degrading, and armed warfare. (Gergen,1999, p. 4)

The critics include empirical psychology in this condemnation, arguing that everything, from research methods to the topics of psychological inquiry (e.g. thought, memory, development – and experience; Gergen, 1985; Walkerdine, 1993) are culturally conditioned epiphenomena of discourse. Hence even the findings and ‘phenomena’ of psychology are seen as social constructions selectively laden with the values central to so-called Western nations. This book set out from a fruitful paradox in the condemnation of enlightenment projects by critical psychologists: enlightenment is damned precisely because it is oppressive and undemocratic. That is, critical psychologists damn the ambition to enlighten on enlightenment grounds. This is quite in keeping with the arguments of post-modern philosophy. Writers like Lyotard (1984) may reject the ‘grand narratives’ (of absolute truth, universal progress, single-track individual development, etc.) that underpin the original project of the enlightenment, giving it an ‘elemental fundamentalism of self-righteousness and indoctrination . . . which always threatens to turn enlightenment into its very opposite’ (Beck, 1997, p. 161). But this does not rule out the possibility of an alternative enlightenment, one that does not impose a single grand vision of reality but adopts a humbler path, welcoming diversity and the limitations of partial, ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1988; Gergen, 1999; Bradley and Morss, 2002). Note that post-modernism was first advanced to exalt ‘a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 67).

2

Students are increasingly attracted to ‘critical’ psychology: the idea of psychology being more democratic and more explicitly committed to ethical and political standards is inspiring to those who would study mind and is hence becoming central to more and more psychology courses around the world.

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My first step was to take up this implicit appeal for justice to make it the foundation of psychology’s mission. Throughout the book, the principles of equal respect and freedom of speech have been fundamental to the psychology I have advanced, whether dealing with psychology’s language, its theory of experience, its methods of research or dynamics in the classroom. The nub of the resulting framework has been a reconceptualisation of experience. This is crucial because the idea of experience is central to the way we understand the scientific method wherever it is applied. The very word ‘empirical’ means based on experience. Hence whether we are doing physics, parasitology or political science, the meaning of the word experience must have a determining influence over what we do. The discipline which has most to tell us about experience is, or should be . . . psychology. So my method has been to suspend our decision about what we deem science to be while we examine what recent research and theory has to tell us about the make-up of experience. In this way we move towards standing psychology on its own feet rather than trying to make it conform to science as acted out in the procedures of physics, biology or information technology – and the assumptions about experience embedded therein. This answers to Allport’s (quoted in Pandora, 1997, p. 127) demand for an autochthonous ‘psychological psychology’ with an internal ‘locus-of-control’ that can serve the strategic mission psychology was first devised to pursue.3 The idea of a psychology that aims to be democratic through and through challenges the possibility of psychologists’ assumed advantages of detachment from those they study. Experience comes to be seen as embedded in a synchronic matrix that is collectively maintained and inevitably includes both psychologists and their targets for inquiry. The fact that experience depends upon collective processes of synchronization forces us to rethink the significance of coincidence in psychology as something fundamental to human meaning-making. Using a variety of evidence, including observations of infants, I conclude that the human capacity for synchronization produces intersubjectives spaces with a topography which both constrains and constitutes the possibilities therein for thought and action. This conclusion suggests that there are two axes of explanation in psychology: synchronic and causal. I argue that it has become traditional in psychology to treat causal, diachronic explanation 3

Pandora (1997, p. 170) adds: ‘Allport maintained that ‘‘what is accepted as fact depends very largely upon the individual’s sense of importance of fact, each individual carrying with him [sic] convictions concerning what is important for him’’. In stressing that factual knowledge was generated through particular frames of reference, Allport placed the experience of individual knowers at the centre of his epistemology, emphasising that the acquisition of knowledge was not simply an act of cognition, but of meaning-making.’

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as the sole route to understanding, bypassing ‘what?’ questions in the rush to answer ‘how come?’. This rush involves an avoidance of the anxietyprovoking recognition that one cannot stand apart from the phenomena one wishes to investigate: one is indissolubly engaged in their coproduction (cf. Bordo, 1987). This path leads psychology to the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is particularly apparent in psychological thinking about development, such thinking eclipsing the study of psychical alteration per se. I argue that change only makes sense when we consider what that change is to, namely, a ‘cell’ of intersubjective space. This implies that a democratising psychology must adopt a midwife-like (maieutic) role in the production of the discipline’s content, creating the kind of symmetrical speech-situation which enables others to raise and articulate their anxieties, perceptions and desires. It is only after this phase of discovery and description is complete that established investigative and pedagogical techniques come into their own. Democratisation of the process of data-production produces a new kind of public relevance for psychology. Until recently, ‘public psychology’ has been conceived as making its impact by contributing scientific data to the domain of policy. Yet many of the most pressing matters of public concern to which psychological knowledge is relevant are too new or too large scale to be studied by traditional experimental means, such as mass obesity, global warming, widespread drug use or nuclear war (Chapter 8 above). In short, we live in a society where our own scientific knowledge founds changes which rebound upon the societies that promote them: industrialisation produces pollution, scientific farming produces Mad Cow disease, relativity theory produces the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. Thus we begin to question the value of science as a guarantor of social progress. It is characteristic of a risk society that its members do not rely on their own individual experience to make crucial decisions but only on what Beck (1992, 1997) calls ‘non-experience’ – external knowledge purveyed by experts. Yet, the more experts we have, the more we see politically loaded dissension between expert knowledge-claims. As a result we are beginning to see two kinds of science diverge in modern civilisations: ‘the old, flourishing laboratory science, which penetrates and opens up the world mathematically and technically but is devoid of experience, and a public discursivity of experience which brings objectives and means, constraints and methods controversially into view’ (Beck, 1997, p. 123). Whilst it may rely at times on laboratory procedures to cast light on empirical doubts, Beck’s experience-based science is close kin to that proposed by the Murphys and Allport and elaborated here, its aim being to deepen the democratic process (Pandora, 1997). Dependency on

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experts means that everyday life is blind. Hence the need for a broadbased socially sanctioned psychologically informed process of inquiry that is more interested in others’ questions than universal answers, a constantly accessible locus for debate about objectives, methods and norms as well as individual and shared realities. This inquiry would bring out the doubts repressed by standard science, happy to champion the uncertainty of experience as a force of epistemic and social liberation. It would cast out the dogma of a single objective reality, making its business the wealth of different worlds a ‘subjectivisation’ of reality enables. Such a science would become ‘an ‘‘eye’’ for realities that are repressed and denied by old thinking and the old institutions’ (Beck, 1997, pp. 168, 176ff). In this way, a methodical democratisation of experience would be made possible and psychologically justified in society, without fear of favour for the status quo. Only in this way can a collective language be fashioned that resonates with our experience and can take us forward into the unknown, opening up the possibility of dealing creatively with whatever the future brings. This proposal has repercussions for both the objectivity and the political status of psychology. Regarding objectivity, we know enough about the history of psychology and of science to know that no amount of methodological safeguards can guarantee that what psychologists say does not work to advantage some groups of people over others. In fact, very often the reason that psychologists are studying a given phenomenon, intelligence, say, is because it does have social significance. Thus intelligence testing has from its inception been entangled with deciding who should and who should not get access to social privileges: better jobs, better schools, the right to emigrate to the USA (Gould, 1981; Rose et al., 1984). As a result IQ-testing has long been tied in to racial and sexual politics. It is clearly ingenuous to imagine that, however valid or dispassionate it is ‘internally’, one can have a study of anything that bears on the management of vulnerable human populations, child care, say, that does not have political weight. In fact such a study would be valueless if it did not have such weight (Bradley and Sanson, 1992). What this goes to show is that any study is contestable. Every study has a perspective evinced by its selection of a problem as important enough to study, its theoretical preferences, its choice of method, and of how it interprets what it finds, how it goes ‘beyond the data given’ (Selby and Bradley, 2003). But the fact that psychologists may choose to ignore or to respect the perspectives of those others they deal with in their practice as teachers, clinicians and researchers shows something further: that psychologists do not just work in a world of alternative perspectives. They work in a world of power-

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differentials. By and large, psychologists stand on the more powerful side of these divides, by virtue of their training, their professional connections, their control over the conditions in which they deal with others, the kinds of jobs they are employed to do by and for the powerful – governments, organisational managers, manufacturers, political parties – ‘on’ vulnerable populations (children, students, the sick, the mad, the incarcerated, workers, the poor; Ingleby, 1974; Scheibe, 1988). So we come to the recognition that it is more objective to recognise the situatedness and partiality of one’s own perspective than to imagine it is a priori better, truer or more universal than that of the others one studies. And if it is partial, it needs complementing by others’ perspectives. Inquiry becomes more objective the more communal it is. The move from truth to justice is one that bypasses relativism. For those concerned about justice, relativism, no less than the old-fashioned scientific universality it challenges, is what Haraway (1988, p. 584) calls a ‘god trick’. It claims to undermine any given truth on the grounds that it might look different from somewhere else – as if the relativist had refuted the scientist’s ‘view from nowhere’ by ascending to an even more sublime ‘view from everywhere’: The alternative to relativism is not totalisation and single vision . . . The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology . . . Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalisation in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective; both make it impossible to see well. (Haraway, 1988, p. 584)

Insofar as psychologists wish to intervene in public affairs, the principle of equal respect requires them to investigate the interests and selfunderstandings of all the people likely to be affected by their interventions: not so much because this warrants the truth of their arguments, but because it makes what they say more just. At the same time, we gain a new standard for empirical procedures: that our data should be produced from ‘speech-situations’ that are just (if they are fairly to represent the human realities they claim to investigate; Habermas, 1970). Follow this path and psychology has a central strategic role to play in the promotion of social justice. One aim of this book has been to develop a framework for psychology that allows us to conceive the discipline as an architecture for building spaces within which the collective discussion of individualised experiences can fruitfully take place, particularly those experiences that might serve as windows on to human realities repressed or denied by current thinking and forms of government. As Beck’s (1992) ‘risk theory’ argues, the structure of modern ‘risk society’ emerges most

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clearly in individualised anxieties. In which case a new kind of collective psychology is needed to serve as a forum for the discovery of these clues to current social structures. The psychology envisioned in this book is the ground-plan for what Beck (1997, p. 123) calls a ‘public discursivity of experience’ that can complement ‘the old, flourishing laboratory science, which penetrates and opens up the world mathematically and technically but is devoid of experience’. The discipline builds on a rigorous social poetic for the discovery of its raw materials, materials which then become the focus for education and research. The strategic rationale for this new methodology is not the quest to attain a more detached and abstract truth but the need to follow where the hunt for justice leads into the unknown.

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Index

abnormality, 72–3, 137, 139, 158–9, 179–82, 196–7 action, 5, 9, 11, 18, 47, 48–50, 67, 85, 91, 95–6, 100, 105–8, 117, 125, 131, 139, 147, 149–54, 164, 166, 178–82 communicative, 89 coordinated, 74–5 deferred, 144 joint, 91–2 knowing-in-action, 21, 28–33 voluntary, 129 see also research, action Allport, Gordon, 6, 210–11 alpha-function, see Bion, Wilfred alteration, 13, 14, 30–45, 117, 123, 133–8, 140–4, 146–8, 150–4, 157, 164, 170, 175, 177, 180, 183, 201, 211 Alvarez, Anne, 142, 143, 148, 153 American Psychological Association, 3, 27 APS (Australian Psychological Society), 21, 23–5, 27, 46, 55, 108–10, 153–4, 184, 191, 195, 206–7 Ardener, Edwin, 58, 78, 156, 166 Aristotle, 176 Asch, Solomon, 4 Aspect, Alain, 79, 149 attachment theory, 11–12, 37, 58, 63, 68, 99, 102, 105, 124, 136, 139, 144, 151, 206 Baldwin, James Mark, 12, 114, 120–1, 139 Beck, Ulrich, 29, 153, 179, 180–1, 183, 186, 209, 211–13 Beckett, Samuel, 83 behaviourism, 6, 36–7, 68, 70, 82, 162, 201 beta-elements, see Bion, Wilfred Billig, Michael, 38, 162–3, 177 biography, collective, 9, 33, 42–3, 141, 164, 168, 190–1, 193, 210 biology, 2–5, 13, 26, 51, 73, 113, 116, 127–8, 160, 177, 195, 202 Bion, Wilfred 23, 34–44, 68, 95, 105, 169 on alpha-function, 37, 39, 41, 43, 56, 169

on beta-elements, 37, 39, 56 Boal, Augusto 184, 192 Bowlby, John, 17, 37–8, 99, 103, 135–6, 139, 144 Bradley, Benjamin, 11, 15, 20, 23, 26, 29, 36, 42, 52, 64, 72, 78, 86, 89, 100–3, 139, 150, 158, 161–4, 179, 183, 209, 212 brain, 16, 33, 36, 43, 48–9, 52, 66–9, 73–4, 81, 82, 99, 121, 127–9, 198, 199, 202, 205, 206 Bruner, Jerome, 52, 98 Burman, Erica, 6, 209 causation, 6, 7, 9, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 18, 26, 35–6, 44, 46, 49, 56–7, 71–3, 78, 90, 105, 114–17, 122, 128–9, 131, 157–62, 180–3, 210 change, see alteration; development Chomsky, Noam, 60, 98, 139, 144, 198 cognition, 18, 21, 26, 43, 108–10, 136–7, 202–3 classroom dynamics, 7, 33, 39, 41, 109, 153, 171–5, 190, 192–3, 197, 210 coincidence, 11, 16, 64, 66–7, 69, 70–5, 77–81, 173–9, 210 detectors, 16, 73 effect, 74, 90, 102, 105 common good, see human welfare complexity, 8, 44, 63–5, 81, 105, 111, 121, 166 theory, 66–9, 70, 74, 75 Concorde, 3 constructionism, social, 129–30, 197, 209 counter-transference, 18–19 cultural studies, 9, 61, 62 curriculum, 7, 9, 15, 20–22, 25, 30, 45, 47, 185, 187 for psychology, 188, 195, 203 of psychology, 3, 4, 6, 12, 15–16, 18–22, 24–26, 28–29, 33, 35–6, 41, 47, 116, 126, 130, 158, 166–8, 194 technical-rational, 7

Index Danziger, Kurt, 27, 36, 111, 158–9, 161–2, 164, 168, 181, 196 Darwin, Charles, 2, 64, 115, 119, 120, 121, 136, 139, 160, 161, 162, 208 Darwin, Erasmus, 1, 205 Davies, Bronwyn, 42–44, 92, 177 definition, operational, 3–5, 36–7, 68, 156, 158, 164–8, 182, 184 democracy, 2–5, 6, 8–9, 10, 14–16, 18, 30, 32, 42, 44, 50–1, 106, 111, 157, 162, 190, 194 Democratic party, 126 Derrida, Jacques, 2 description see taxonomy development, 6, 8, 11–14, 17–45, 54, 63–5, 67–8, 82, 89, 97–8, 101, 112, 114, 122, 124–5, 131, 134–40, 142–4, 146, 150–1, 154, 157–62, 164, 166, 177, 194, 196, 203, 205, 209, 211 see also psychology, developmental Devereux, George, 171–4 Dewey, 8–9, 17, 18–19, 29–32, 44, 46, 200 diachrony, 7, 11–12, 57, 67, 74–80, 112, 113, 124–5, 133, 145, 180, 183, 205–6, 207, 210 discourse, 61, 76–7, 91–2, 98, 109, 111, 118, 130–1, 136, 147–8, 160, 168, 179, 197–8, 209 see also language drugs, 72, 105–6, 115–8, 163, 179, 181–2, 186–9, 199 Durkheim, Emile, 56, 67, 68 Einstein, Albert, 123, 127 Elms, Alan, 4 emotion, 9–11, 18, 26, 34–45, 51, 63, 76, 86–8, 93, 95–7, 120, 125, 129–30, 133, 134, 136–8, 196, 199, 201 empiricism, 2–7, 19, 50, 64, 66–7, 157, 162, 182, 199, 214 democratic, 156, 157, 162 radical, 49, 57, 64 enlightenment, 6, 207–14 epigenetics, 13 equal respect, principle of, see justice estrangement, 83 ethics, 4, 170 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 71, 105 evolution, see theory, evolutionary experience definitions of, 3, 156, 166–8 formative, 7, 10, 205–6 immediate, 7, 8, 35, 44, 47–51, 53, 61, 62, 64–5, 86, 108, 149, 162, 177, 182, 183, 194

239 as starting-point, 8, 15, 26, 33, 181 whose?, 3, 5, 7, 8 experiments artifacts in, 12, 14, 16, 62, 106, 111, 112, 125, 207 see also method, experimental fantasy, 91, 95–7, 142, 173–4, 196, 200, 203 fate, 59, 70 feminism, 15, 180 Foucault, Michel, 90, 118, 158, 197 freedom of speech, 5, 210 Freire, Paulo, 31, 32, 44, 200 Freud, Anna, 82, 102 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 82, 102, 125, 134, 137, 139, 144, 148, 149–54, 166, 171, 199, 206, 209 Fukuyama, Francis, 5 fundamental attribution error, 111, 127 future, the see present, the generalisation, 88, 157, 168, 175, 176 genes, 12, 13, 57, 112, 114, 121–4, 127, 130, 131, 136, 138, 139, 206 expression of, 71, 113 genetic fallacy, 12, 114, 115, 130, 135, 154 Geneva Convention, 84 Genie, 84 geology, 13, 115, 116 Gergen, Kenneth, 129, 130, 139, 146–53 Gergen, Mary, 139, 147, 195 Giddens, Anthony, 68, 69, 87–9, 95–7, 181 Gilligan, Carol, 15, 177, 180 Goffman, Erving, 38, 85, 92 Greenhalgh, Trisha, 27, 28, 29, 194, 203 Habermas, Jurgen, 9, 12, 33, 61, 76, 89, 98, 101, 153, 169, 195, 197, 208, 213 Haraway, Donna,163, 176, 209, 213 Harlow, Harry, 4 Harre´, Rom, 6, 92 Haug, Frigga, 42, 177, 178, 190 Heisenberg, Werner, 156 hermeneutic inquiry, 15, 18, 169, 176 history, 5, 10–11, 21, 22, 25–7, 36, 47, 56, 67, 88, 96, 112, 115, 122, 124, 129, 130, 137, 141, 147, 148, 151, 176, 178, 195, 196, 212 causal, 11, 158 See also causation cultural, 129, 130 natural, 114, 139 personal, 61, 127 psychology’s, 6, 133, 195, 196, 208 science’s, 1, 112

240

Index

Hollway, Wendy, 174 Holmes, Jeremy, 5, 28, 76 honesty, 190 ‘‘how come’’ question, 13, 113 ‘‘how’’ question, 4 Human Genome Project, 13, 119, 124, 208 human welfare, promotion of, 324 humour, 71, 140, 149, 188 Husserl, Edmund, see phenomenology imagination, 91, 135, 196, 203 individualisation, 177 moral, 203 individualism, 12, 63–5, 68, 82–3, 90, 91, 98, 110–12, 129, 146–53, 206 infancy, 11–12, 16, 23, 48, 49, 75, 82, 84, 90, 97, 99–103, 111, 114, 125, 131, 135, 139, 144, 166, 207, 210 intelligence, 83, 119, 123–4, 199–200 emotional, 41 sensori-motor, 49, 144 testing, 116, 196, 199–200, 212 interpretation, 8, 12–14, 24, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 43, 105, 108, 109, 111, 125, 127, 164–9, 171–3, 178, 184, 212 intersubjectivity, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 18–19, 44, 45, 50–1, 61, 63, 64–5, 69, 77, 82–3, 86–90, 92, 93, 95–7, 101, 105, 111, 113, 127, 134, 146–147, 151, 153, 169, 171, 175, 195, 199–200, 202, 203 in infancy, 49, 82, 84, 97, 166 innate, 100 of psychical space, 9, 11, 44, 48, 69, 75, 81, 87–93, 94–5, 97, 98–112, 113, 116, 119–22, 134, 145, 147, 150, 154, 157–62, 173–9, 184, 203, 207, 210, 211 in psychological practice, 190 radical, 65, 89, 99, 170 in research, 8, 12, 13–14, 50–1, 73, 107, 153, 169, 172, 174–5, 177, 179, 195 IQ, see intelligence irrationality, 86, 170, 173 James, William, 6, 9–11, 15, 26, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 59, 69, 79, 80, 114, 125, 135–54, 157, 162, 166–8, 200, 202 on experience, 7, 64, 166–8 John, I.D., 20–41, 190 justice, 3, 5, 9, 15, 16, 156, 163, 184, 190, 195, 198, 205, 209, 213, 214 Kaplan, Bernie, 136, 138 Keats, John, 167, 172

Keen, E., 8 Kermode, Frank, 139 Kierkegaard, Søren, 143 knowing, see action; cognition Lacan, Jacques, 39, 151 Langer, Susanne 13, 57, 58 language, 2, 11, 12, 18, 25–30, 60, 61, 70, 76, 84–93, 125, 143, 146–53, 155–7, 169, 172, 175–7, 195, 198, 200, 206, 207 acquisition of, 98, 127, 144 linguistics as pilot-science, 41, 48, 55, 57, 60, 63, 67, 74–80, 86, 93, 94–5, 118–19, 120, 124, 144, 201, 207 of psychology, 38, 128, 160, 162, 164, 166, 210, 212 See also discourse; poetics learning, 8–9, 11, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 29–31, 33–7, 39, 40–1, 43, 44, 54, 60, 73, 82, 139, 154, 189, 190–5, 197, 198, 200 problem-based, 190 theory, 11, 82 Levinas, Emmanuel, 169, 170, 172, 174 Lewin, Kurt, 13, 16, 81, 147, 183, 206 Lindley, Richard, 5, 198 love, 10–11, 36, 86, 94–5, 135, 142, 143, 154, 163, 167–8 luck, 10, 66, 105, 113–24, 142 moral, 70 Lukes, Steven, 129, 136, 206 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois 209 Marx, Karl, 67, 68, 87, 98, 150 Mead, George Herbert, 61, 92, 134, 146–7, 206 meaning, 1, 7–13, 17–45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63–65, 69–72, 74–80, 89–92, 98, 102, 103, 113–124, 125–126, 134, 135–54, 156, 157–62, 166, 167–8, 171–2, 176, 194, 199, 206, 210–11 memory, 7, 11, 18, 26, 42, 43, 51, 54, 55, 73, 74, 98, 110, 118, 125, 131, 190, 195, 198, 202, 209 collective, 192 memory-work, 178, 179, 191 mental testing, see intelligence, testing; psychometrics method, 1, 2–7, 12, 14, 15, 26, 27, 30, 42, 52, 106–11, 155, 157, 164, 171–2, 186, 188–190, 202, 205, 208, 211, 212 empirical, 182 experimental, 79, 80, 117, 190, 195

Index narrative, 156 non-numerical, 72, 101 of research, 9, 24, 26, 88, 101, 153–4, 156, 159, 162, 163, 171–5, 184, 185, 192, 195, 197, 199, 209, 210 of teaching, 41, 192 Milgram, Stanley, 4, 159 Miller, George A., 3, 208 Miserere (Allegri’s), 55 Morawski, Jill, 23 Morss, John, 13, 23, 72, 93, 137, 143, 158, 163, 179, 209 Mozart, Wolfgang, 55 multi-subjectivity, 92, 153 See also subjectivity Murphy, Gardner and Lois, 6, 211 music, 11, 14, 55, 86–8, 150–3 narrative, 6, 111, 139, 140, 152, 154, 156, 194, 201–202, 203, 209 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 115 non-locality, 79, 150 normality, see abnormality objectivity, 3, 15, 28, 51–2, 163, 167, 172, 190, 201, 212, 213 ontogenesis, 136, 138 oppression, 6, 87, 180 over-determination, 148 Oyama, Susan, 13, 113 Pandora, Kathleen, 6, 64, 181, 208, 210, 211 parapsychology, 79–80 passivity, 6 past, the, see present, the pedagogy, 7, 16, 19–20, 26, 30, 31, 33, 42, 187, 190, 193, 194 experience-based, 8, 15, 18, 19, 25, 26, 40, 41, 188, 190, 191, 196, 198, 203, 204 laboratory-based, 2–12 technical-rational, 20, 21, 24, 25, 43, 44, 187–9, 203 perception, 8, 14–15, 18–19, 26, 35–6, 43, 46, 55, 73–80, 94–5, 108–10, 125–6, 133–5, 148, 153–4, 184, 194, 195, 200, 206–7, 211 personality, 11, 26, 35, 36, 43, 110, 119, 122, 126, 127, 131, 135, 148, 149, 157–62, 196, 198, 201 personality–situation debate, 126 phenomenology, 8–9, 64–5 physics, 2–7, 27, 51–2, 57, 66–7, 76, 106–1, 130, 133, 166–7, 205–6 quantum, 79, 149, 155, 206

241 Piaget, Jean, 49, 82, 108, 109, 135–7, 139, 142, 144 placebo effects, 105, 128 poetics, 162, 176 politics, 7–8, 9, 23, 36, 45, 46, 62, 64–65, 69, 82–3, 86–9, 95–7, 110, 125–126, 127, 136, 159, 163, 176, 177, 180, 181, 186, 194, 195, 196, 207–13 post-modernism, 6, 209 practice, 17–45, 203 evidence-based, 25–30, 187 present, the, 2, 7–8, 18–19, 26, 44, 65, 113–15, 122, 135, 146–53, 181–4 practitioner, reflective, 21, 30, 46, 190, 191 probability, statistical, 71, 142, 158, 184 proteomics, see genes, expression of psychoanalysis, 18, 79, 105, 142–3, 151–2, 171–5 psychology, 2–5, 8 aims of, 2–7, 19, 130, 158, 169, 182, 191, 208, 210 contents, 4, 21, 41, 73–80, 162, 190, 193, 196, 211 critical, 209 developmental, 11, 13, 17–45, 61, 99, 114, 120, 122, 124, 125, 131, 134, 135–154, 157–62, 193, 201–2 evolutionary, 11, 86, 114, 119, 121, 135–54, 157–62 experience-based, 2, 207 laboratory-based, 2–7 phenomenological, 8, 9, 51 positive, 9, 158 professional, 2–7 psychological, 136, 188, 210 social, 38, 68, 82, 92, 112, 127, 131, 196–7, 200, 201–2 psychometrics, 118, 156 see also intelligence, testing reasoning, see cognition research action, 14, 73, 153, 168, 182–4 psychical, see parapsychology see also method risk, 89, 158, 163, 180, 183, 184, 193, 194 factors, 72, 158, 179–82 research, 182 taking, 182 theory, 181, 211, 213 risky shift, 189 Rose, Nikolas, 6, 90, 118, 158, 196, 197, 208 Royal Society of London, The 159

242

Index

sampling, 62, 163 Saussure, Ferdinand de 13, 56–60, 62, 78, 124, 125, 147, 149 Scho¨n, Donald, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 30, 44, 109, 190–3, 203 science, 8, 13, 22, 23, 52, 56, 57, 71, 77, 87, 112, 114, 130, 135, 141, 157, 159, 166, 198, 210–12, 214 cognitive, 6, 36, 82, 112, 155, 202 empirical, 1, 37, 68, 110, 154 enlightenment and, 6, 207, 209 experience-based, 208, 211 as model for psychology, 1, 2, 21, 172, 205, 208 natural, 5, 76, 115, 155, 161–2, 165 psychology as, 2–7, 19, 24, 25, 26, 167, 189, 207 pure and applied, 2–7, 22, 43, 111, 187, 189, 197, 205 social, 2, 56, 93, 118, 156, 166, 193, 196, 197–8, 202, 207 Secord, Paul, 6 Selby, Jane, 92, 93, 94, 103, 153, 164, 172, 174, 175, 183, 212 selfishness, 1, 119 sensation, 26, 43, 51, 55, 114, 130, 190, 195, 200 sex, 11, 23, 35, 40–1, 63, 86, 88, 96–7, 116, 121, 122, 128, 136, 139, 143, 167, 202, 212 Shakespeare, William, 70, 83, 119, 176, 177, 200 Shotter, John, 6, 69, 79, 91, 97, 102, 150, 157, 160 simultaneity, 9, 14, 46, 54, 56, 59, 63, 72–3, 93, 96, 125, 148–52, 176, 183 Skinner, B.F., 70, 139 socialisation, 110, 136 society reproduction of, 9 Socrates, 1, 135 soul, 83, 142, 145, 176, 209 space, psychical, 9, 11, 48, 54, 75, 76, 81, 87–93, 97, 98–112, 134, 154, 157–62, 175–7 speech-situation, 10, 33, 42, 94, 101, 175, 184, 190 statistics, inferential, 2–7, 14, 20–41, 57, 69, 70, 72, 78–80, 153–4, 156, 158, 176, 181, 200, 212 subjectivity, 4, 12, 51–4, 61, 63, 68–9, 78, 86–93, 95–7, 108, 110, 131, 169, 170, 171–3, 182, 202, 212 the researcher’s, 162

subject-position, 23, 77, 92–4, 133–5, 160, 178, 179, 203 sublime, the, 169 superiority, 5 synchronicity, 78, 79, 80, 150 synchronisation, 69, 73, 75, 76 synchrony, 12, 14, 50–1, 57, 59, 65, 74–80, 112, 152, 157 systems, 12, 27, 48, 54, 55–62, 89, 100, 124, 151 see also complexity tau theory, 74, 95–7, 116, 128 taxonomy, 8, 14, 115, 165, 166, 197, 199, 203 telepathy, 79 theory, 6, 8, 13–14, 15–16, 17, 20, 21, 24–45, 82–3, 86–93, 98–112, 133, 134, 157, 164, 169, 175, 183, 186–9, 202, 208, 210–11 developmental, 135–54 evolutionary, 115, 119–22, 161–2 probability, 70 social, 9, 11–12, 61, 67, 68–9, 81, 87–93 see also attachment theory; complexity, theory, Einstein, Alberts; learning, theory; psychoanalysis; physics, quantum; risk, theory; tau theory; Trevarthen, Colwyn time, see present, the Tolstoy, Leo, 83 torture, 4, 97 transference, 18–19, 171, 174 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 75, 98 truth, 3–5, 23, 58, 68, 113, 128, 130, 142, 144, 164, 168–70, 175–7, 190, 195, 209, 213–14 unconscious, 8, 37, 39, 50, 61, 79, 95, 97, 107, 134, 148, 149, 171–4 validity, 4, 15, 24–45, 102, 106, 114, 130, 155, 160, 172, 177, 184, 187, 190, 195, 199, 203, 206–7, 212 value-neutrality, 2–7 variables, 74 dependent and independent, 11, 116, 117, 118, 157–62, 169, 180 psychological, 3–5, 36 statistical, 3–5, 36 Vygotsky, Lev, 97, 98, 207 Walkerdine, Valerie, 6, 76–8, 90, 92, 135, 147, 169, 174, 203 war, 17, 24, 39, 83–5, 95, 145, 179–82, 211

Index Watson, J.B., 36 Weiskel, Thomas, 160, 162 ‘‘what’’ question, 4, 13, 26, 66–7, 113–15, 134, 135–54, 161–2 Whitehead, Alfred, 20–41 Wiener, Norbert, 169 Wilde, Oscar, 7

243 Winnicott, Donald, 91, 134, 175, 181–4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 60, 70, 92 Woolf, Virginia, 7, 83, 133 Wordsworth, William, 161 Wundt, Wilhelm 12 Zimbardo, Philip, 4