An Old Melody in a New Song: Aesthetics and the Art of Psychology

232 Pages·2018·4.037 MB·English

by  Luca Tateo

Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences
Luca Tateo Editor
An Old Melody
in a New Song
Aesthetics and the Art of Psychology
Theory and History in the Human and Social
Sciences
Series Editor
Jaan Valsiner
Department of Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences will fill in the gap in the
existing coverage of links between new theoretical advancements in the social and
human sciences and their historical roots. Making that linkage is crucial for the
interdisciplinary synthesis across the disciplines of psychology, anthropology,
sociology, history, semiotics, and the political sciences. In contemporary human
sciences of the 21st there exists increasing differentiation between neurosciences
and all other sciences that are aimed at making sense of the complex social,
psychological, and political processes. Thus new series has the purpose of (1)
coordinating such efforts across the borders of existing human and social sciences,
(2) providing an arena for possible inter-disciplinary theoretical syntheses, (3) bring
into attention of our contemporary scientific community innovative ideas that have
been lost in the dustbin of history for no good reasons, and (4) provide an arena for
international communication between social and human scientists across the World.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15826
Luca Tateo
Editor
An Old Melody
in a New Song
Aesthetics and the Art of Psychology
Editor
Luca Tateo
Department of Communication and Psychology
Centre for Cultural Psychology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
ISSN 2523-8663 ISSN 2523-8671 (electronic)
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences
ISBN 978-3-319-92338-3 ISBN 978-3-319-92339-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92339-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955627
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The "I" who speaks in this book is by no
means the author. Rather, the author wishes
that the reader may come to see himself in
this "I": that the reader may not simply relate
to what is said here as he would to history,
but rather that while reading he will actually
converse with himself, deliberate back and
forth, deduce conclusions, make decisions
like his representative in the book, and
through his own work and reflection, purely
out of his own resources, develop and build
within himself the philosophical disposition
that is presented to him in this book merely
as a picture. (p. 2)
Fichte, J. G. (1848). The vocation of man.
Trans W. Smith. London: John Chapman.
Series Preface
The Art of Science
Being considered an art should be viewed as a compliment for any science, but it is
(usually) not. This is particularly true in the case of psychology, which was first a
casualty in the “science wars” in nineteenth-century Europe (Valsiner, 2012), fol-
lowed by the skirmishes between emerging psychologists and hardline philosophers
about the “dangers of psychologism” (Kusch, 1995) at the turn of the twentieth
century. What followed over the next century were two World Wars; the exodus of
psychology as a science from Europe to North America; and the establishment of
psychology as “an empirical science.” In that transition, it took on new social orga-
nizational forms from US society, which had embraced the arrival of this refugee
science—the notion of “majority” (“mainstream” psychology) versus “minority”
(various “nonmainstream” trends) . To speak about “mainstream” psychology in the
year 1900 would have made no sense. Even if Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory in
Leipzig drew hordes of international visitors, who carried its handicrafts of labora-
tory plans and design of experimental equipment all over the world, that laboratory
was in no way the “mainstream” of psychology in Germany. One hundred years
later, in 2000 and beyond, we are well-versed in referencing “mainstream psychol-
ogy”—usually to contrast what we do ourselves positively against its dull intellec-
tual modus operandi.
I believe that such “mainstream bashing” is socially useless and intellectually
dangerous. It is useless because the realities of research carried out by the “busy and
mindless” ill-defined group of the “mainstream” are determined by the socio-
political and economic setup conditions in institutions where research is done.
These are shared with other sciences. Thus, it is often the conformity of fellow
researchers—elevated to the minimal power role as reviewers of grants and other
proposals—that maintains the “mindlessness” of the “mainstream” through simple
administrative procedures. Thus, any critique of the “mainstream” would be socially
mute and does not change the prevailing scientific–political practice. “Mainstream”-
bashing is simply a waste of time.
vii
viii Series Preface
Yet, the danger to intellectualism is more damaging—not to the “mainstream”
but to its opponents themselves. The critique of the theoretical limitations of the
“mainstream” channels the criticizers into repetitive argumentation and diminishes
the possibilities for developing alternative positive perspectives. The latter are rather
rare in contemporary psychology. Furthermore, what is offered as a solution for
theoretical problems is a call to join a new fashion, which may be nicely labeled
(e.g., “positive psychology,” “ecological psychology,” “evolutionary psychology,”
and—to my serious concern—“cultural psychology”). If a discipline moves ahead
by one fashion replacing another—rather than by theoretical efforts to innovate its
conceptual core—it is only the never-ending flow of empirical research reports that
follows. The “mainstream” wins again—after adopting a new label. All this becomes
socially accepted by the model of science as that of accumulation of empirical
data—“let us collect more data and the theoretical issues become resolved” is a
prevailing ethos.
The contributors to this volume take a different path—that of restoring the notion
of artist-like exploration of psychological issues to the science of psychology. The
volume includes work well informed in the history of aesthetic perspectives that
grew out of philosophy and emerging psychology from its eighteenth-century roots.
Thus, what is attempted here is building a new theoretical direction where the aes-
thetic world view is the center of science, while tracing back to these foundational
roots of psychology as an emerging science. It deserves careful attention from the
readers—depending on how art in science is elaborated upon, it either leads to basic
breakthroughs in psychology as a science, or becomes a new fashion that dies out
before it has a chance to accomplish its goals.
I, of course, hope for the former. Fashions do not develop ideas—they just pres-
ent them. The first artful moment for a scientist is to distinguish between actual
theoretical potentials for a breakthrough and fashion-based claims that such a break-
through occurred, or is now happening, in the given field. Was there a breakthrough
when the common notion of “thoughts” that satisfied psychologists in the early
twentieth century were replaced by the fashionable notion of “cognitions” (note the
plural here)? I have seen no benefit to the development of the understanding of the
human mind (or “cognition”) in comparison to the efforts in that direction at the era
of “thoughts” (e.g., the “Würzburg School” of Oswald Külpe in 1896–1909).
However, the participants in this volume make an even more profound start—
jumping from eighteenth-century aesthetics to twenty-first-century science. They
do it under the contemporary up and coming (to fashion) label of “cultural psychol-
ogy.” It really depends upon their success whether the label is rendered irrelevant by
their innovation in the field—which, as they point out, starts from the need to inno-
vate methodology.
This innovation is no easy task. Methodology does not equal a “toolbox of meth-
ods” that can be freely used, but an integrated system of epistemology (Branco and
Valsiner, 1997). If that innovation were to begin from the meta-code “Science is a
form of Art”—which it seems to do in this volume—it has major consequences for
the ways in which psychologists as researchers work. They have to be interested in
a personally disinterested way—the criterion of an aesthetic world view—in both
Series Preface ix
the most ordinary (Marsico & Tateo, 2018) and in the most extraordinary (Luria,
1987) phenomena. This is easier said than done—it is most perceptively pointed out
(Devereux, 1967) that researchers are themselves complicated human beings whose
own ego-defense mechanisms do not easily allow for the aesthetic relation to their
object of study to develop. Psychologists’ educated intuitions are the result of for-
mal schooling, administering procedures in research laboratories, and clinical con-
sultation rooms; rarely would they be found building upon direct war-time
experience (e.g., Bion, 1997). By contrast, artists immerse themselves in the “real
life” in its unbounded fullness—on the battlefield (Vereshchagin), in the psychiatric
hospital (van Gogh), or in brothels (Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Kirschner, and
many others), not to mention getting drunk and involved in restaurant and tavern
outings. A drunken artist is a socially acceptable—even if not necessarily aestheti-
cally pleasing—sight. A drunken psychologist administering an IQ test would be an
unimaginably comic or grotesque scene if viewed as a thought experiment, and a
breach in professional ethics if it occurred in reality.
Despite the obvious difficulties by the researchers’ personal efforts to assume an
aesthetic perspective, I believe it is possible. Yet, it would drive a division between
theoretically oriented psychologists and those interested in social practice. The for-
mer—from the distance of their ivory tower (read—crammed university office
somewhere)—can reach the aesthetic criterion of feeling-in without feeling-about
(interested disinterest), whereas for the social practice-oriented psychologists it
would be very hard. Social practice requires involvement—which is contradictory
to the aesthetic world view.
The next arena for change is theory—the aesthetic perspective of research calls
for replacement of both inductive and deductive knowledge-making tactics by their
abductive counterpart. That requires artistic ingenuity in looking at the observed
phenomena and imagining the various possible novel scenarios for its post factum
explanations. In psychological theories one would not encounter an invented entity
(“trait,” “heuristic,” etc.) suddenly moving to another trajectory (à la Niels Bohr’s
physics) or expect it to be of two identities at the same time (e.g., androgyny—the
simultaneous presence of male and female sides). There are no equivalents to the
“jumping genes” (Barbara McClintock’s maize genetics) in psychology. This lack
of ingenuity continues in the neurosciences, where already the complexity of the
anatomy of the neuron should suggest otherwise.
Finally, what would an aesthetic view of method construction look like?
Psychologists’ methods have at times intuitively made use of the artistic general
attitude by using drawing tasks to represent psychological phenomena. Projective
techniques such as Rorschach’s inkblots and all kinds of narrative methods bring
psychologists’ research tools very close to those of art. Yet, the closeness stops
when the research participants have finished their tasks and the researchers begin
“data analysis.” What is called “analysis” is actually an act of hybridization of the
original products of the participants with superimposed—usually quantificational—
data reconstruction schemes. The original phenomena get lost in the data, and they
are never recovered. It is already for the sake of avoiding such loss that the new
aesthetic start is promising in psychology.
x Series Preface
These challenges to the new aesthetic science in psychology are not fatal to the
effort. Rather, they can stimulate the search for new solutions—often turning to re-
organization of the current methods in methodologically sound ways. The present
volume includes a number of promising directions for innovation in a co-i maginative
effort to make psychology human, and possibly humane, again, and one I hope readers
will join.
Aalborg, Denmark Jaan Valsiner

References
Bion, W. R. (1997). War memoirs 1917–1919. London: Karnac Books.
Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (1997). Changing methodologies: a co-c onstructivist study of goal
orientations in social interactions. Psychology and Developing Societies, 9, 1, 35–64.
Devereux, G. (1967). From anxiety to method in the behavioral sciences. The Hague: Mouton
Kusch, M. (1995). Psychologism: a case study in the sociology of philosophical knowledge.
London: Routledge
Luria, A. R. (1987). A mind of a mnemonist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marsico, G., & Tateo, L. (Eds) (2018). Ordinary things. Vol 3 in Annals of cultural psychology.
Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers.
Valsiner, J. (2012). A guided science: history of psychology in the mirror of its making. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.