The General Psychologist

Dr. Barbara Held delivered the Division 1 Arthur W. Staats Lecture at the 2023 APA Convention in Washington, DC after having received the award by the same name. The Arthur W. Staats Lecture was established in 1997 by Peter S. Staats, MD, in honor of his father. The lecturer delivers an address on a body of work which has held great significance for many fields of psychology or has the potential to be extrapolated to have unifying power within psychology as a whole.

Barbara is Barry N. Wish Professor of Psychology and Social Studies Emerita at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. Her books include Back to Reality: A Critique of Postmodern Theory in Psychotherapy (W. W. Norton, 1995), Psychology’s Interpretive Turn: The Search for Truth and Agency in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (APA Books, 2007), and Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001). She was recipient of the 2012 APF Joseph B. Gittler Award for "scholarly contributions to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge." Dr. Held has written opinion pieces for several newspapers, with focus on discerning truth in science and in our social/political world, and on uncommon coping mechanisms. We are thrilled to be publishing her lecture on this edition of The General Psychologist.

Psychology Bound and Unbound

Let’s assume that psychology should be bound by disciplinary principles. We may then ask, what kind of principles? Surely principles about psychology’s proper subject matter—its ontology and concepts. And also principles about psychology’s proper means of investigating that subject matter—its epistemology-cum-methodology. Together these principles would provide a unifying disciplinary identity, including what questions may be rightly considered psychological.

To be sure, such unity has yet to be accomplished, despite diverse attempts at meta-psychologies— the grand unifying schemes that have retained many traditional disciplinary principles, such as those proposed by Arthur Staats (1983, 1991, 1999) of this eponymous award, Gregory Kimble (1994), Robert Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko (2001), and Gregg Henriques (2003).

By contrast, we’ve also seen efforts to free psychology from its traditional disciplinary boundaries, by way of turns to other disciplines for boundary-defying work: In his call for a social-constructionist metatheory, Ken Gergen (1985) advanced a framework with core principles that entail disunity—actually, a disunifying unity, if you will. As he wrote,

"Should the challenge of developing an alternative metatheory be accepted, a variety of interesting changes may be anticipated. . . . A general account must be furnished of the social dimensions of natural science, social science, and philosophy. The demarcation (if any) between science and nonscience must be carefully examined . . . . For such tasks dialogue is essential between psychologists and like-minded colleagues in sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and literary studies (p. 273)."

I return to Gergen’s insistence on “like-minded colleagues” in due course.

Gergen’s views (1985, 1990) dovetailed with other movements dedicated to the anti-objectivist and anti-universalist creeds of postmodernists, such as constructivist, feminist, and indigenous psychologies. Although these movements have sought disciplinary boundary-crossings, they too embrace principles. After all, a discipline, or a movement within a discipline, can’t be completely unbounded if it is to have any meaning at all. It’s just a matter of by which principles to be bound.

An overarching aim of movements such as these is to liberate psychology (and its subjects, in both senses) from its traditional disciplinary ties. This activity frequently includes listing the so-called “mainstream’s”¹ alleged offenses, many of which fall under the umbrellas of its supposed “scientism” (see Held, 2022) and “epistemic violence” (see Held, 2020). The most radical critics call for burning mainstream psychology to the ground. But even they offer other metatheories, or principles, to which psychology should be rightly bound, in calling for resistance to what theoretical psychologist Anna Stetsenko (2020) dubbed the “dominance of a dogmatic scientism” in psychology.

¹ I place “mainstream” in scare quotes to indicate I don’t believe that a mainstream psychology exists, over and above individual research programs, which differ vastly in their subject matter and methods.

Although mainstream psychology is not necessarily synonymous with general psychology, general psychology surely includes what many (though not all) theoretical psychologists point to when referring to the mainstream they have denigrated for decades (see Held, 2021, 2022). Although the Society for General Psychology’s Mission Statement (click on link) plainly states its goals, it doesn’t delineate its essence in terms of boundary conditions for the use of the term “general psychology.” General and theoretical psychologist Lisa Osbeck (2020) took on the daunting task of defining general psychology, beginning with two ways of conceptualizing it:

First, we might have in mind theories, methods, values, and assumptions common to all psychologists, to psychology in general, that is. Whether such commonalities are to be found in actuality is a matter of debate; I introduce this sense of general psychology principally as an abstraction, one coextensive with the subject matter or essential nature of psychology itself—that which could be called invariant across psychology. . . . Alternatively, we might regard general psychology as a subspecialty within psychology at large, a subspecialty with a perspective and set of questions that distinguish it from other branches of psychology (pp. 6-7).

Osbeck notes that “even this most basic conceptual distinction” (p. 7) carries complicated fundamental questions of definition—namely, “How should we describe our subject matter? What is the definition and essential nature of psychology? These questions have been posed repeatedly and given varied answers, yet the subject matter remains elusive” (p. 7). To be sure, these questions afford a wide space for theorists (who find the mainstream scientistic and epistemically violent) to oppose the mainstream by turning to the humanities disciplines for salvation.

The Psychological Humanities

The “psychological humanities” constitute theoretical psychology’s most recently ascendant boundary-defying movement. Members of that movement maintain that in scientistically adopting natural-science methods from its academic inception, psychology has ignored human subjectivity or personhood, the lived experience that is pronounced by them to be psychology’s proper subject matter (Held, 2021). On their view, the humanities should guide psychologists’ understanding of subjectivity or personhood (see, e.g., Sugarman & Martin, 2020; Teo, 2017), to alleviate our so-called “physics envy” (see Held, 2019).

The APA Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24) 2023 Midwinter Meeting theme, “Constructing the Psychological Humanities,” demonstrates the growth of this movement (see, e.g., Fortes et al., 2023; Laubscher et al., 2023; Parker & Gantt, 2023).

Here I consider how proponents of the psychological humanities have ignored the ways in which the humanities suffer from ontological, epistemic, and ethical woes akin to the defects those theorists find in scientific psychology. Instead, they romanticize the humanities as they continue to demonize psychology’s use of seemingly “scientistic” natural-science methodology (see Held, 2021, 2022, for elaboration).

Charges of Scientism and Decline in the Humanities

In his book Humanities and Scientism, philosopher Roger Scruton (2015) attributed the lamented turn to social, evolutionary, and neurosciences in the humanities to a need for funding and prestige in light of their declining stature in the academy:

University departments . . . are increasingly assessed—both for status and for funding— on their output of “research.” The use of this word to describe what might formally have gone under the name of “scholarship,” naturally suggests an affinity between the humanities and the sciences, implying that both are engaged in discovering things. . . . . Pressed to justify their Existence, therefore, the humanities begin to look to the sciences to provide them with “research methods,” and the promise of “results” (p. 133; see Held, 2021, 2022, for elaboration).

Apropos of that decline, in the Jan 23, 2023 New Yorker article “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?,” Merve Emre wrote,

Establishing a formal method of critical inquiry was in part an attempt to put literary studies on a par with the science. . . . Close reading branched out into many methods of reading—rhetorical reading for the deconstructionists, symptomatic reading the Marxists, reparative reading for queer theorists—culminating in what has been called the “method wars,” [which, according to John Guillory, author of the 2022 book, Professing Criticism,] really represented a willingness to settle for “no method.”

Are psychological-humanities scholars also willing to settle for no method of critical inquiry? In any case, the rise of the psychological humanities in the last decade (perhaps ironically) coincides with the decline in university enrollments in the humanities disciplines. In his March 6, 2023 New Yorker piece entitled “The End of the English Major,” Nathan Heller wrote,

From 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

My Start in the Humanities

To be clear, I take no pleasure in reporting this decline in the humanities. After all, I entered college intending to be a studio art major with an English lit minor. Painting in oils by age 8, I wanted to be the next Cezanne: Here’s my 11-year-old attempt at just that:

Not bad, but it hardly screams child prodigy compared to this work by 11-year-old Picasso (click on link for image).

Realizing I would starve in a garret, I continued taking art history and English lit courses, as I searched for another major. My first-year English comp prof told me I was a writer. OK, but what would I write about to earn a living? So I tried a psych course, as clinical psych seemed like a real profession. The rest is history.

A high point in my professional history was the good fortune of meeting and befriending two renowned humanities scholars on their visits to Bowdoin College: classical Greek scholar Mary Lefkowitz and Renaissance and modern art historian and critic Leo Steinberg. They gave me insider views into criticisms of them in their respective fields, criticisms which, decades later, were uncannily echoed in psychological theorists’ critiques of mainstream psychology. See Held (2021) “Taking the Humanities Seriously,” in the Review of General Psychology, for elaboration of criticisms of these two scholars as they relate to criticisms of mainstream psychology by members of the psychological humanities movement.

Examples of Epistemic Fractures in the Humanities

On Historical Facts

In 1996, as the culture wars reached boiling point in the academy, Wellesley College professor and National Humanities Medal honoree Mary Lefkowitz published the book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. Lefkowitz challenged the 18th century belief that the ancient Greeks stole their philosophical and scientific knowledge from discoveries made by ancient Egyptians: “The idea of a ‘Stolen Legacy’ was first popularized by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, . . . and developed into a full-fledged [conspiracy] theory in 1954 by . . . George G. M James” (Lefkowitz, 1996, p. 10).

Lefkowitz explained that on James’s view Egyptian knowledge was stolen by the Greeks

when Alexander, accompanied by Aristotle, looted the library of Alexandria in 333 B.C” [pp. 134-135] . . . Although Alexandria was founded in 331 B.C., it did not begin to function as a city until after 323. Aristotle died in 322. The library was assembled around 297 under the direction of Demetrius of Phaleron, a pupil of Aristotle’s. Most of the books it contained were in Greek (p. 137).

Lefkowitz’s book sent classical scholars into a frenzy. Professor Tony Martin, then chair of Wellesley’s Africana Studies, assigned James’s The Stolen Legacy. In 1993, Martin published The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront. Tensions on campus escalated, resulting in Martin’s suing Lefkowitz in 1994 for defamation. In her 2008 account of the controversy, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, she wrote that she “was accused of racism, conservatism, intellectual naiveté, and the like” (p. 14). More recently she’s been charged with reductionism, which allegedly begets “willful ignorance” (Snyman, 2017, p. 10). The Anti-Defamation League defended Lefkowitz against Martin’s suit, which was dismissed on grounds that Lefkowitz’s writings had not misrepresented anyone.

The language used to describe Lefkowitz sounds remarkably like that of theoretical psychologists’ descriptions of mainstream psychology. For instance, several chapter authors in Jim Lamiell and Kate Slaney’s 2021 edited book, Problematic Research Practices and Inertia in Scientific Psychology, used these very words to characterize mainstream psychology: “Ignorance," "confusion," "obstinacy," "inertia," "incorrigibility," "recalcitrance," and "disregard.” In her chapter in that book Fiona Hibberd (2021) called “psychology’s ongoing insulation [from theoretical work] an ingrained not wanting to know” (p. 30), which sounds to me like the charge of “willful ignorance” aimed at Lefkowitz. In a chapter in another book, Lamiell (2017) called mainstream psychology “The Incorrigible Science.” In his 2019 book, Psychology’s Misuse of Statistics and Persistent Dismissal of Its Critics, he accused the mainstream of “deliberate duplicity” (emphasis in original), which is surely a close cousin of willful ignorance.

Would theoretical psychologists who reject mainstream psychology also reject Lefkowitz’s scholarship, for much the same reasons as do some classical Greek scholars? With whom would they side, if they wanted to use that aspect of ancient Greek history in their work?

I turn now to how such fractures in the humanities might play out for psychologists if the matter is not one of historical fact, but one of interpretation of art. Here I exemplify with the much-debated (and trickier) question of authorial intention, although the problem of evidence obtains nonetheless. And the ad-hominem criticisms continue.

On Interpreting Art

The great Renaissance and modern art historian/critic Leo Steinberg challenged the Renaissance art world in his 1986 book, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (rev. 1996). There he asserts what he calls a “long suppressed matter of fact”:

In many hundreds of pious, religious works, from before 1400 to past the mid 16th century, the ostensive unveiling of the Child’s sex, or the touching, protecting or presentation of it, is the main action. . . . The emphasis recurs in images of the dead Christ, or of the mystical Man of Sorrows. . . . All of which has been tactfully overlooked for half a millennium. Hence my first question—whether the ongoing 20th century is late enough to concede that the subject exists. (p. 3)

Steinberg presented extensive visual evidence in challenging the prevailing view that the display of Christ’s genitals in a great many pictorial and sculptural artworks was intended by Renaissance artists to be solely spiritual, that is, without corporeal/sexual meaning. Consider the front and back cover art on his book (click on link for images) which illustrates his argument. In particular, notice on the front cover the Madonna in the act of closing the cloth around the Christ child’s genitals—though she stops just short of that, as if intending to give us a glimpse. And on the back cover, the Christ child holds the cloth revealing away from himself.

Steinberg said his critics made an overarching “bid to discredit the author”:

He is not to be trusted, since he seems out of control, witness his writing style (described . . . as “overheated,” “drooling,” “strident,” and “faintly hysterical”—“a prose type that would choke any self-respecting typewriter”). One scholar diagnoses his case as borderline pathological. . . . I am presented as one who sees Christ’s humanity exclusively in the genitals, which, the reviewer rightly concludes, “borders on caricature” (p. 345).

Despite countless paintings and sculptures which support Steinberg’s claim that Christ’s genitals were intentionally displayed by Renaissance artists to present him as fully human, including his sexuality, Steinberg, like Lefkowitz, has been castigated by many. After all, by the late 20th century, with the rise of postmodernism in the humanities, the new literary critics had dispensed with authorial intention as a basis for artistic interpretation, dubbing it the “intentional fallacy.”

My point is, in this area of the humanities, as in the classics, disputes over evidence and interpretation are intense, with the vitriol shot at certain scholars remarkably similar if not identical to that aimed at mainstream psychology by many theorists. And so we may ask how psychologists who turn to the humanities for boundary-defying salvation should deal with these disputes. Whose version of humanistic inquiry in any given field should be deemed acceptable, and whose not? According to Gergen (1985), psychologists circled wagons should include only “like-minded colleagues” in other disciplines, which amounts to a close-minded unbounding at best.

Conclusions

I applaud unbounding psychology by forging connections with humanities disciplines, as long as we are mindful of the perils that loom if they are romanticized. In short, caveat emptor.

Following our psychological interests may take us to surprising and interesting places. The nature of the question asked must drive the tools we use to answer it, regardless of their disciplinary origins. And the methods deployed in any particular study can and should be open to challenge, vis a vis the question. But theorists’ a priori, wholesale rejection of mainstream methods constricts inquiry—even while theorists charge the allegedly constricting mainstream with overreach, as we see in Gantt and Williams (2018) edited book, On Hijacking Science: Exploring the Nature and Consequences of Overreach in Psychology.

In his endorsement of this book, theoretical psychologist Mark Freeman called the “dominant view” “parochial” and "scientistic," and lauded this book’s contributors for offering a “broader more inclusive perspective on what psychological inquiry might be”—minus traditional approaches, that is.

Wherever our preferred disciplinary boundaries lie, we must be bound to at least two principles: (a) the relentless search for truth, and (b) the understanding that there’s always more to be said.

William James expressed these obligations in these three arresting words, which form the title of a new book by Saulo Araujo and Lisa Osbeck (2023): “Ever Not Quite.”

References

Araujo, S. & Osbeck, L. M. (2023). Ever not quite: Pluralism in William James and
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