Psychology and Experience

This page intentionally left blank

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

978-0-511-12490-7 eBook (EBL) 0-511-12490-2 eBook (EBL)

isbn-13 isbn-10

978-0-521-81264-1 hardback 0-521-81264-x hardback

isbn-13 isbn-10

978-0-521-01199-0 paperback 0-521-01199-x paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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.

4

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

10

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

12

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,

22

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).

24

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.

Learning from experience

27

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

28

Psychology and Experience

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.

Learning from experience

29

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.

30

Psychology and Experience

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.

Learning from experience

31

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

32

Psychology and Experience

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

Learning from experience

33

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.

34

Psychology and Experience

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.

Learning from experience

35

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

36

Psychology and Experience

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.

Learning from experience

37

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.

38

Psychology and Experience

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