On opening the psychology of personality to philosophy and literature in our time: A response to Gardner

Abstract

In his William James Award address to Division 1 for General Psychology of the American Psychological Society in 1989, Howard Gardner has given us a thought-provoking overview of “scientific psychology,” suggesting that neuroscience, cognitive science, cultural studies, and educational and clinical psychology represent centrifugal tendencies in the discipline. At the “disciplinary core,” he suggests, lies the study of self, personality, consciousness, and artistic creation. Even if these were the “center” for James, Freud, and Murray, Gardner’s point requires the amplification that these psychologists would have sanctioned opening up psychology to other disciplines in our own time. For instance, Gardner illustrates his hope that the disciplines of literature and psychology would work together with empirical studies on “the correct interpretation of a work of art,” or the “appreciation of irony,” or the “appeal of fairy tales,” or the “power relations among individuals in Shakespearean plays,” (p. 187). In his own Harvard Project Zero, children are exposed to such interdisciplinary education and investigation. If he were to call upon the fruits of feminist philosophy and reception theory in literature, to take just two examples, he might find deeper grounds for cooperation on these fronts. Gardner’s interests would seem to require that psychology reach out to other disciplines. In all periods, psychology has had literature in its background, and literature has expressed political concerns. G. T.Fechner published sardonic humor in an effort to raise the level of scientific education in his day. R. H. Lotze belonged to an adolescent literary circle in Zittau during the 1830s that dedicated itself to what Karl Marx was doing more radically in the Rhineland: to bring social reform to the public through literature. This critical function of literature served an academic political purpose to legitimate psychology as a discipline, but it also served here to educate the public. Literary feuilletons in psychology are more common than we think. The names of Skinner, Bruner, and Bronfenbrenner come to mind from yesteryear, but more recently, Carole Wade and Carol Tavris are known through Psychology Today and their popular textbook (1990). Writers and readers of New Ideas in Psychology are primarily psychologists who do not limit their identification to psychology, as is witnessed by their fruitful contacts with education, language,