On Some Accounts Of Meaning And Their Problems

Abstract

A number of influential theorists in psychotherapy and psychology rightly argue that meaning is central to psychology. However, they ground this insight on further claims that persons autonomously create meaning and reality; and that a constructivist, antirealist, postmodern philosophy offers justification for the centrality of meaning. These further claims are mistaken. They confuse two different psychological phenomena, both called meaning, symbolic meaning and meaning as salience. The latter, the meaning usually of concern to psychotherapy, is a relation between a person (specifically motives) and objects. It results from the interaction between persons and objects relevant to their motivational interests. It is part of the real, determinate world and in principle scientifically investigable. The argument that meaning is part of autonomously created realities is incoherent. Further, antirealist, postmodern constructivism depends on the realist assumptions about facts, truth and objective knowledge that it denies. The genuine insights of the meaningmaking movement require a realist account of knowledge, truth and objectivity. 1. The Importance of Meaning Psychotherapists see themselves as helping professionals and, concerned as they are with freeing individuals from their psychological burdens, they favour theories of human action that have regard for persons, their beliefs, wishes and perspectives. A major theme of the now dominant cognitive, cognitive-behavioural and allied therapies—the centrality of cognitions in the genesis of psychological 1 This chapter is revised from Mackay, N. (2003a). Psychotherapy and the idea of meaning. Theory & Psychology, 13(3), 359-386, and Mackay, N. (2003b). On “Just not getting it”: A reply to McNamee and to Raskin and Neimeyer. Theory & Psychology, 13(3), 411-419. ACCOUNTS OF MEANING & THEIR PROBLEMS 549 distress—promotes just this examination of the person’s perspective and beliefs, the ‘internal world’. The focus of psychotherapy has moved from how objective conditions may control and be manipulated to alleviate symptoms, to the ways in which persons’ perceptions of their world generate, and may be adjusted to alleviate, pathology. At the same time a number of writers from inside and outside psychology have presented more radical critiques of mainstream psychology (including psychotherapy and clinical classification) and analyses of social processes (including psychotherapeutic processes) from constructivist and social constructionist standpoints. Constructivism offers personal agency as the source of action, and social constructionism offers social discourse as constituting mind and action. Both reject the objectivism of traditional empirical psychology. It is against this background that a theme that has always existed on the margins of psychology—most famously articulated in Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning (1964)—has developed into a flood of writings on the primacy of meaning and meaning-making in therapy and human conduct. Though it comes in many different forms, the theme of this literature is that human actions, including pathology and its remediation, are shaped by the meanings that events have for persons, or are created in discourse, rather than being determined by their objective features. To deal with this (how persons construct meaning and reality), psychology and psychotherapy require a non-objectivist metatheory. My concern here is with certain general features of this work, whose epistemological position and attendant ontology are incoherent and poorly serve the worthy humanistic aims that inspire the literature.