Persons and players: A psychological perspective

Abstract

It can be argued that psychology should focus on the human person rather than on the behaviour and experiences of individuals. Unfortunately, since the arrival of Cartesian dualism, most of psychology has tended to emphasise the notion of individuals and societies over persons and communities. Related to this, Giorgi (1970) argued that the result of following the natural science model and its underlying assumptions has led to a significant restriction in which topics have been studied in the human science disciplines. Within psychology and sport psychology, the major challenge to this dominant paradigm has been provided by existentialphenomenological and transpersonal psychology. According to Valle, existential psychology is based on ‘a critical stance towards the natural science conception of the person and the world and the technologically oriented culture that arises from this world-view’ (1989, 255). Existential literature has attempted to investigate all aspects of human experience, including love, creativity and religious belief, which most other approaches in psychology have generally ignored. Within such a perspective, based as it is upon the lived reality of human persons, it has been possible to consider matters like spiritual awareness and transcendental belief. Behaviourist and cognitive psychologists have ignored these and other similar elements like will, courage and consciousness largely because the underpinning natural scientific foundations of their paradigm reject these concepts as unverifiable. What is really being said here is that, since the methods of natural science cannot accommodate these important human experiences, the solution has been to leave them to philosophy, theology and the arts. However, the difficulty with this is that psychology and sport psychology conceived as a natural science is forced to reduce human beings to something which fits neatly into its methods. The outcome of this is that science has determined its subject matter and presented a particular and restricted view of human beings when it should have changed its approach to meet the reality of the human person.