The psychology of human possibility and constraint

Abstract

The way to read this little book is to share in the authors' concern for understanding individuals and for vindicating psychology as a discipline concerned with the psychological of individuals. The authors' collaboration in the pursuit of understanding of socioculturally enabled individual psychological development (p. xvi) is an extended argument that is didactically satisfying, even as it is intellectually promiscuous. It is satisfying because their concerns are of the heart; it is promiscuous because their expressed effort is one of borrowing and attempted reconciliation from divergent philosophical perspectives. Ironically, there is little concrete psychological inquiry here, and little on the meaning and significance of human suffering in becoming a person. Rather, its strength as well as its weakness resides in the perspective and approach it advocates in the study of human being, and so provides, as Donald Polkinghorn writes in his illuminating Foreword, a groundwork that other scholars can use to explore personhood further (p. xiv).The first three of the book's six chapters are devoted to a presentation and elaboration of the authors' metaphysical thesis of interactionism, the last three to an instantiation of this thesis in the domains of psychotherapy, education, and psychological inquiry. Throughout these chapters the authors juxtapose social constructionism and cognitive constructivism as instances of holism and atomism, respectively, and as extant psychological paradigms for the understanding of individuals. Since they recognize that these paradigms have fundamentally different assumptions and metatheories and so preclude integration, they assume as their task to formulate a theoretical approach, one with ontological and epistemological assumptions different from either of the positions, so as to ground the relation between social-cultural and psychological individual realities (p. 5).This new theoretical approach borrows explicitly from recent continental philosophy, notably from Heidegger's ontology and from Gadamer's hermeneutics conceived as an epistemology for psychology and the human sciences. Less explicit but evident throughout the text are borrowings from Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and from Charles Taylor in support of the individual -- that is, the person -- as that incarnate mode of experience sublimated in language, meaning, and history. Later, in an instantiation of their thesis in the context of education, the authors also find their perspective converging with the work of Mead and Dewey, and indeed, for better or worse, the style of the entire theoretical formulation exemplifies a strong pragmatic orientation. Not surprisingly then, even if their theoretical approach is philosophically overdetermined and therefore promiscuous, they do stipulate their use of such frequently occurring terms as metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology.The proposed metaphysics of dynamic interactionism is presented as a challenge to the lingering Cartesianism of the discipline that separates mind from body and individual from social-cultural context. It is also intended to avoid the conclusions of post-structuralist thought (Barthes and Derrida are cited) that dissolves the individual into text, and the excesses of social constructionist thought that dissolves the individual into social and linguistic practices. Instead, the authors conceive of individual psychological experience and its constituting social-cultural context as shifting ontologies that are dynamically related in a manner that is historically emergent and mutable, and do not permit ontological reduction of one to the other. So that while the social-cultural context is conceived as an enabling and constraining source in the formation of the individual self -- here the authors take cognitive constructivism to task -- the individual is underdetermined by its social-cultural sources. …