Too young to die—Let's not bury psychology alive: A response to Gardner

Abstract

If one strolls through the Mellon British Art Museum at Yale University, one encounters hundreds of master works of British art, most of them from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the works are portraits of people from these times past, including both adults and children. If one scrutinizes the portraits of the children, one notices something strange, at least by contemporary standards. The children are portrayed as miniature adults. They are poised like adults, they are dressed like adults, and even their faces appear to be faces of adults in the small. It is clear that the earlier British conception of the child is very different from our contemporary one: For these artists and for the society in which they lived, the child was a miniature version of an adult. More importantly, children were expected to behave as adults, and were held to a standard that today would be viewed as inappropriate and even unreasonable. In this article, I will argue that psychology is thriving as a discipline and that we have every reason to believe that it will continue to survive. Calls for its demise, such as Gardner’s, are, in my opinion, misguided. In the first major section of the paper, I will argue that, given its state of relative immaturity, the testing of boundaries and even of the core of the discipline that we see today in the field of psychology is a sign of health rather than illness. In the second major section of the paper, I will describe the form that this testing takes. In the third section, I will draw conclusions.