Day 57 – A 1998 paper on postmodernism and psychology
Day 57 – I wrote this paper back in 1998 for a class on the history of psychology. Reading back on it I'm impressed with how much these ideas influenced my belief in knowledge as "situated" and with my understanding of the role of language in establishing power.
Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash
HISTORICAL INFLUENCES OF POSTMODERNISM ON PSYCHOLOGY
“While epistemology may seem to reside in a heady conceptual realm far removed from the clinician’s doorstep, it is of fundamental concern to the practice of therapy. One cannot operate without epistemological assumptions, although it is possible to be unaware of them. Our theories are founded on epistemology - whether theories of psychotherapy, or personal theories of life manifest in the choices we make on a daily basis. When one considers, then, that epistemology informs all of our beliefs about where problems come from, how they are maintained, and what facilitates their resolution, the distinctions examined here are fundamental” (Pare, 1995, p.3).
Postmodernism has brought many interesting challenges and dilemmas to the field of psychology during the last 10-15 years. Postmodernism began as a cultural and intellectual movement. Postmodern themes have emerged since the 1950’s within art, architecture, literary criticism, sociology, and philosophy (Kvale, 1992). Postmodernist ideas have found their way into psychology through the theories of social constructionism and constructivism, through the fundamental critiques of logical positivism and the “science” of psychology, and through narrative approaches to therapy. In this paper I hope to explore the basic premises of postmodernism, and to review some of the historical ideas in philosophy which postmodernism questions.
Many of the new theories of social constructionism, constructivism, and narrative approaches to therapy have found their roots in the postmodern movement. Although postmodernism is often spoken of as a single movement, in fact, it is quite complex and multidimensional. “‘Postmodern’ does not designate a systematic theory or a comprehensive philosophy, but rather diverse diagnoses and interpretations of the current culture, a depiction of a multitude of interrelated phenomena” (Kvale, 1992, p. 32). Within postmodernism there are important splits and schools which approach the problems of “modern” man from fundamentally divergent positions. It is this diversity within the postmodern movement that often adds to the confusion one encounters in trying to understand or critically evaluate it. Cahoone (1996) uses a useful metaphor in discussing the postmodern movement. He describes it as an extended family in which there are quite different appearances despite similar genetic material, and in which there are deep divisions and conflicting views. Yet, what these divergent models of postmodernist thought do have in common is a fundamental questioning of the modernist “belief in a knowable world” (Gergen, 1992, p.19). From this questioning two central questions arise: Are we really able to “know” the world? And is there even such a thing as a “knowable world?”
POSTMODERNISM’S INFLUENCE
Postmodernism within psychology has led to the questions of how we “construct” reality, what the role of language is in social exchange, and in how “objectivity” is viewed, both in terms of the “science” of psychology and in terms of the therapeutic relationship. The past 20 years has seen a “crisis of knowing” (Harding, 1996). The most visible and traditional methods of knowing in our Western culture have their roots in modern Western philosophy (See my short history of Western philosophy if you want a review - having never taken a philosophy course, I needed to outline the basic western theories before I could understand the postmodern critiques). These methods of knowing are generally contained within “classical rationalism and logical empiricism” (Mahoney, 1996, p. 128), and can be summarized as a reliance on “the workings of the mind (which are) to be aided by the laws of logic; (and) the renderings of the senses (which are) to be helped by instrumentation and public inspection” (p. 128). Basically, the worldview was that knowing was possible through a rational, logical, objective method. The belief was that through this method the rational order of the universe could be explicated.
The scientific approach to psychology has dominated the field as THE “legitimate” form of psychology throughout the last hundred years (Koch, 1992), despite the introduction of various “new” models of psychology (i.e.: psychoanalysis, Gestalt theory, the humanistic and existential movements of psychology). In fact, some theorists have proposed that the wide acceptance of the scientific model itself, prevented some of these new models from becoming more visible and gaining greater legitimacy (Benjafield, 1996, p.197). Yet in spite of its dominance, this drive towards an “emergence of a rigorous, cumulative, predictively powerful science” (Koch, p.929) has been under considerable debate during the past 15 years. Linguistic theory and philosophy, feminist theories, poststructural literary theory and philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism, as well as changes within the philosophy of science, have all challenged the scientific model and served to influence the development of postmodern perspectives in psychology.
FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Psychology’s turn toward postmodernism has been greatly influenced by the changes within the philosophy of science. In the field of science, Kuhn (1962/1970 as cited by Loving, 1997) was responsible for starting a philosophical revolution. Kuhn wrote and revised a ground-breaking work called “The structure of scientific revolutions,” in which he proposed that rather than scientific theories being cumulative or evolutionary, that is, rather than knowledge being linear - in which one theory builds incrementally upon another, that theories are often context specific and revolutionary, that one theory confronts and takes over another theory as being more socially or politically relevant, thus initiating a shift in paradigms. “We do not improve our knowledge of the world through systematic study, proposed Kuhn, so much as shift our way of seeing the world” (Gergen, 1992, p.21). Further, Kuhn and other philosophers of “post-”modern science proposed that these shifts have within them presuppositions that are theory based (see Loving, 1997). This theory, along with Karl Popper’s claim that all observations are necessarily theory-laden (Ingelby, 1992, p. 109), has led to serious doubts about science’s ability to find universal laws.
This notion that scientific theory is context bound has led to one of postmodernism’s more durable influences - that ACKNOWLEDGING CONTEXTS is critical. Within physics, the Heisenberg principle which posits that you can’t separate the effect of yourself as the observer from what you are observing (Hare-Mustin and Marecek, 1990, p.27), paralleled important contributions of literary criticism and philosophy. Constructivism took this notion of not being able to separate yourself from what you observe one step further to propose that what is observed is an artifact of our language systems, and that reality is invented rather than discovered.
CONSTRUCTIVISM AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
Constructivism gave birth to several constructivist theories. Mahoney (1996) notes that on one end of the continuum of constructivist theories is “radical constructivism” which proposes that personal reality is totally “created” by the individual. At the other end of the continuum is “social constructivism” which proposes that reality is only known through social, historical, and cultural context. For the social constructivists there is no personal reality. And Mahoney places himself in the mid-ground, with “developmental constructivism” which “attempts to respect both individual (self-generative) agency and dynamic social embeddedness” (p.132). These constructivist theories reflect a continuum of postmodern positions. What these positions share is a belief in an active construction of meanings through language.
Nietzsche is said to be one of the forefathers of postmodernism (Linn, 1996; Cahoone, 1996). He is said to be “the first Western philosopher to stress that all thought is linguistic, and furthermore, that language itself imposes a shape on the way human beings think about the world” (Linn, p.19). For Nietzsche, language is internalized, and this “public” language then places “truth” within a sociocultural context. The idea that language is the central cause of the need for context is a cornerstone of the postmodern movement.
THE TEXT IS EVERYTHING AND LANGUAGE IS A GAME
Linguistic theory and philosophy have offered the idea that language is at the root of the creation of reality. Within this emphasis on language as the contexter of reality there is a continuum from those that believe that we are merely linguistic artifacts to those that see language as the means by which we construct reality together to those that see language as the method by which we structure our experience. These theories run the gamut of those that take a strong anti-reality position, to those that promote social construction, to those that use language to explore methods of discourse. Like all postmodernist ideas, there is a multiplicity of positions taken about the importance of language in the “construction” of reality. There is not one postmodern position on the importance of language, despite critiques to this effect (Held, 1995). Held (1995) reduced all postmodern thought to a “fundamental antirealism” (p.4). She noted that the linguistic philosophers proposed that “we can never get outside of language to attain knowledge of an independent - or extralinguistic - reality,” but just because we cannot get outside of language to attain it, doesn’t mean that an extralinguistic reality doesn’t exist. The linguistic philosophers lie on a continuum with regards to their anti-realist stand. In response to these criticisms of antirealism, the postmodernists propose that this question of whether an extralinguistic reality exists is the wrong question. Postmodernists seek to transcend the dualistic reasoning of the Cartesian debate. They propose that what’s more important is not whether an external reality exists, but that through language and sociocultural history we co-construct meaning.
One of the central cornerstones of postmodernist thought is the challenge that there is no “determinant (fixed or intrinsic) relationship between words and world” (Gergen, 1994, p.412). There is no fixed, “real” naming of things which is not ultimately linked to a sociocultural context. Wittgenstein is credited with serving as the key spokesperson for this view (Gergen, 1994). Wittengstein held a more social constructionist view of the importance of language. He proposed that “language acquires its meaning not through a referential base but through its use in social practices” (p. 413).
Another postmodern theme is that language always stands between reality and experience (Polkinghorne, 1992). Words “represent” things, not as a mirror of something real out there, but rather as a social construction. This notion that language structures experience and our understanding of experience is also echoed in Heidegger’s notion of “poetisizing”. Heidegger says that we introduce metaphor into our conceptions, and that language gives “being” to things (Shawver, 1996, p. 380). Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1990) point out that not only does language structure the experience of the speaker, but it also structures the experience of those to whom one speaks (p.25). Derrida, the father of deconstructionism, takes this idea one step further by stating that “there is nothing outside of text” - emphasizing that there is no sense to things outside of the context in which we place it through language. “This context is what makes sense of things, what crystallizes meaningless puffs of unnoticed reality into the hard rock of the solid real” (Shawver, p.379).
In particular, what Derrida notices is that there are always a variety of meanings that can be extracted from any text. Words, just as Western thought, are made up of a series of “interrelated hierarchical oppositions” (Hare-Mustin and Marcek, 1990, p.46-47). Within most words and thoughts an opposite is held (i.e.: what defines dark is the absence of light) and by giving precedence over one meaning, we forget the other, and place meanings in a hierarchical context. If we question the opposition and the hierarchy inherent in our meaning making, then through deconstruction we open up a fuller sense of meaning. The notion of opening up dialectics, or reorganizing hierarchy, and of taking all the possibilities in rather than choosing some, form some of the fundamental premises of postmodernism. These ideas showed up in art, architecture, and literature of the postmodern era (i.e.: the use of collage). The issue of recognizing the importance of multiplicity has also shown up in psychology. The move towards multicultural perspectives is sometimes seen as an outgrowth of postmodernism.
Along the realist - antirealist continuum, Derrida takes a much stronger anti-realist attitude. Words serve as metaphors and because language never catches all that we mean, there is the possibility of all that what is within, or behind, the meaning of our words can become illuminated through the process of deconstructing the meanings behind our words. “Our language practices mislead us into expecting the world to be more precisely what the imagery in our language suggests it is” and we forget that there is so much more (Shawver, 1996, p. 384), or for some so much less. This antirealist attitude has brought on one of the most serious criticisms of postmodernism - postmodernists are seen as representing a nihilistic relativism characterized by an uncertainty or utter rejection of all standards, and a sense of “drift and doom” (Smith, 1994, p. 406).
Yet this criticism fails to note the variety of positions taken by the postmodernists. Postmodernists propose that it is the “interpretations of reality (that) are inconstant, not reality itself; the discursive framework does not deny reality nor reduce everything to mere words” (Rubin, 1997, p.4). What the postmodernists do propose is that the reality which is a “given,” carries within it a certain perspective, and that this perspective often belies a power structure.
“POWER IS KNOWLEDGE” AND KNOWLEDGE IS SITUATED
“(P)ostmodernism can be summarized like this: Language matters, and it matters far more than people have imagined. It does not simply label reality in accurate or inaccurate ways. It creates metaphorical images of reality that take us into different kinds of experience. Having different experiences causes us to do things differently, to create different kinds of institutions and cultures, and lead different kinds of lives” (Shawver, 1996, p.390). The role of language and culture in “creating” reality, is thus one of the fundamental premises of postmodernism. Foucault magnifies the importance of language by linking language to power (Gergen, 1992). If we “create” truth through language than ultimately the power to “label, define and rank” is tremendous power indeed (Hare-Mustin and Maracek, 1990, p. 26). This link between language and power is one which feminist postmodernists have embraced. “If statements and not things are true or false, then truth is necessarily linguistic; if truth is linguistic, then it is relative to language use (words, concepts, statements, discourses) at a given time and place; therefore, ideology, interests, and power arrangements at a given time and place are implicated in the production of what counts as ‘true’” (Cherryholmes as cited by Riger, 1992, p. 150).
Postmodernism, thus, acknowledges the multiple meanings of language, placing language within culture, links language to the “creation” of reality, and sees this social construction of reality as having implications with regards to power. This emphasis on power has forced even the feminist theorists to question their assumptions. While looking at their work through postmodernist eyes, some feminist researchers realized that basic assumptions about the self being a unified whole (as opposed to the deconstructivist view of the self as fragmentary), or development being linear (as opposed to the multidimensional) kept them from fully articulating or seeing the experience some women had of themselves and their ways of knowing (Debold, Tolman and Brown, 1996). Postmodernism has led to a basic questioning of a unified self (Lacan), issues of power (Foucault), and issues of language and meaning (Derrida) (Bicket, 1997, on-line).
This issue of power has important ramifications when applied to the field of psychology. Gergen (1994) notes that some “people of other cultures claim that Western psychology is a subtle form of colonialism,” and that even within our culture “White culture (including that of social science) has no right to speak for the Black woman” (p.413). Gergen notes that “to lay claim to principles has been to silence those embedded in the complexities of ongoing interaction” (p.414). White and Wang (1995) note, “Modernist worldviews are based on the metaphysics of ‘reality,’ of the ‘self,’ and of the ‘good,’ which denied the dependence of these supposed entities on language practices that are culturally and historically bound. To present cultural or social constructs as ultimate realities is to engage in a totalizing politics that hypostatizes one’s own language game as the foundation of all communicative practices - the hallmark of ethnocentrism” (p.392).
In response to the recognition that all knowledge and language is culturally embedded, the postmodernists have called for us to describe our perspective as ‘situated’ in a particular place, time, and power dynamic, and to take responsibility for co-creating systems which promote inclusion, diversity, and tolerance - to “locate” ourselves. But this form of postmodernism, which allows for an “embedded” self, is to be distinguished from the forms of postmodernism which deny the existence of a self, and see the self “as merely another position in language” (Squires, 1993, p.4). “The traditional humanistic concept of self, formerly thought to be a metaphysical reality, is here understood to be dialogical, discursive, and determined by the communicative practices of language-using individuals. For postmodernists, the self is not obliterated, but situated” (White and Wang, 1995, p. 392). Because of the diversity of voices within the postmodern movement, this notion of whether the self exists, and whether it is “situated” or not, has led some critics to be concerned about moral relativism - if the self cannot rely on transcendent values, on what do we base our moral convictions? In response to this, Gergen (1994) points out that postmodernism acts as “an invitation to reflexivity, encouraging one to consider all propositional realities and dictates as local, provisional, and political” (p.414). Some post-post-modernists are calling for an approach which celebrates difference while offering the possibility for a political togetherness which recognizes that “we are embodied and embedded selves whose identity is constructed narratively. Thus, whilst we may give up all use of foundational, essentialist, teleological and transcendental concepts, we will still need a notion of the self” (Squires, p.11-12). But is this possible?
RADICAL HUMANISM AS THE ANSWER
Some postmodernists are calling for the development of a “human community which is a community of communities,” and an embracing of “radical humanism” which proposes that we respect differences while affirming solidarity and connection (Weeks, 1993, p. 197). This view on a macrocosmic level, is paralleled with a microcosmic level in which knowledge is seen not as something individually determined, but rather something socially constructed. “How one knows is multiply determined within the array of relationships that define the self. Meaning making is not a solitary pursuit, but is interactional and negotiable; that is, knowledge is co-constructed. Persons are ‘situated’ in communities of knowers in which the dynamics of power and status are often controlling factors in how one knows and what one knows” (Goldberger, 1996, p. 14-15). And I would add that these communities are located within larger communities that also fall victim to dynamics of power and status, and that these communities ultimately fall within the human community. Psychology’s challenge is to become one of the human communities which gives voice to differences, explores the methods by which communities construct meanings and build affiliations, and which through careful exploration and investigation begins to unfold our embodied, lived realities.
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