S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 7 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 1 2 3 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos permeates our whole culture, in literature and art and in almost every other aspect of western man’s self-interpretation. Freud obviously had more influence on psychology and psychiatry than any other man in the twentieth century. Unless we confront him directly, consciously and unflinchingly, our discussions of therapy will always hang in a vacuum. We cannot, furthermore, dismiss Freud simply by stating our disagreements with him. The same could be said of behaviorism and its principal exponents John B. Watson (1878–1958) and B. F. Skinner (1904–1990). Modern Western psychology – as a field of science distinct from philosophy and physiology – is thought to have officially commenced in 1879 with Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) establishment of the first experimental psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in German. It is a little-known fact that across the Atlantic, William James (1842–1910) had established a similar laboratory four years prior to Wundt, in 1875, at Harvard University (see Harper 1950). However, others trace its beginnings to German psychologist Franz Brentano (1838–1917), who asserted in his Habilitation (1866) that empiricism, not metaphysics, is the basis of modern psychology: “[T]he true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences.” (Dewalque 2017, 226). Wundt, regarded as the “father of experimental psychology,” warned of the ill-fated consequences should psychology divorce itself from philosophy in his 1913 essay Psychology’s Struggle for Existence (2013, 197): Leafing through the first section of this work, one might be inclined to view it as a provocation. But one who decides to read through to the end will be convinced that, on the contrary, the work could well be regarded as a peace offering. In the opinion of some, philosophy and psychology should divorce from each other. Now, it is well known that when a married couple seeks a divorce, both members usually are at fault. In these pages it will be shown that the same is true in this instance, and that if this matter takes the course that both parties want, philosophy will lose more than it will gain, but psychology will be damaged the most. Hence, the argument over the question of whether psychology is or is not a philosophical science is for psychology a struggle for its very existence. James (1908, 467), often considered the “father of American psychology,” makes a curious yet troubling observation: When …we talk of ‘psychology as a natural science,’ we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse; it means a psychology particularly fragile, and into which the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint, a psychology all of whose elementary assumptions and data must be reconsidered in wider connections and translated into other terms. In fact, he reached the following conclusion regarding the limits of his discipline: “Psychology [note: is] a nasty little subject – all one cares to know lies outside.” (James 1920, 2). Although James refused to consider modern psychology as a science, properly speaking, he was nonetheless optimistic and suggested that: “This is no science, it is only the hope of a science.” (1908, 468). The fate of psychology would have been very different if more individuals had taken heed of Wundt’s or James’s wise words of caution. That said, it has been suggested that modern psychology’s inception began even earlier with John Locke (1632– 1704), one of the most influential of thinkers of the European Enlightenment to whom was attributed the doctrine of empiricism and the associated notion of tabula rasa –“clean or erased slate” [5]. According to American psychologist Gordon W. Allport (1897– 1967), there are essentially two epistemological approaches in Western psychology: “Virtually all modern psychological theories seem oriented toward one of two polar conceptions, which, at the risk of some historical oversimplification, I shall call the Lockean and the Leibnizian traditions respectively.” (1969, 7). Locke’s influence has weighed heavily and endures up to the present day. His ideas have paved the way for modern science to dissociate itself from sacred principles and from what lies beyond the limitations of the empirical ego: “Locke insisted that there can be nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses – ‘nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu.’” (Allport 1969, 7). He thus turns the transcendent intellect on its head, inverting its function and leaving only sensorial experience as the sole means of verifying the truth of reality (but only as conceived in narrowly materialist terms). Accordingly, we can now see that modern psychology privileges sensorial experience above the noetic faculty of the Intellect as illustrated in an often-cited statement by Fritz Perls (1893–1970): “Lose your mind and come to your senses” (1969, 69). Swedish historian and philosopher Tage Lindbom (1909–2001) remarks that “[w]hen John Locke affirmed
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