Topic 2 Lecture Notes - Hermeneutics and Nomothetic Research PDF

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Lecture notes from Professor Matthew Giobbi's class....

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h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOdQB4W5R9M Humanities-Based Psychology ● Psychologists believe that understanding is more important than causal explanation ○ Must interpret human beings and their history, emotions, culture, etc. ○ Focus on understanding/interpretation - not explanation through laboratory research (quantitative experiments) ❖ Hermeneutics (hermes) - understanding through interpretation ➢ Meaning of the divine messages of the gods ➢ Hermeneutics: ■ Main research method of all of these areas of study ■ Theology context 1. Literal interpretation (universe was created in literally 6 days) 2. Moral interpretation - the meaning of the stor 3. Allegorical interpretation - hidden meanings (tree of knowledge represents…) 4. Mystical interpretation - numerology, hidden mystical/mathematical components underlying meanings beyond the allegorical ❖ Friedrich Schleiermacher’s definition on understanding hermeneutics ➢ Empathizing with the thoughts, intentions, and feelings of another ■ Putting ourself in the worldview of others ➢ Interpretation and understanding with empathy of the other ❖ Explaining and understanding - Droysen ➢ Nomothetic research - explaining/looking for general laws (natural science psychology) biological or environmental determinism (nature vs nurture) ➢ Idiographic research - description (leads to interpretation and understanding) of individual events; more applicable to hermeneutics (not explanatory) ❖ Hans-Georg Gadamer ➢ Interpretation is the core of being ■ The human experience is interpretation - the key feature of being human is the ability to understand through interpretation (based on Heidegger) ➢ “Assumptions precede interpretations” - Idolatry of the Scientific Method book ➢ Every individual’s interpretation is based on their worldview - critical of natural science approach ■ Scientists mistook their work as being completely objective - they didn’t recognize their assumptions that preceded their idea of objectivity ■ Interpretation is based on pre-understandings

➢ If you use the method, you get to scientific fact - Gadamer said this was flawed thinking ■ Method is what constructs knowledge (it does not just reveal it) ■ Hermeneutics must be used to enhance, improve, etc. the natural science approach ■ In contemporary society, to psychologists, it is betrayal to question if psychology is a science ■ “To understand the phenomenon itself” ● The human sciences make an error in trying to emulate the natural sciences - these are incompatible projects ■ Similar to Freud’s study of psychoanalysis (non measurable aspects of the unconscious ➢ Phronesis - understanding, moral (meaning of the story) knowledge; looking at art and understanding its meaning ➢ Episteme - explaining impossible in human beings ■ Criticizing episteme in natural sciences (individual becomes object of their own subjectivity) - Subject/Object dualism makes episteme impossible in human beings - Gadamer: this is a flawed way of thinking ➢ 6 concepts of hermeneutics for psychologists: 1. Understanding is framed by a point of view 2. Personal experience limits understanding 3. One can transcend their personal horizon 4. Tradition is prejudicial thinking 5. Understanding others is questioning one’s POV 6. Language precedes thought ❖ Linguistic relativism: the grammar that one is raised in influences how they see the world and how they come to think about what reality is Part 2: ➔ Jurgen Habermas ◆ Critical theory + hermeneutics ● Psychologists should challenge the claim that psychology is an objective sciences ● Historical relationship between subject and object is what should be studied ● All phenomena will take on the shape of the school of thought through which it is viewed ◆ Not just data, but discussion about data ◆ Hermeneutic surplus of interpretation (interpretation of data)

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◆ The most important part of the study is the discussion, not the data Hermeneutic deficit: the neglect in psychology to critically consider methodological and epistemological problems with the issues including the ideology of objectivity ◆ Not questioning objectivity ◆ Psychologists who dismiss criticisms of the natural science approach Epistemological violence: when members of a centralized, privileged tradition (the dominant paradigm) produce interpretations of data that inferiorize the other traditions of interpretation (schools of thought) ◆ When interpretation is taken as pure fact, rather than contextually-situated description - cognitive psychology, neuroscientists, positivists, behaviorists, theoretical positions Psychology holds an individualistic conception of mind - memory perception, consciousness, language as individual functions of a person’s mind Critical theory holds a sociohistorical and sociocultural conception of mind (memory is not something that exists within the brain - it exists within history and the context of the individual) Hegel’s three minds framework ◆ Subjective mind - individual aspects of mind (habit, desire, memory) ◆ Objective mind - social mind (ethics, law) ◆ Absolute mind - art, religion, culture, thinking + artificial products Wilhelm Dilthey ◆ Founders of hermeneutic decisions ◆ Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding ● The individual’s mind is contextually creates an objective reality ● Psychologists can study this objective mind through what an individual creates ● We must study people historically, not experimentally ◆ Objectivity is something that is a product of the mind ● Social organizations are internalized and become objective in the mind, but are not objective within themselves ◆ Psychologists can study this objective mind through what the individual creates ● Studying cultural acts (religion, art, etc.) - study people within historical context - not in an isolated, controlled, experimental methodology ◆ Three research approaches for psychologists 1. Content research - the meaningful content of an individual’s mind 2. Descriptive research - how the meaningful content operates 3. Structural research - the Gestalt (whole) of one’s mental life

➔ Cognition, emotion, motivation are not distinctly different things as natural-science experimentalists believe - they are all part of a greater whole that function as a way of thinking ◆ The meaningful contents of one’s mind cannot be accessed experimentally ◆ Naturwissenschaften (natural science) ◆ Geisteswissenschaften (human experience) ◆ Psychology must explore human experience ➔ “We explain nature, but we understand mental life.” ◆ Four forms of understanding 1. Elementary understanding - everyday life as it happens 2. Higher understanding - life in context 3. Highest understanding - empathic re-experiencing of the psychological world of another 4. Scientific understanding - introducing the person to themselves Part 3 ● Eduard Spranger (german adolescence and types of personality) ○ The hermeneutic study of personality and adolescence ○ Better able to understand others than to understand ourselves (more accurate) ○ Two methodological statements of spranger: ■ 1. We can see others in context of their history and social structure ■ 2. Not empathy but the connections between the individual’s world and their unconscious is to be studied ○ Not the study of the individual, but the study of the individual’s relationship and understanding of their historical and social context ○ Spranger on personality ■ Six ideal personality types ■ 1. Theoretic type ■ 2. Economic type ■ 3. Aesthetic type ■ 4. Social type ■ 5. Religious type ■ 6. Political type ○ We each manifest aspects of all of these, some are more dominant than others ○ “typical “ adolescence portrayed ■ Characteristics of adolescent psychological structures: ● Discovery of self ● Emergence of a life plan ● Ventures into different domains of life

■ Culturally and historically specific (german adolescents of the 1920s) ■ Biological development is useful but not exclusive in studying adolescence ● Karl Jaspers (focused on psychotherapy and psychopathology) ○ The hermeneutic study of psychopathology ○ Influenced by Dilthey and Husserl ○ Called for a theory of psychopathology that extended beyond natural science ○ Understanding is needed, not just causal explanation ○ Nosology - study from a medical perspective ○ Eidology - cultural and psychological ○ Personal biography ○ Not idiographic (individual) study by phenomenological (using the phenomenological reduction) ■ Five hermeneutic considerations for clinical psychology ■ 1. Phenomenological understanding - experience, self-description ■ 2. Understanding of expression - physical gestures ■ 3. Static understanding - psychological qualities (like anger) ■ 4. Genetic (developmental) understanding - emergence of one psychological event from another (depression from anxiety) ■ 5. Rational understanding - cognitive understanding of rational content ○ Neurosis stems from a failure in marginal situations - stretching the limits of a person’s thinking ○ Dying, suffering, guilt are marginal situations ○ Authentic existence comes from coping in marginal situations ○ Methodological pluralism - respecting the limitations of any one way of thinking Part 4 ● Phenomenological psychology and existential psychology ○ Phenomenology - mental processes that go into the subjective experience ■ Aware of personal and cultural contributions - systematically eliminate them and get to the thing itself ○ Originators: Emmanuel Kant, Husserl (founder) ○ Problem with psychology being a science - the concept of choice/free will is eliminated (determinism) ○ The world as we experience it through the structures of our mind and what we’ve learned - as we become educated we use impure reason ○ Pure reason - examining how the mind exists before anything is learned ○ Transcendental idealism + mental conditions that are experienced ○ Framework of the mind that exists before learning

○ Science is being based on observation - what is the mental event of observation? Kant ○ Franz Brentano ■ Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) ● Not empirical as it is used today ■ Descriptive psychology (1887) ■ Central figure to humanities based psychology ■ Description not causal explanation ■ Intentionality - thought is always related to some thing or event ■ Professor of: Edmund Husserl, Carl Stumpf (teacher of Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Lewin, and Kurt Kofka), Christian von Ehrenfels, Sigmund Freud; Gadamer criticized the idea that we can approach phenomena without tradition ○ Edmund Husserl ■ Founder of phenomenology ■ Student of Brentano ■ A method of describing what appears in consciousness without preconceptions of history and culture ■ Naturalism - a pejorative term for the belief that methods natural science can be in all types of knowledge ■ “To the things themselves” ■ Psychologism - the mind creates all reality ■ Intentionality - consciousness always refers to something ● Consciousness is an activity ■ Phenomenological reduction ● Bracketing (epoche) ● Method of the phenomenological reduction ○ 1. Suspend all captivations in acceptedness (Epoche) ○ 2. Meditation on the transcendental insight independent of preconceived notions ○ Martin Heidegger ■ Analysis of Dasein - existence (being in the world) ■ Not “I” and the world but being-world embeddedness ■ World - totality of things and events ■ Every being must face non-being (death) ■ Authenticity comes from accepting one’s mineness of non-being ■ “I” have freedom to choose meaning in my existence ■ We are un-free to death

■ Inauthentic attitude: refuses to acknowledge mortality; external forces make all the decisions for who I am ■ Failing to take responsibility for one’s meaningful existence reuslts in existential guilt ■ Existential anxiety: the assurance of death free us from the need for conformity and social norms ■ Throwness - we are thrown into existence and this brings certain circumstances: gender, ethnocultural, status, social class, social categories ■ Fallenness - inauthentic social conformity ■ Ontic - everything natural science observes and measures ■ Ontological - humanities-based psychology/hermeneutics, the study of the Being, the essence of being (what it means to be/exist) ■ Ontology - meditation on that which is not covered on the Ontic (big Being) ○ Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas ■ Ponty ● The phenomenology of Perception book ● The basic feature of human existence is not intentionality but embodiment ● Embodiment - relationship of one’s body to the world ● This challenges cartesian mind/body dualism and the idea that the mind is like a computer ■ Levinas ● Alterity Otherness - Totality and Infinity book ● The concept of “I” is problematic (look towards the other) ● Western preoccupation with reason, immanence (now/here) and egological self is problematic ● The Looking Glass self of sociology ○ Human Existence ■ Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Lidwig Binswanger, Viktor Frankl, MArtin Heidegger, Friedrich, Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard ■ Existentialism ● Freedom, responsibility, meaning, mortality (Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy) ● Anxiety, despair, death, hope, openness, authenticity ■ Sartre ● Meaningful life comes from living one’s philosophy

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● Liberation comes thru solidarity with others through peace, love, and respect ● We must determine our identity “existence precedes essence” ● There are others in this world besides me (No Exit, 1949) ○ “Hell is just other people” ● Hell is when others challenge the mask we wear ● Personal freedom comes from social existence Simone de Beauvoir ● The Second Sex (1949) ● Existence is gendered in a patriarchy ● Not a partner of Sartre, but partnered with Sartre ● Sex versus gender Albert Camus ● The absurd ● The discrepancy between the search for meaning and a meaningless existence ● Solidarity, love, and friendship bring meaning ● The most important philosophical question is suicide Ludwig Binswanger ● Daseinsanalyse existential analysis ● How a person interprets life-events, anxieties, fears, personal values ● Three modes of personal existence ○ 1. Umwelt - natural world and events ○ 2. Mitwelt - shared interactions with others ○ 3. Eigenwelt - personal world ○ Weltenwurf (world-design) the mental world people live, challenged and described by the existential analyst Viktor Frankl ● Spent years in a concentration camp and served as a therapist ● Logotherapy ● Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) ● The answer to life’s difficulties is making meaning - creating purpose ● Not finding oneself, but creating oneself ○ Dereflection - breaking compulsive self reflection ○ Paradoxical intention - encouragement to do the thing we desire (OCD treatment) ○ Anticipatory anxiety - fear of ridicule produces ridicule...