21 Sep How Did Psychology Lose Sight of the Spiritual?
What we know of as Western psychology began in the late 1880s as the fledgling discipline attempted to incorporate the scientific worldview (Hartelius, date unknown). During the previous century, in what was known as the Age of Reason, people’s relationship with God had been increasingly replaced with the idea of impersonal natural laws and with the belief that matter and mind were separate. Matter contained no intelligence, and the focus became on measuring and quantifying this inert substance – believing that this effort would uncover the secrets of the universe.
It is important for us as transpersonalists to note that early theoreticians such as Wundt and Titchener argued that for psychology to continue to legitimize itself metaphysics would destroy the field’s integrity (Brennan 2003). Herein began the split between Western psychology and the spiritual. Brennan continues to point out that if psychology as a field were to become a recognized discipline it needed to align with a natural science model, and that science offered the most promising direction.
Watson (1913) took this to an extreme with his development of behaviorism by positioning psychology as a purely objective and experimental branch of natural science. The goal: the prediction and control of behavior, which was later avidly taken up by corporations and the advertising industry (Cushman 1995). This is about as opposite from transpersonal thought as one can get, because it espouses that there is no difference between animals and humans, and that there is no value in introspection.
Boring (1953) continued this line of reasoning with two important dichotomies: animal vs. human psychologies, and the unconscious mind vs. the conscious. He believed that the “introspection that cannot lie does not exist.”
The worldview that underlies any scientific endeavor will affect its findings (Hartelius, unknown date). Our transpersonal view that the world is an interconnected whole is in stark contrast to the Western scientific view that the world is made of separate, non-living objects. Perhaps our transpersonal research and studies can help to bridge the gap.
Boring, E. G. (1953). A history of introspection. Psychological Bulletin, 50(3), 169-189. Danziger, K. (1980). The history of introspection reconsidered. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 16, 241-262.
Brenan, J. F. (2003). The founding of modern psychology. In History and systems of psychology (pp. 159-176). Prentice Hall.
Cushman, P. (1995). Constructing the self, constructing America: A cultural history of psychotherapy. Da Capo Press.
Hartelius, G., (date unknown), A Very Brief History of Stems of Psychology: 1870-2010 [Webinar], California Institute of Integral Studies. https://ciis.instructure.com/courses/17368/pages/week-3-lectures?module_item_id=187494
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20(2), 158-177.
© 2022 Catherine Auman
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