Jeff Sugarman

The Moral Dimension: A Conceptualization and Empirical Demonstration of the Moral Nature of Psychotherapeutic Conversations

The authors argue that counseling psychologists will benefit from the development of conceptual frameworks that focus attention and consideration on the moral dimensions of psychotherapeutic practice. The authors present such a conceptualization with respect to actual psychotherapeutic conversations, and they provide an empirical illustration of how this conceptual framework illuminates the moral dimension of such conversations. The authors also briefly explore possibilities for further conceptual and empirical study of moral aspects of counseling and psychotherapy.

Between the modern and the postmodern. The possibility of self and progressive understanding in psychology.

Psychology assumes defensible notions of human subjectivity and understanding. Yet, some versions of postmodernism, including some of those currently influential within psychology, eschew the possibility of the kind of understanding-capable personhood on which modern psychology has depended. The authors argue for a skeptical, middle-ground position that might allow psychologists to resist a forced choice between modernism and postmodernism in their subject matter and understanding. The authors set up their argument with 2 stories of human development and change. These stories assume no fixed, essentialist foundations of the sort favored in classically modern psychologies, yet they maintain the possibility of both self and understanding within a real but contingent physical, biological, and sociocultural world. The authors then articulate a middle-ground position as one that avoids the fixed foundationalism, essentialism, and absolute certitude of modernity, without endorsing the radical arbitrariness, antisubjectivism, and anarchistic relativism of some versions of postmodernity.

Interpreting Human Kinds Beginnings of a Hermeneutic Psychology

During the past decade, a number of theoretical psychologists have argued that the subject matter of psychology is distinct from that of the physical sciences in ways that require interpretation as a method of inquiry. Rejecting what they regard as a mistaken scientism in the conduct of traditional psychological research, these hermeneutically inspired theorists also have been critical of what they regard as overly strong anti-realist, anti-subjectivist and relativistic aspects of postmodern social constructionism as it has been developed by some psychologists. In this article, we elaborate a distinction between natural and human kinds, summarize concerns that have been expressed with respect to Gergens social constructionism, review recent attempts to develop a hermeneutically informed interpretative psychology, and highlight central features of this developing approach to psychological inquiry.

Persons and Moral Agency

Charles Taylor’s claim that personhood consists in its relation to moral goods and commitments, and that persons are moral agents, is summarized and examined. According to this view, persons not only have an understanding of themselves as moral agents, they are partially constituted by this understanding. It is argued that as moral agents, persons are capable of effecting changes in their lives through enacting understandings of the good. Moreover, they have the capacity not only to adopt and wield social and cultural moral practices, but also to revise and transform them. Particular features of human psychology and its development are discussed that assist in clarifying the relation between persons and moral agency. Further, it is suggested that moral development might be understood as the gradual process whereby traditions are interpreted and reinterpreted toward the end of fashioning more virtuous persons.

Practical Rationality and the Questionable Promise of Positive Psychology

It is argued that positive psychology is committed to an ideology of technical and instrumental scientific rationality. The article describes features of this ideology, its historical emergence and adoption by disciplinary psychology, its pervasive influence across contemporary life, its problems and dangers, and the way in which it is promoted by positive psychology. By failing to grasp the extent of this influence in their practices and beliefs, it is claimed that positive psychologists inadvertently undermine the Aristotelian-inspired notion of human fulfillment they seek to advance. The upshot is that positive psychology will further reduce our horizons of reflection on human flourishing, as our ordinary capacities for practical judgment are devalued and supplanted by the presumed expertise of psychological professionals who effectively guide us toward unreflective ends.

Beyond Methodolatry: Two Conceptions of Relations Between Theory and Research in Research on Teaching

Two views of the relationships between theory and empirical research are described as Aristotelian and Galilean, following Cassirer 1923) and Lewin (1935). The two conceptions of theory and research differ with respect to the nature of the conceptual models they employ and the roles and expectations they hold for empirical research. These matters are discussed in the context of research on teaching. The Aristotelian versus Galilean distinction is held to be more fundamental to the conduct and interpretation of such research than other, more frequently discussed contrasts such as descriptive/explanatory, qualitative/quantitative, discovery/verification, or positivist/constructivist. The central claim is that all extant programs of research on teaching inappropriately construe research on teaching as primarily an empirical enterprise, leading to an overemphasis on methodology.

Is the Self a Kind of Understanding

We present a developmental, relational perspective on the self as a kind of reflective, interpretive understanding. Such self understanding always is embedded and emergent within the historical, sociocultural life-world, and serves to disclose and extend the being of particular embodied agents. Following an introduction that links our work to related traditions of scholarly writing on the self, our essay is organized in four parts. The first of these provides a very brief conceptual clarification of the relationships we assume between self and other aspects of personhood. The second offers a broad, developmental framework for the emergence of self as the kind of understanding we envision. The third elaborates the kind of understanding that constitutes the self, especially in terms of the care manifested by human agents in the life-world. In the final section of the essay, critical consideration is given to the viability, coherence, and potential fruitfulness of our attempt to consider self as a kind of understanding.

Theorizing Relational Agency

Gergens conception of human agency as a relational phenomenon and its adequacy to the tasks of psychological description and explanation are examined. A contrasting view is discussed that shows how psychologically capable agency can be rendered intelligible only by attending to its developmental emergence in historically established sociocultural contexts. It is argued that an elaborated developmental account is necessary to comprehend how psychological agency, once it has emerged, is a unique form of relational being capable of transcending its biophysical and sociocultural origins. From this perspective, agentive personhood is not simply “a social performance,” but rather, an active structuring of existence.

Perspectives and Persons: Ontological, Constitutive Possibilities

In contemporary developmental psychology, perspective taking is understood as an important process or mechanism by which we come to know that others are people with minds of their own–intentional agents whose goals, strategies, commitments, and orientations bear both similarities to and differences from our own. In this chapter, we will argue that perspective taking is more than a powerful epistemic mechanism of this sort. It is also and more foundationally, ontologically constitutive of us as social, psychological persons and rational, moral agents. On this account, human persons are understood as interactive kinds (Hacking, 1999) who care about and react to the ways in which they are described and classified, and such uniquely human care and reactivity are consequences of our perspectivity. It is because we are able to occupy and take perspectives that we are persons at all. It is by means of perspective taking that we are constituted as selves and agents and that we simultaneously also come to differentiate and understand others.

Neo-Foucaultian Approaches to Critical Inquiry in the Psychology of Education

Education is, first and foremost, the education of persons. While debate persists over whether or not animals teach, what they are is not changed by their learning. By contrast, persons can be transformed by education in ways that change the kinds of persons they are.