Ute Osterkamp

Psychology: Social Self-Understanding on the Reasons for Action in the Conduct of Everyday Life

The title “Psychology: Social Self-Understanding on the Reasons for Action in the Conduct of Everyday Life” does not intend to put forward some new type of psychology in addition to those already existing. Instead, it argues that psychology in its entirety, as it has developed historically, needs to put itself under such a motto if it wants to fulfil its function within the scientific community of offering a particular access to our experiences and actions. This simultaneously maintains, ex negativo, that the prevailing psychology is unable to master this task; its research misses human problems of life and is incapable of contributing anything substantial to our knowledge in human and social sciences.

The Colonization of Childhood: Psychological and Psychoanalytical Explanations of Human Development

In psychology, “development” not only serves to designate the topic of a particular branch, namely “developmental psychology”; concepts such as “development”, “childhood”, etc. are used in various problem contexts where the behaviour or personality of adults is to be made explainable or comprehensible. This paper focuses on the second, more general concept, its characteristics and its functions. It is designed to gradually explicate how, when one talks of “development”, this is done in a particularly fixed and “one-sided” way (without this being made apparent or reflected upon) which, on the one hand, largely characterizes present psychology’s self-understanding and “identity” in distinction to other social sciences and, on the other, involves discipline-specific restrictions on knowledge by which contradictions are bracketed out and insights into broader interrelations blocked. In discussing the implications and consequences of such a foreshortened concept of development for psychological research and practice, the perspective of a more comprehensive and less ideologically fixed understanding of “development” should become clear.

Basic Concepts of Critical Psychology

When it comes to individuality or the human psyche, society cannot be ignored. Surely, no one doubts this. The question, however, is how society is taken into account. It is a current and widely held view that society is merely an environment that has effects upon people. This is, first of all, the case in the conditioning model of traditional psychology that, as you know, works with independent and dependent variables, conducting experiments in which conditions are set up in order to study their effects upon the individual’s behaviour. Society appears here, if at all, as an independent variable, as, for example, in studies of the effects of socioeconomic status on individuals. Yet similar notions of society can be found, for instance, in sociological role theory, in which society appears as a network of expectations to which individuals are exposed, and into which they then have to integrate. There are even Marxist theorists who understand society in this way, mistakenly interpreting the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach to mean that the individual is the ensemble of societal relations. Thus, here too the individual’s behaviour is assumed to be determined by societal conditions. However, this stands in stark contradiction to the basics of Marx’s theory, according to which human beings are distinguished from all other species as they produce the means and conditions of their own lives, i.e. they do not simply live under conditions, but produce the conditions under which they live.

Introduction: Klaus Holzkamp and the Development of Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject

Klaus Holzkamp (1927–1995) was a professor at Free University Berlin and the founder of German Critical Psychology, which worked towards a renewal of academic psychology. His ideas inspired and mobilized generations of young researchers and practitioners who were discontented with the socio-political function of psychology and the human sciences. Although his approach has been discussed internationally, much of his work is not available in English. With this book we offer a selection of his writings in order to introduce the reader to the central ideas of Holzkamp’s psychology from the standpoint of the subject.

The Fiction of Learning as Administratively Plannable

The Primary Education Act, passed in 1920 by the German Weimar Republic and introducing both compulsory education and common attendance of elementary school for four years, can be considered as the essential milestone on the road to modern schooling. Previously, parents had merely been obliged to give their children some (possibly private) lessons. Introducing compulsory education also compelled the state to provide a sufficient number of schools in the quality required (cf. e.g. Nevermann & Schulze-Scharnhorst, 1987, p. 82). The common primary school replaced the “column-principle”, where children from different social strata were assigned to different types of education from pre-school onwards by a “fork principle”, with this split first occurring after four years of shared education in primary school.

The Development of Critical Psychology as a Subject Science

One needs only to glance at current trends within the social sciences and psychology to gain the impression that, at present, subjectivity is experiencing a boom. From different theoretical perspectives, “subject theories” are discussed and “subjective” structures analysed; the people who are “affected” are integrated, questioned or talked about, self-testimonials and self-experiences are en vogue. “Everyday life” as the subject’s living space is analysed and the particular quality of “everyday consciousness” emphasized. Methodologically, qualitative methods are increasingly recommended and tested as alternatives to or supplementary to quantitative ones, and the possibilities and limits of biographical methods are discussed; hermeneutic analyses of the construction of subjective meaning patterns are highlighted as an alternative approach to the mere collection of facts. Even in academic psychology, following the “cognitive turn”, the subjective has become acceptable again, at least in some areas. This is obvious not only in the systematic usage of terms previously dismissed as “mentalistic”, such as “expectation” or “consciousness” (“awareness”), but also in the way that traditional concepts are given a subjective touch by adding the prefix “self”: “self-perception”, “self-consciousness”, “self-reinforcement”, and — in the latest version of Bandura’s theory — “self-efficacy”.

Musical Life Practice and Music Learning at School

Obviously, pupils do not have their first and only contact with music in school. Before entering school, everyone has already had their own particular experience with music and developed her/his own access to it; and, of course, this practical experience with music outside school does not end when music becomes the object of lessons, i.e. something required to be learnt. Consequently, from the standpoint of the learning subject, her/his (spatio-temporally more comprehensive) musical experiences virtually constitute the background and frame of reference for the way one experiences music lessons in school, their significance for one’s life, and the extent to which one is able or willing to become engaged in them. To elucidate this more precisely, I will begin by accentuating, more descriptively or “phenographically”, the essential dimensions of music in everyday life and, on this basis, discuss in detail what this means for learning music in school.

What Could a Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject Be

There has been a lot of talk recently about a “renewal of psychology”, and the various proposals emerging under this rubric appear to have at least one thing in common: they are all dedicated to a scientific reaffirmation of the human subject, which has been largely neglected by traditional nomological psychology. This is not only expressed by the fact that we are now hearing about subject science, subject theory, subject orientation, subject development, and the like in strategically significant contexts. A reaffirmation of the subject is also more or less explicitly embodied in other basic concepts, such as “qualitative” research, “interpretative” paradigms, “hermeneutic” analyses, and “life-world”. Given such a consensus between different alternative psychologies, the question then arises of what this means for the individual approaches, i.e. what theoretical and methodological consequences this consensus entails. Evidently, simply invoking the subject does not necessarily lead to agreement in fundamental scientific thinking and research. Rather, the shared interest in the subject merely provides a basis for debate on the question of what kind of research is needed to develop a psychology appropriate to human subjectivity.

Practice: A Functional Analysis of the Concept

The relationship between theory and practice is discussed not only in psychology, but in many scholarly areas. In social sciences, for example, there has been a debate on the “problem of application”. This deals with the questions of how scientific theories can be implemented, for example, in educational, social, administrative or political programmes, how theories have to be constructed and formulated to allow such an implementation, how the realization of such programmes can be scientifically instructed and supported and, finally, how the results of such programmes can be judged or “evaluated”.

Personality: A Functional Analysis of the Concept

In this article, I do not deal with particular personality theories, but pose the more general question of what function the concept of personality has within psychology, i.e. which interests are implied when we use this concept and, hence, are also inherent both in theories working with this concept and the empirical hypotheses and results based upon it. Formulating the question in this way will, if we take it seriously, have significant consequences for a scientifically adequate treatment of the personality problem in psychological research and practice.