churchill - humanistic psychology as the other

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Humanistic Psychology as "The Other":The Marginalization of Dissident Voices withinAcademic Institutions1Scott D. Churchill, Ph.D.

University of DallasAbstract

Situated within the framework of a "sociology of knowl-edg e," this paper will explore both th e place and dis-place m ent of hum anistic psychology within institutiona lcontexts ranging from private liberal arts colleges to pro-fessional organizations like the American PsychologicalAssociation. First, from the perspec tive of social con-structionism, we present the function and marginalizationof humanistic psychologists (including existential, phe-nomenological, human science, transpersonal, and"postmodern" schools of thought) within American aca-dem ic psychology. Nex t we consider, from the persp ec-tive of Alfred Schutz's social phenomenology, humanisticpsychology's place within academic psychology as "thestranger," both in terms of the fundamental incongruenceof "traditional" versus "humanistic" psychological rele-vance systems and the resulting breakdown of the "inter-changeability of standpoints" that normally allows forcontemporaries to communicate. The specific nature ofthese conflicts is then elaborated with reference toHeidegger's analysis of the concept of time.

I . INSTITUTIONALIZATION

Berger and Luckmann (1966) begin their now classic text The SocialConstruction o f R eality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge, withthe observation:xAn earlier version of this paper was presented in K.R. Malone(Chair), Postmodernism raises the question of "the other": Does psy-chology reply? Symposium presented at the Ann ual C onvention of theAmerican Psychological Association, August 11,1995, New York City.


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138 Journal of Theoretical and P hilosophical Psy. Vo l. 17, No. 2 , 1997The man in the street inhabits a world that is "real" tohim, albeit in different degrees, and he "knows," with dif-ferent degrees of confidence, that this world possessessuch and such charac teristics. The philosophe r, of cou rse,will raise questions about the ultimate status of both this"reality" and this "knowledge." What is real? How is oneto know? These are among the most ancient questionsnot only of philosophical inquiry proper, but of humanthough t as such. (Berger & L uckm ann, 1966, p. 1)

The psychologist today is both philosopher and man in the street.Equipped with various preconceptions regarding "what is real" and"how is one to know," psychologists attempt to understand and inter-vene in the world of behavio r. The institutional settings within wh ichpsychologists find themselves can serve either to legitimate or tomarginalize their work, according to what extent that work is itself anexpression of the ideologies served by the institutions. Inde ed , aca-demic institutions are able to exist and function as institutions insofaras they participate in the production and promulgation of knowledgesystems that ultimately justify on the one hand their own existence andon the othe r hand th e ethical acts of their constituents. Th e scientificand theoretical knowledge systems produced by university researchers(and publicized by the APA) are examples of what Berger &Luckmann (1966) call "conceptual machineries of universe-mainte-nance" (p. 104). Those who individually or collectively refuse to adoptor adapt to the symbolic universe in question, or who stand in subver-sive defiance to it, are pushed to the margin of the institution; they arepermitted to exist only insofar as their minority status disempowerstheir otherwise potent message.

The inspiration for this pap er came when I return ed to Da llas froma meeting in Washington of the APA Science Directorate (in lateNovember 1994), the purpose of which was to decide upon the invitedspeakers as well as the program for the 1995 Science Weekend at theA nn ual C onven tion. Re prese nting Divisions 24 and 32,1 found myselfon the margin of what was taking place, even as I actively petitioned toadd philosophical and humanistic psychologists to the list of namesbeing considered. R eturn ing to the University of Dallas, a small Ca th-olic institution that takes its mission statement quite seriously, I real-ized that I was also on the margin of what was taking place on my ownturf, especially when I received a memo announcing that my universitywould be hosting the 1995 annual conference of the Institute of Per-sonalist Psychology. The latte r is a very conservative g roup of philo so-phers and philosophical psychologists whose central interest (indeveloping a psychology consistent with Catholic Philosophy) is indeedcongru ent with our university mission statem ent. I was dismayed thatmembers of the Psychology department were to be among the last to


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Hum anistic Psychology as "The Other" 139know that a psychology conference would be hosted by our university.It dem ons trated the university's ultimate p ower as well as our status as"fringe-dwellers," while also making it clear to us what kind of psy-chology gets financial support at a Catholic university.Some ideas grounded in the literature of phenomenology and socialconstructionism have helped me to understand the nature of the insti-tutional order within which subgroups like a departments of psychol-ogy or divisions within the APA (such as Division 24 and 32) findthemselves situa ted. I will begin by presenting the no tion of "finiteprovinces of meaning." This expression derives from Alfred Schutz's(1973) essay "On Multiple Realities," in which he draws upon WilliamJames' analysis2 of our sense of reality to observe that "there are sev-eral, probably an infinite number of various orders of realities, eachwith its own special and sep ara te style of existence. Jam es calls them'sub-universes' and mentions as examples . . . the world of science, . . .[and] the various supernatural worlds of mythology and religion"(Schutz, 1973, p. 207). Schutz prefers to speak of "finite provinces ofmeaning,"3 since no social group exists apart from the meaningsascribed to it by its con stituen ts. We "bestow the accen t of reality "upon the g roup of which we are a pa rt. For Schu tz, "we call a certainset of our experiences a finite province of meaning if all of them showa specific cognitive style and are with respec t to this style not onlyconsistent in themselves but also compatible with one another" (p.207).

Berger & Luckmann (1966) write: "Compared to the reality of eve-ryday life, other realities appear as finite provinces of meaning,enclaves within the paramount reality marked by circumscribe^! mean-ings and modes of ex pe r ie nc e. . . . ALL FINITE PROVINCES OF MEANINGARE CHARACTERIZED BY A TURNING AWAY OF ATTENTION FROM THER E AL IT Y OF E VE R YDAY L IF E " (p. 25, em phasis add ed ). This is a verypowerful statement, especially when considered in relation to the fieldof psychology, or even in relation to the academy as a whole: In whatsense is the field of psychology a turn ing aw ay from eve ryday life? Inwhat sense is the life of the university a turning away from the realityof everyday life?Psychology is certainly devoted to understanding and healing thepsych e's of everyday pe op le. So its "turning aw ay" is of a differentna ture than a simple lack of interes t in the everyday. We might say

2 As a reference, Schutz cites Chapter XXI of Volume II of James'Principles of Psychology.3 Schutz does not like the expression "sub-universes of reality"because, phenomenologically speaking, "it is the meaning of ourexperiences and not the ontological structure of the objects which con-stitutes reality" (Schutz, 1973, p. 230).


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140 Journal of Theoretical and P hilosophical Psy. Vo l. 17, No. 2, 1997that the field of psychology can be characterized as a turning awayfrom the common sense definition of psychological reality that is,from an understanding that we are self-evidently moved by our ownsouls, (e.g., that we wave to a friend because we are happy to see her,and not because our genetic make-up and past environmental contin-gencies of reinforcement make it pleasurable for us to do so!). Psy-chology is thus a turning away from the way that common folk viewthe flow of expe rience in time. This turning away, stated positively, is aturning towards a finite province of meaning in which psychologicalprocesses are reifiedas parts of the natural universe that produce us,rather than the other way around.4

A special kind of reification occurs in the relationship of psychologyto its subject ma tter. Forgetful of its own role in the prod uc tion ofunderstanding about the psyche, psychology5 takes its understandingof psychological life for granted as part of the natural order of things, 6and then proceeds to impart this objectivated knowledge to initiateswithin the field, who then go on to invent interventions in the consult-4 "Typically," write Berger & Luckmann, "the real relationship

betw een m an and his world is reversed in consciousness. M an, the pro -ducer of a world, is apprehended as its product, and human activity asan epiphenomenon of non-human processes. Human meanings are nolonger und erstoo d as world-producing b ut as being, in their turn , prod-ucts of the 'nature of things.' Even while apprehending the world inreified term s, man continues to produ ce it. . . Com plex the oretical sys-tems can be described as reifications, though presumably they havetheir roots in pretheoretical reifications established in this or thatsocial situation" (1966, p. 89-90).5 Here and throughout the paper I will break with APA format andrefer to "psychology" rather than "psychologists," both to underlinethe reification of this subuniverse of individuals, and to point to theinstitutional nature of the "world of psychology."6 "Considered as a cognitive construction, the symbolic universe istheoretical" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p.104) Originating inprocesses of subjective reflection, the constructions are themselveseventually objectivated, at which point the theoretical character of the

particular symbolic universe whether that of a Catholic Universityor of a Science Directorate becomes "indubitable, no matter how. . . [questionable] such a universe may seem to an 'unsympathetic'outsider . . . . [and] everybody may 'inhabit ' that universe in a taken-for-granted attitude: (p. 104). Here is the key idea borrowed fromsocial constructionism: "If the institutional order is to be taken forgranted in its totality as a meaningful whole, it must be legitimated by'placement' in a symbolic universe" (p . 104).


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Hum anistic Psychology as "The Othe r" 141ing room as well as the work place that derive from psychology'sunderstanding of "the truth" of human nature.

Berger & Luckmann (1966) write that "reification is the apprehen-sion of the products of human activity as if they were something elsethan human productssuch as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws,or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capa-ble of forgetting his own authorship of the human world . . . "(p. 89).7They also assert that "the reified world is, by definition, a dehuman-ized w orld" (p. 89). If it is precisely th e psyche that is reined by psy-chologists, then this means that the psyche becomes dehumanized bypsychology. This is indeed what Sartre (1943/1956) warned in Beingand Nothingness when he said that the psyche as understood by psy-chologists "is made-to-be what it is not, and . . . it is no t what it is made-to-be" (p. 167). (Alread y by 1943, Sartre was able to see both the p ro-ductive nature of the scientific enterprise, and its dehumanizing conse-quences as well.)

In the reification of its subject matter, there is a "detachment of[psychological] knowledge from its existential origins" (Berger &Luckmann, 1966, p. 87), which is precisely how psychology as a fieldturns its atten tion away from the reality of everyday life. The existen-tial origin of psychological investigation is of course the world of eve-ryday life, and it is precisely the function of humanistic andphilosophically-minded psychologists within APA to turn our attentionback to this lifeworld. A s Merleau-Po nty (1945/1962) writes in hispreface to the Phenomenology of Perception,

The whole universe of science is built upon the world asdirectly experienced, and if we want to subject scienceitself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assess-ment of its meaning and scope, we must begin byreawakening the basic experience of the world of whichscience is the seco nd-o rder expression, (p. viii)

To retu rn to things themselves is to return to that worldwhich precedes knowledge, of which knowledge alwaysspeaks, and in relation to which every scientific schemati-zation is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as isgeography in relation to the countryside in which we h avelearnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is. (p.ix)So, for psychology to return to its existential origins would mean toengage in a project of de-reification. (This is essentially what Edmund

7 It appears that psychologists are willing to recognize and name andthereby reify all psychological processes except this self-forgetful pro-cess known to sociologists and philosophers as "reification"!


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142 Journal of Theoretical and P hilosophical Psy. Vo l. 17, No. 2 , 1997Husserl (1913/1982) meant by the phenomenological epoche: the tak-ing out of play of all preconceptions originating from the naturalisticprejudice, in order to allow consciousness to engage its world in adirect and unadulterated intuition.)Berger & Luckmann extend the scope of what is considered reifica-tion from the realm of scientific theo ry to the realm of religion. Theywrite that "Reification is the appre hensio n of human ph en om en a as ifthey were things, that is, in non-hum an or possibly supra-humanterms" (p. 89).8 Furthermore, they assert that "the analysis of reifica-tion is important because it serves as a standing corrective to thereifying propensities of theoretical tho ug ht" (p. 91) The com plex theo-retical systems that become reified over time, whether those belongingto science or religion, have the function of "legitimating" the institu-tional order that produced the theoretical system in the first place."Legitimation 'explains' the institutional order by ascribing cognitivevalidity to its objectivated m ean ings ." (p. 93) As a social process, legit-imation accomplishes this by inventing a philosophy that serves to jus-tify a system of values already operative w ithin the institution . Th en,the institution pretends that this system of "knowledge" preceded thevalue system, so that the value system can be shown to rest on knowl-edge about the way things are. "In other words, 'knowledge' precedes'values' in the legitimation of institutions" (p. 94). When, in fact, it isvalue systems that always already dictate the production of "knowl-edg e." Know ledge systems thus function as conceptual mach inery forthe maintenance of symbolic universes. And in the institutional order,the inventors as well as the maintainers of legitimating knowledge sys-tems hold a very important place within a given group.

In my own work over the last dozen years, I realize that I have beenlimited by the institutional contexts within which I belong to subgroups8When man is seen, for example, as the creation of God, then anunderstanding of human nature will be drawn from the same theoreti-cal and pre-theoretical understanding of God that pronounces humanna tur e as the makings of a god. H er e, as is typical in the social world,"the real relationship between man and his world is reversed in con-sciousness. Man, the producer of a world [in the case at hand, a Chris-tian world], is apprehended as its product, and human activity [is

appreh ended ] as an epiphen om enon of non-hum an processes. H um anmeanings are no longer understood as world-producing, but as being,in their turn, products of the 'nature of things.'" (Berger & Luckmann,1966, p.89) H enc e, "complex theoretical systems [such as Catholic phi-losophy] can be described as reifications, though presumably they havetheir roots in pretheoretical reifications" (p. 89) that, far from beingthe "mental constructions of intellectuals," originate from the con-sciousness of the man in the street.


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Hum anistic Psychology as "The Other" 143that function not as maintainers, but essentially as dissidents within theinstitutional ord er, and thus always rema in on the margin. Interest-ingly, the two primary social institutions within which I work theUniversity of Dallas and the APA are each involved in their ownenterp rise of legitimating a particu lar reification of hu m an reality: A sa Catholic university, my immediate work place illuminates the humanworld from the perspective of its own particular supra-human interests;while the APA is on the other hand caught up for the most part inilluminating the human person in terms of the non-human and sub-human, (i.e., env ironm enta l and biological forces). Ind eed, at theAPA's November 1994 planning session for its 1995 Science Weekend,a physicalistic interpretation of human reality was so taken-for-grantedthat th ere w as talk of inviting as hon ored speake rs not only the ph ysio-logical psychologists studying the brain by means of functional Mag-netic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology, but also the physiciststhemselves who were the developers of this technology. 9 In otherwords, physicists, who have themselves effectively become maintainersof the legitimating apparatus of modern psychology, are given moreconsideration than philosophically-minded psychologists, who areadversaries of the physicalistic paradigm of science, when it comes toshowcasing psychological research at Science Weekend.10

W hat happ ens when one finds oneself as having a different opinionfrom the majority w ithin a symbolic universe? O ne beco m es, essen-tially, "The Other." Simultaneously, from our perspective, "traditionalpsychology" becomes "The Other" something to be kept at bay,critiqued, and passed over. One's Otherness is in fact a prere qu isite ofthe legitimating ap para tus, insofar as know ledge systems, we know , arefirst invented to justify institutional orders (belief systems and codes ofconduct) to those individuals to whom the institution's ways are notself-evidently 'corr ect.' These O the rs wou ld include, for exam ple, the

9 Thus if the praxis of physicists has contributed to maintenance ofthe physicalism that has become psychology's theoretical substructure(namely, the study of the psyche as just another "thing of nature"),then physicists get to be honored as psychologists (which in turn meansthat the logos of psyche has been equivocated with the imaging of thebrain).10 Of the several names we managed to get onto the ballot Giorgi,Polkinghorne, DeRivera, Pribram, and Rychlak Rychlak did makeit to the final list. G iorgi wou ld have, but at the last m inu te, som eon eraised the question of whether minorities were being fairly repre-sented. A nd so A m ed eo Giorgi, a white male with radical views, wasdropped from the final list in favor of someone who might havebeen a minority (demographically speaking), but who most certainlywas a Maintainer of the majority view within the APA.


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144 Journa l of Theo retical and Philosophical Psy. Vo l. 17, No. 2, 1997heretics for whom the Church invented apologetics to justify herself."Legitimation justifies the institutional order by giving a normativedignity to its practical imperatives. . . . [it] is not just a matter of 'val-ues. ' It always implies 'knowledge' as well." (Berger & Luckmann,1966, p. 93) "H eretical groups [like hum anistic and po stm od ern psy-chologists within the APA, or even non-Catholics within a Catholicuniversity] posit not only a theoretical threat to the symbolic universe,but a practical one to the institutional order legitimated by the sym-bolic universe in question" (p. 107). n (Indeed, the 1995 APA Conven-tion Program [p. 258] lists a paper entitled "Post-Modernists Threatenthe Science and Application of Psychology.")

Berger and Luckmann describe a process of "nihilation" (pp. 114 ff)whereby "the threat to the social definitions of reality is neutralized byassigning an inferior ontological status, and thereby a not-to-be-taken-seriously cognitive structure, to all definitions existing outside the sym-bolic univ erse" (p. 115). (The "Le tters to the Ed itor " section of theAPA Monitor, for example, has given space in recent years to main-stream psychologists such as Hans Eysenck, who is allowed to presenttirades against psychoanalysis.) Nihilation can also tak e the form of"incorporat[ing] the deviant conceptions within one's own universe,and thereby liquidating] them" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 115):"In this manner, the negation of one's universe is subtly changed intoan affirmation of it" (ibid.). Thus we observe the practice of psychol-ogy textbook writers, who pay lip service to humanistic psychology bycontinuing to talk about the "phenomenology" of Carl Rogers andpresenting handsome graphic representations of Abraham Maslow's1940s hierarchy of motives thereby acknowledging humanistic psy-chology while reducing it to its earliest formulations, and thus "incor-

11 A s long as we rem ain m ere dissidents within our institution, we arestill less of a threat (Psychologically speaking ) to individuals maintain-ing that institution than would be the existence of "an alternative sym-bolic universe with an 'official' tradition whose taken-for-grantedobjectivity is equa l to on e's ow n. It is much less shocking to th e realitystatus of one's own universe to have to deal with minority groups ofdeviants, whose contrariness is ipso facto defined as folly or wicked-ness, than to confront another society that views one's own definitionsof reality as ignorant. . . .(Berger & Luckmann, 1966, pp. 107-8). "Theappearance of an alternative symbolic universe poses a threat becauseits very existence demonstrates empirically that one's own universe isless than inevitable" (p. 108). In a small ivory tower, however, itbecomes easy to pretend that other worldviews do not exist: you sim-ply create a power structure within which the threat of an alternativesymbolic universe cannot survive economically.


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Hum anistic Psychology as "The Other" 145porating" its vision as nothing more than a footnote in the history ofpsychology (see Churchill, 1988).An alternative to nihilation is therapy, in which the "Other" isoffered the chance of assimilating oneself into the institutional order.In my own case, for exam ple, upo n my retu rn from the 1995 AP A Con -vention, I was invited to participate in our faculty week seminar inwhich we will read Herburgh's (1994) The Challenge and P romise of aCatholic University. The apparent aim was that all those who attendwill be edified in their allegiance to the Catholic mission of the univer-sity. In his essay on "The Stranger" Alfred Schutz (1971) writes that:

the reproach of doubtful loyalty originates in the aston-ishment of the members of the in-group that the strangerdoes not accept the total of its cultural pattern as the nat-ural and appropriate way of life and as the best of all pos-sible solutions of any problem . The stranger is calledungrateful, since he refuses to acknowledge that the cul-tural pattern offered to him grants him shelter and pro-tection. But these people do not understand that thestranger in the state of transition does not consider thispattern as a protecting shelter at all but as a labyrinth inwhich he has lost all sense of his bearing s, (pp. 104-105.)

I I. T H E INCON GRU ENCE OF SYSTEMS OF RE LE VA NC E WITHINPSY C H O L O G Y

In his essay on "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation ofHuman Action," Schutz (1973) writes that "common-sense thinkingovercomes the differences in individual perspectives" by means of (a)the interchangeability of standpoints (namely, that our ability to stepinto each oth er's shoes ma kes possible the resolution of percep tual dif-ferences); and (b) the congruency of relevance systems (namely, thatour frames of interpretive reference are for all intents and purposesequiva lent): "W hat is supposed to be know n in comm on by everyonewho shares our system of relevances is the way of life considered to bethe natural, the good, the right one by the members of the 'in-group'"(p. 13). Ho w is it, then, that w e can experience ourselves as "strang ers,as the " O the r," in the context of our institutional life? Schutz em pha-sized that there is a cognitive style peculiar to each finite province ofmeaning, and that furthermore, all experiences within a finite provinceof meaning are "compatible with one another" only relative to this spe-cific cognitive style (1973, p. 230). Schutz elaborates this concept bystating that such a style consists of, among other things, a specificepoche, namely, a suspension of doubt; a specific form of experiencingone's self; a specific form of sociality; and a specific time-perspective(pp. 230-232). Furthermore, he asserts that what is seen as consistent


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146 Journal of Theoretical and Ph ilosophical Psy. V ol. 17, No. 2, 1997and co m patible w ithin one province of meaning w ill not necessarily beseen as such within another province of meaning; hence, the talk offinite provinces of m eaning. "Th e passing from one to the o ther canonly be performed by a 'leap ,' as Kierkega ard calls it, which manifestsitself in the subjective experience of a shock." (p. 232)

What, indeed, is so shocking about stepping out of one province andinto ano ther? H ere we consult Heidegg er (1925/1985), who in hisProlegomena to the History of the Concept of Time points to the un der-standing of time as the u ltima te basis for differentiating all concep tionsof reality, and therefo re all finite provinces of m eanin g. Natura lismitself is a thesis developed into a system of knowledge (known as"modern science") that is the correlative of a specific cognitive stylethat Husserl called the "naturalistic prejudice" a bias in which thenatural world can only be seen according to a way of seeing that positsonly "facts." He idegger states: "Positivism is to be un ders too d notonly as a maxim of concrete research but in general as a theory ofknowledge and culture" (p. 15). With regard to the marginalization ofhum anistic psychology, this pro m pts us to ask: wh at lies at the ro ot ofthe difference between the cognitive styles of (a) traditional empiricalpsychologists, (b) humanistic psychologists, and (c) even Catholic phi-losophers? 12 It appears that this does in fact have something to dowith our conceptions of time.

In terms of theory, traditional psychology eschews teleologicalthinking. O ne conseq uence is that there is no room for an agent whosebeh avior is purposefully directed toward self-projected end s. B.F .Skinner (1971), for example, wrote in Beyond Freedom and Dignitythat "nothing is ... left for which autonomous man can take credit" (p.58). In the final analysis, he claimed "that what we call the behavior ofthe human organism is not more free than its digestion, gestation,immunization, or any other physiological process" (1975, p. 47).According to this view, any intentions we project as goals are merelyself-flattering and ultimately self-deceptive phantoms that have "noexplanatory force" insofar as they are really only "collateral products"of the biological chain of events that is behav ior (1975, p . 43). Skinnerserves as a good example here because in his radical behaviorism the12 "At first sight, this seems to be a strange sort of an approach, or in

any case a de tou r. But it loses its strangeness as soon as we recall,even quite superficially, that both historical reality and natural realityare continuities that run their course in time and are traditionallyunde rstood as such . . . . To the totality of tem poral reality we tend tojuxtapose the extratemporal constituents which, for example, are thetopic of research on m athem atics. In addition . . . w e are familiar withsupratemporal constituents in metaphysics or theology, understood aseternity." (Heidegger, 1925/1985, p. 5)


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Hum anistic Psychology as "The Other" 147epiphenomenalism of consciousness comes across more clearly than incognitive psychology, which no neth eless finds its own w ays of avoidinga teleological view of consciousness. Gio rgi (1987) w on de red aloudseveral years ago why cognitive psychology, which came about histori-cally at approximately the same time as humanistic psychology, hasflourished so well while humanistic psychology can hardly even be con-sidered a viable "force" in academic psychology. H e looked to practi-cal reasons, such as the large number of humanistic psychologists whogo into private practice rather than university teaching or researchpositions. The dee per reasons may be, how ever, m ore ideological thanpractical: cognitive psychology man aged to put the psyche back intopsychology while maintaining a temporal perspective of linear deter-minism. For humanistic psychologists, phenomenologists, and trans-personal psychologists, the psyche always transcends the physicalorder, and can neither be reduced to neither physiological mechanismsnor to heuristic algorithms. The latter can be measured in clock time;the psyche's temporality cannot. This means that two fundamentallydifferent cognitive styles, corresponding to two different time perspec-tives, are at work in traditional versus humanistic psychologies.13

Moreover, the difference in time perspective extends from theoryinto practice, insofar as psychology adheres to a mechanistic concep-tion of time, which is rooted in (even while helping to maintain) themodel of technological efficiency seen first in industry and its assem-bly-line fashioning of m an to m achine . Such a psychology bo th moti-vates and grounds itself in an ethics of efficiency, the most recentappearance of which is the development of a "managed-care" systemof therap eutics. Co ntem pora ry p sychotherapy is yielding itself to aworldview wherein the person and his or her existential dilemmas arebeing managed by MBA's whose job it is to fit one's psychopathologyto the time frame deemed nomothetically most cost-effective.Finally, what abo ut th e precarious position of hum anistic psychologyat religious institutions? In the South, the term " hu m anism " alwayssmacks of som ething evil, Godle ss, and self-aggrandizing. A ltho ug hphenomenological psychology has tended to be supported at Catholicinstitutions throughout the Western world, this has generally been thecase where the institution is characterized by an openness in its searchfor truth, as opposed to a dogmatic commitment to a doctrine of "TheTru th" in which all teleology must point toward the on e and only G od(as conceived by the Catholic Church) in order to be consistent withthe university mission. Thus, even phenomenological psychologistsarguing for a teleological conception of the human person can none-

13 "See Sartre (1943/1956, Part Two: "Original Temporality andPsychic Temporality: Reflection") and Churchill (1991) for elabora-tions of this theme."


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148 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vo l. 17, No. 2 , 1997theless be held in contempt if theirs is not the proper teleological con-ception, one that has its beginning and end in eternity. A gain, we seetha t it is a difference in time pe rspective tha t results in the m arginaliza-tion of humanistic psychology.Once one has aligned oneself with one of these fundamentallyopposed worldviews (each of which is the function of a difference cog-nitive style, according to which the province of meaning specific to it isexperienced as consistent and the experiences within this province areseen as compatible), one cannot help but to see someone subscribingto the alternative view as fundam entally "O th er ." Sa rtre (1943/1956)put it very simply when he stated that "the essence of the relationsbetween consciousnesses is not the Mitsein; it is conflict" (p. 429).Thus writes Simone de Beauvoir (1949/1952) that:no group ever sets itself up as the One without at oncesetting up the Other over against itself. . . . followingHegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hos-tility toward every other consciousness; the subject can beposed only in being opposed he sets himself up as theessential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, theobject, (p. xxix)

It is not the Other who, in defining himself as theOther, establishes the One. The Other is posed as suchby the One in defining himself as the One. But if theOther is not to regain the status of being the One, hemust be submissive enough to accept this alien point ofview." (p. xxx)Are we being submissive (if not downright separatist) in acceptingour "divisional" status within the APA (which delineates in advance

the field of our influence)? Rece nt discussions of a new "su bdis-cipline" of theoretical psychology (Slife & Williams, 1997) aim in anintegrative direction; but, the existing bias toward naturalism with inpsychology as a whole might simply respond the way it already haswith hum anistic psychology: by not listening. I close then with a ques-tion ra the r tha n a solution. If it is ultimately a difference in the con-ception of time that constitutes us as "the Other" within mainstreampsychology, if we are separated by cognitive styles that are fundamen-tally incongruent, if we are too small of a group of dissidents to ulti-mately change the style and direction of thinking in contemporarypsychology, then what are we to do? Is it our destiny to remain b ut afootnote in the history textbooks of psychology?

REFERENCESBeauv oir, S. de (1952). The second sex (H.M. Parshley, Trans.). NewYork: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1949)


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Hum anistic Psychology as "The Other" 149Berger, P. & Luckm ann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality:A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Do ubleday.Churchill, S.D. (1988). Hum anistic psychology and introductory tex t-

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