Abstract
The argument that Brian Schiff presents in his latest book is not altogether new; rather, its roots go back at least a decade. In his contribution to Oxford’s “Explorations in Narrative Psychology” series, Schiff (a former student of Elliot Mishler) presents the extension and evolution of thoughts he shared previously in (a) his 2006 Narrative Inquiry article; (b) his 2012 book chapter from Navigating Multiple Identities: Race, Gender, Culture, Nationality, and Roles; (c) his 2013 chapter in The Travelling Concepts of Narratives; and (d) his 2012 Narrative Works article, “The Function of Narrative: Toward a Narrative Psychology of Meaning.” By combining elements of the aforementioned studies, Schiff describes the status quo of contemporary psychological inquiry, warts and all, and proposes a reconceptualization of the field—one that holds relevance for many of the social sciences.
Schiff contends that contemporary psychology suffers from inexact methods and low replication rates. However, he contends, these shortcomings pale in comparison to a larger problem: the “troubling crisis of interpreting quantitative research” (p. 4). For that problem, methods are not the answer. As Schiff notes, “Our task must be to get beyond conceptual confusion and to bring together method and problem into a more certain relationship” (p. 5). Because of the disconnect of problems and methods, the field currently experiences a disciplinary identity crisis, one that Schiff wants to address by promoting unity in contemporary psychology.
Attempts to address that problem might have replaced it with another one. Efforts at such a unity have led the field to privilege methodological unity over theoretical unity while ignoring (or, at least, downplaying) the fact that methods can (and, some argue, always do) prejudice observations. In response to this trend, Schiff presents this book on narrative and psychology, combining his thoughts on narrative as a means of understanding humans with his observations on the nature of his field. Schiff’s main contribution to the current dialogue in the field is to propose a narrative perspective that focuses on meaning making and interpretation rather than on variable-centered methodologies. Narrative psychology, according to Schiff, is necessary for understanding human experience. He is not alone in that assertion, of course, as evidenced by the emergence of the journal Qualitative Psychology in 2013. His desire to further promote that rhetorical agenda lies at the heart of the book.
In the early chapters, Schiff focuses on the weaknesses of contemporary psychology, which he attributes to an excessive adherence to a variable-centered model of inquiry. The result has been a field that studies variables instead of people, personality research sans the person. Schiff understands the tendency to favor methodological unity over theoretical unity—the general over the particular; it is relatively simple to deal with methods and to pursue consistency in systematic studies. The greatest weakness of the variable-centered approach, ironically, is “its enormous success, prevailing over all alternative methods and leading to the over-application of variable-centered methods to every question that psychologists might conceivably study” (p. 12). A related shortcoming of contemporary psychological scholarship is its focus on easily accessible research subjects from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies, even when those groups are outliers (e.g., Westerners who are likely to perceive the self differently from others).
Schiff cites another structural problem in psychological inquiry at the level of variables. He faults the field for focusing on associations between variables—associations that are based on group averages—to such a degree that scholars often misinterpret the associations (between intergroup contact and prejudice, for instance) as individual psychological processes. When such interpretations occur, researchers risk misapplying these associations in their efforts to understand behavior at the level of the individual.
In the remainder of the book, Schiff presents narrative as the study of interpretive actions and proposes new directions for psychology in general and narrative psychology in particular. He describes narrative psychology as an interpretive hermeneutic, a theory for understanding interpretive actions. In describing the turn to narrative, he highlights “the descriptive analysis of how persons, in context, interpret themselves, others, and the world” (p. 43). Building on the work of Gordon Allport, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and others, Schiff extols the value of case studies and a personological psychology that studies individuals both from the outside in and from the inside out.
From there, Schiff discusses current uses of narrative in cognitive, personality, linguistic, sociocultural, and blended approaches to psychology. He explains the structural properties that are unique to narrative, as opposed to other forms of talk, and details the process whereby people configure coherence and make sense of personal experiences through narrating. Narrative, to Schiff, is dynamic and contextual, as “an interpretive action, articulated in space and time” (p. 74).
Schiff acknowledges but is not content with the current contributions of the psychology literature; he advocates a view of narrative itself as psychological science. He urges scholars to put psychology back in context (thus undoing the damage caused by variable-centered thinking) and to realize the potential of psychology to particularize. Without a new narrative for the field, Schiff fears, psychology might devolve into a human science in name only. By inviting dialogue about the potential of narrative to contribute to (and perhaps revolutionize) contemporary psychology, Schiff hopes to move psychology away from the pitfall of becoming a human science that gradually grows more inhuman(e).
