Abstract
Valsiner’s target is the quantitative trend in psychology which, he claims, has replaced people by numbers. Certainly most would agree that neither sensations nor personality dimensions are directly measured, and their measurement can never be disentangled from theory. However, it is unfortunate that Valsiner does not recognize some of the counter-trends. Interesting developments in cognitive science, philosophy of mind and developmental research show the impact of new theories on research. A clear example is Theory of Mind. It started off as an empirical issue raised about chimpanzees, then developed into a full philosophical theory of mental representation and folk psychology that was then tested on children and animals, and is widely used to interpret a pervasive developmental disorder, autism (for a review see Carruthers and Smith, 1996). Thus, over the last half-century there is a rather interesting interplay between highbrow philosophical theories and psychological research which, in turn, has brought about a turn toward a much-longed- for theoretical psychology. There are similar issues regarding the way statistical notions are treated in the book. Valsiner does not deal with the recent changes in the use and study of statistics. Effect size, for example, has become a crucial issue dethroning tests of significance, and entirely changing the meta-analytic literature (Kelley and Preacher, 2012).
Valsiner’s historical analyses nonetheless merit detailed consideration. He has three interesting proposals regarding early German psychology. Herbart and Lotze, he claims, should be taken more seriously, since decades before the start of experimental psychology their textbooks had a broad influence. Second, these works demonstrate the Romantic element in early -19th-century German psychology and its uneasy relationship with the Enlightenment (Richards, 2002). The birth of modern psychology in Germany on the one hand was a scientistic reaction to this Romantic trend, in the work of Helmholtz and his circle, but on the other hand it was an attempt to continue this Naturphilosophie tradition that showed up not only in the Völkerpsychologie, of Lazarus, Steinthal and then Wundt, but in the speculative works of Fechner, and in Dilthey. Third, the nomothetic and ideographic attitudes evident in early German psychology are still relevant since ‘Psychological events have a tendency to disappear even today, when the persons become either texts or genes!’ (144), or, we might add, brain image scans.
In analysing the heritage of Dilthey, it is unfortunate that Valsiner overlooks the classic works of Spranger (1926) and the recent analyses of Kusch (1995, 1999). It is, however, a bonus that he highlights again the interrelationship between the traditions of laboratory and phenomenological psychology in German-speaking lands, which Valsiner claims roughly correspond to a North–South, Protestant–Catholic dimension. It is of course, not easy to fit into this picture Ernst Mach, and the entire Berlin Gestalt movement.
A separate chapter deals with the crisis literature in psychology. The analyses of the three classics – Dries, Bühler and Vygotsky – are presented as examples of dissatisfaction with naturalistic and quantitative psychology. These crisis rhetorics, Valsiner reminds us, have been a consistent element of modern psychology and it seems that psychologists delight in them. Instead of wallowing in this crisis literature and its concomitant derogation of a virtual ‘mainstream’ psychology, we should rather realize that all of this has to do with the crisis of empiricism in European sciences which had already been analysed by Husserl in the 1930s.
The third part of the book interprets relations between globalization and psychology. A new element is the interpretation of the spread of quantitative practices as intellectual colonialization. Valsiner suggests that rather than studying college populations, we should really learn about indigenous psychologies such as Indian psychology and Japanese primatology. The issue of anthropomorphization does not come up in Japan, for example, since it does not start from a Cartesian human–animal separation.
The concluding chapter presents Valsiner as a revolutionary who claims that the real question is not to analyse social phenomena in the light of evolution but to initiate revolution. Rather than creating new categories such as post traumatic stress disorder, psychology should become an agent of peace. (That was a favorite rhetoric of East European cold warriors, by the way.) Through this political commitment a new psychology might emerge. Rather than chasing facts and impact factors … psychology has a chance to build itself as a new science … Psychology is a basic science that builds on cultural histories … as Homo sapiens inhabits our planet. The Eurocentric axiomatic basis of the science needs internationally informed corrections … Will the discipline manage to avoid the distorted mirrors through which it looks to itself? Only time will tell – but there is a chance. (280–1)
The examples Valsiner uses to illustrate this new psychology are rather meager. Psychodrama is introduced by him as a new alternative procedure. The book provides interesting food for historical thought. It does not really provide a new program for 21st-century psychology, however. The lack of a positive program is related to the general attitude of the author. He is able to prove that anything is not like it was supposed to be.