Abstract
The two-pronged thesis of this book is that a discipline-wide movement away from the long-dominant variable-centered approach to psychological research is warranted, and that genuinely person-centered inquiry in which narrative methods would play a prominent role is a scientifically viable and practically feasible alternative. Written in a welcoming conversational style, Part I of the book, comprising 40 pages distributed over two chapters, is devoted to the first part of the argument; Parts II and III, comprising the remaining eight chapters, to the second.
In Part I, Schiff makes clear his affinity with the argument developed by other contemporary critics of mainstream methodological thinking (including the present author) that the only “person” revealed by statistical analyses of variables with respect to which individuals and groups have been differentiated is an abstract and entirely fictional entity whom the Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) famously labeled l’homme moyen, or “the average man” [sic]. Schiff endorses the view that, however well-suited knowledge of this l’homme moyen may be to the objectives of some sort of demography, it fails us when the quest is for substantive knowledge of the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social functioning of real flesh-and-blood persons, presumably the overarching objective of a genuine psychology.
In places within the first two chapters, Schiff seems to be arguing that person-centered inquiry in general, and narrative studies in particular, should supplant the traditional variable-centered approach. In other places, however, his language suggests the more moderate view that person-centered methods should supplement the traditional ones. I find this aspect of the work worrisome when considered in light of the fate of Gordon Allport’s (1897–1967) well-known but finally unsuccessful advocacy of “idiographic” research methods in personality psychology. Allport, who is cited by Schiff, argued correctly that such methods would make personality psychology decidedly more person-centered than the extant field could then claim to be, dominated as it had been by the variable-centered methods he (Allport) so ill-advisedly labeled “nomothetic” (cf. Allport, 1937; Lamiell, 1998). In time, however, Allport yielded to the mainstream’s persistent claim that the “nomothetic” research methods could and did, after all, deliver some knowledge of individuals’ personalities, and, with that concession, his pleas for more extensive use of “idiographic” methods alongside the “nomothetic” methods were easily co-opted. The result within the mainstream was (and has remained) the continued domination of the variable-centered approach (cf. Lamiell, 1987). Schiff’s intimations of inclusiveness in Part I of his book could similarly compromise the force of his call for a methodological overhaul in psychological research, and that would be unfortunate.
It is in Parts II and III of his book where Schiff is at his best. There, he elaborates his vision of narrative psychology, and, in the process, offers concrete illustrations of the approach in action. He first takes on the challenge of bringing order to the sometimes widely disparate conceptions of what narrative psychology is and could/should be, noting that some versions of the approach have been extant along the periphery of the field for many years. He mentions in this regard the works of such well-known figures as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Erik Erikson (1902–1994), as well as those by the aforementioned Gordon Allport and by Robert W. White (1904–2001). Prudently in this contest, Schiff endorses an inclusive orientation toward narrative psychology, making clear his view that “there is no single method of narrative research” (p. 64). At the same time, however, Schiff avers that, whatever the specifics of some particular narrative method might be, “narrative psychology is, at its core, the study of meaning-making practices—how persons, together with others, articulate and inhabit interpretations of life” (p. 65).
Schiff illustrates what he means by this through discussions of material gleaned from interviews, some of which have been reported in the literature by other authors, but several of which have been conducted over the years by Schiff himself. One of these discussions features a young Arab woman living in Israel and her struggles to establish an identity. Another features young couples in which one partner is Jewish and the other Arab. Still another features an elderly Holocaust survivor. In each of these discussions, Schiff does an excellent job making clear for the reader how close attention not only to what interviewees say but also to various aspects of how they say it can reveal aspects of human psychological functioning—including, most prominently, the shaping and re-shaping of personal identities—to an extent unreachable through conventional variable-centered studies. For Schiff, narration is not only a method for conducting psychological research but is also itself a mode of psychological functioning: the telling of stories, he argues persuasively, is a medium through which individuals construct and re-construct their very identities as persons.
Inevitably given his re-centering mission, Schiff was bound to address the question: Is narrative psychology science? Schiff’s immediate answer to this question is another question: What do we mean by science? Transparently, Schiff’s vision of narrative psychology is in the intellectual patrimony of ideas endorsed by such forerunners as Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and, of more recent vintage, Charles Taylor (b. 1931). All of those thinkers qualify as prominent advocates of a hermeneutical method of inquiry in the service of psychology conceived as a human science, and all of them endorse(d) the view that the overriding knowledge objective of the human sciences (die Geisteswissenschaften) is not to explain the phenomena under investigation in terms of universal laws, as in the natural sciences (die Naturwissenschaften), but rather to understand those phenomena in terms of the meanings they contain and convey. Traditionally, of course, mainstream psychology has modeled itself on the natural sciences, and has summarily dismissed the very idea that “human sciences” could even qualify as genuine sciences.
To the extent that the heretofore hegemonic view continues to prevail within psychology, narrative inquiry (and other forms of person-centered research) will remain on the discipline’s periphery, and Schiff’s hopes for his book will remain unrequited. However, readers with a more philosophically and historically grounded understanding of what scientific psychology can and should be (and, in some relatively small circles, has long been and continues to be) will find Schiff’s perspective on narrative psychology at once theoretically invigorating and methodologically liberating. In the present author’s view, this makes A New Narrative for Psychology a most commendable addition to the literature.