Abstract
My journey through and within psychology is a story of gradual disenchantment with its conventional scientific methods. For me, however, such disenchantment did not spell the end of my interest in psychology. Instead, it eventually made room and provided a renewed enthusiasm for the discipline, reconsidered as a psychology of persons and their lives. (p. 3)
Jack Martin’s memoir of his career as an academic psychologist narrates a changing relationship with psychological science over almost five decades. His academic journey began in the then-promising thinking and methods of behavioral psychology, and culminates in his current interests in psychobiography and studying persons’ lives in context. This is an autobiography of personal and scientific transformation through Martin’s changing engagements with psychology’s ideas and research methodologies. As the opening quotation of this review states, this is an academic’s story of becoming disengaged then reengaged in psychological scholarship.
Following a decade when the natural sciences delivered spectacular accomplishments like moon landings, the still-promising social sciences seemed to lag behind in changing the world (Shapin, 2008). Psychological science in the early 1970s almost exclusively used generalizing concepts and methods to arrive at normative understandings that could inform educational, therapeutic, and human relations practice. Initially enchanted by psychology’s potentials, Martin undertook a Skinnerian analysis of undergraduate students’ interactive behaviours in educational and group therapy contexts. In a view he holds to this day, “if something important is going on, it should be made as clear and obvious as possible” (p. 20). What became increasingly evident in examining human interactions was that, while he could identify statistically significant group differences, understanding individuals as personal or moral agents was not possible using the conventional psychological concepts and research methods of the day.
I have known and worked with Jack Martin over the last 20 years, having previously reviewed an earlier book of his (Strong, 2000), and having recently contributed a volume to a book series he was editing (Strong, 2017). I also recently retired from academic life, and Martin’s professional academic contexts, as well as his conceptual and methodological pursuits, have numerous points of overlap with my own. So, when I learned of his memoir, I volunteered to review it for this journal.
In this 100-page memoir, Martin presents a chronology of developments in his academic career along with his evolving methodological interest in studying persons as moral and rational actors in their sociocultural contexts. For most of his career, Martin has been a counsellor educator and educational psychologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada (and at Western University in the 1980s). In the book, readers learn of how his graduate training led to ascending academic ranks and administrative appointments. He describes influential relationships, changing research foci, fruitful collaborations, and the perplexities that prompted him to turn to new conceptual and methodological resources in addressing his increasingly person-focused direction. His early, yet conventional, success came from a program of research that yielded behaviourally oriented books and articles focused on counselling and learning effectiveness. His disenchantment developed in his posttenure years, when trying to make sense of persons (as opposed to group effects). Tired of asking effectiveness questions of the “does this work” variety, he began asking clients and counsellors for their views on what makes therapy effective. This shift to persons as meaning-makers and agents in therapeutic processes drew Martin to qualitative research methods and very different but related ideas, most notably the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Taylor, and Rom Harré. Martin became reenchanted with psychology, initially through discursive and hermeneutic ideas, and later, through psychobiography and contextualizing the lives of people, through the use of material such as historical documents.
Martin’s reenchanted approach to psychology is articulated in the final two chapters, and here is an example of the approach he advocates:
Psychology should focus on persons without minimizing our distinctive capabilities and accomplishments. Such a psychology ought to draw on scientific, artistic, and humanistic considerations that take full cognizance of our historical, sociocultural, political, economic, and moral contexts by employing a multi-perspectival array of theories, methods, and critical considerations. Only then will psychology finally get its core subject matter, persons and their lives, right. (p. 81)
Currently, Martin has turned to life-writing as the focus of his postretirement published works. This book’s personal psychobiography chronicles a successful Canadian academic psychologist navigating university and disciplinary cultures through tribulations familiar to readers acquainted with the “method wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. For career-minded readers curious about how to do academic psychology successfully, while taking up unconventional ideas and methods for studying persons as moral and rational actors in their sociocultural contexts, this will be an informative book. Consistent with his “personist” stance, Martin has used this book to put his own academic struggles and accomplishments into historical and institutional context.
Academic work is demanding, and becoming, then staying, a successful and engaged scholar can be central to the challenge. Martin’s insider’s tale of disenchantment then reenchantment over nearly five decades is intriguing: how does one find a “second wind” of enthusiasm in later stages of one’s academic career? Early success with a promising research program could readily be extended, using “tried and true” methods and ideas, perhaps on new subject matter. His hard-won and well-practiced advice here is that, “we must be vigilant in guarding against an over-reliance on methodologies that can alienate us from ourselves” (p. 99).