Theory & Psychology

Wilhelm Dilthey's essay of 1894, Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology, is the locus classicus for the distinction between `understanding' and `explanation', or Verstehen and Erklaren, in the 19th-century German tradition of hermeneutics and the Geistes-wissenschaften. This article discusses the distinction Dilthey draws there between `explanatory' psychology, based on subsumption of the behaviour of individuals under general laws, and `interpretive', or `descriptive and analytical', psychology, based on disclosure of the uniqueness of individual case-histories. It defends his conception against the objections of the Neo-Kantian philosophers Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert and the experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, as well as neo-positivist writers such as Theodore Abel. The article also argues more generally that Dilthey's dichotomy of `spirit' and `nature' still articulates a fundamental methodological difference between the sciences, despite our contemporary recognition of the importance of interpretation in both the natural and human sciences.

Psychological practitioner inquiry differs in kind from psychological researcher inquiry. From the perspective of researcher inquiry, practice should consist of applying research-generated knowledge. Because practitioners consistently report that this is not how they approach their clients, and because the epistemological foundations of psychology research inquiry have been questioned, it is necessary to study how practitioners actually engage in practice. The hermeneutic tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer and the pragmatic tradition of Dewey provide a philosophical groundwork for the study of practitioner inquiry. Gadamer and Dewey propose that in everyday functioning people primarily act out of their internalized, culturally provided knowledge, which primarily functions outside of awareness. However, they also hold that people are not locked into their socially transmitted backgrounds. People can advance the effectiveness of their received practical knowledge through reflective inquiry and trial-and-error activity. People learn from the effect of these trials and thereby expand their background understandings. For ordinary everyday functioning, psychological practitioners are assumed to engage in a process similar to the one outlined by Dewey and Gadamer.

In this article it is argued that the realism-relativism duality addressed by the grounded theory approach to qualitative research is best accounted for when the method is understood to be an inductive approach to hermeneutics. Phenomenology, C.S. Peirce's theory of inference, philosophical hermeneutics, pragmatism and the new rhetoric are drawn upon in support of this argument. It is also held that this formulation of the grounded theory method opens the possibility that the method improves on earlier approaches to methodical hermeneutics. As an outcome of this formulation, the debate on the validity and reliability of returns from the grounded theory approach is cast in a new light. The new methodical hermeneutics is discussed in terms of prior attempts to relate hermeneutics to method.

The questions of resilience and discontinuity in the affective development of survivors of child abuse are explored from the viewpoint of Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory and current social constructivist theories. Moral tools, commitments and higher-order skills play a crucial part in the development of agency, personal empowerment and discontinuity. The recurrence of affective problems in survivors may be connected to moral confusion and insoluble moral dilemmas. This is seldom acknowledged in theoretical discourse, for example in cognitive therapeutic theories. Consequences for the treatment of survivors of abuse are discussed.

This paper aims to provide an overview of a narrative psychological approach towards the study of self and identity. The narrative psychological approach can be classified as broadly social constructionist insofar as it attempts to examine the cultural structuration of individual experience. However, building on recent criticism of certain social constructionist approaches (such as discourse analysis), it is argued that these approaches tend to lose touch with the phenomenological and experiential realities of everyday, practical life. Accordingly, they overplay the disorderly, chaotic, variable and flux-like nature of self-experience. Drawing on recent research on traumatizing experiences such as living with serious illness, this paper argues that the disruption and fragmentation manifest in such experiences serves as a useful means of highlighting the sense of unity, meaning and coherence (the `narrative configuration') more commonly experienced on an everyday level. Moreover, when disorder and incoherence prevail, as in the case of trauma, narratives are used to rebuild the individual's shattered sense of identity and meaning.

As one of the key tools of social constructionist research, discourse analysis has allowed us to explore the ways in which `health' and `illness' are constructed through language. There are two major ways in which a Foucauldian version of discourse analysis has been applied within this context. Discourse analysis has been used to deconstruct expert discourses of health and illness (Focus 1) and to determine the extent to which dominant discourses are reflected in lay people's talk about health and illness (Focus 2). This article argues that in order to progress our understanding of the subjective experience of what it means to be `healthy' or `sick', discourse analysis needs to develop Focus 2 through the use of memory work and positioning theory. The article concludes by sketching a research programme for a discourse-dynamic approach to the study of subjectivity in health psychology.