For Hall, what the world needed was a “psychological Plato” to solve this
situation.
The singularity of the term “psychology” should not mislead one into thinking that such a discipline was ever successfully founded.
Or that there is an essence to “psychology” that could encompass the various
definitions, methodologies, practices, world-views, and institutions that have used this designation.7
Rather it indicates the massive significance that psychologists gave to being seen to be talking about the same thing.
As Edmund Husserl noted, “the history of psychology is actually only a history of crises” (1937, 203).
The continued reference to psychology in the singular, split up and subdivided into tendencies and schools, is an instance of what Kurt Danziger has aptly called “unification by naming”.
As we have just seen, it was what Clapar`ede and Baldwin had explicitly proposed in a programmatic form.
While their project was a failure, the operation of unification by naming did play a critical role in twentieth-century psychology – not through providing the ideal of
univocal meaning and the possibility of effective translation and communication,
but through papering over and covering up the incommensurabilities
and cleavages that multiplied.
This was not only important at a conceptual level, with the promotion of terms such as stimulusresponse learning or the Unconscious, by which psychologists sought
to bring all human experience under the rule of one universal master concept, but in the conception of the field itself.
One effect of the singular conception of psychology, Danziger suggests, was that it furthered the cause of professionalization, by implying that the practically oriented
brancheswere linked to a scientific discipline.
This linkage in turn implied that the more abstruse research had practical significance (1997, 84, 133).
Furthermore, by giving a distinct profile to the discipline, however conflict-ridden, unification by naming masked the epistemological anarchy that prevailed within it.
The ever-increasing fractionation of psychology was partially a consequence of the fact that psychology never was one thing.
Rather, it was an appellation that came to be used to designate a conglomeration of diverse practices and conceptions in different domains.
Already in the 1920s and 1930s, perceptive figures who had participated in the founding of psychology expressed grave doubts as to its progress.
In 1921, Stanley Hall noted that there was a growing consensus amongst “the competent” that the condition of psychology was unsatisfactory and that its inaugural promise had not been fulfilled.
Morever, he thought that its state was likely to get worse (9). According to Hall,
Never in the history of the sciences has there been a stage in any of them (with
the possible exception of sociology, if that can be called a science) in which along
with great activity there has been such diversity of aims, such tension between
groups and such persistent ignoring by one circle of workers of what is made
cardinal by another (for example, the psychoanalysts and the introspectionists).
(477)
For Hall, what the world needed was a “psychological Plato” to solve this
situation.
A further aspect of the self-conception of psychology as a science is its
evolutionary legend, the axiomatic belief that – unlike the understanding of the human condition embodied for instance in literature – psychology undergoes a process of development.
As a consequence, it is widely held that we are better equipped with the theories of today than those of yesteryear through some ill-defined process of natural selection.
This evolutionary legend, which passes unexamined, has lent a normative aspect
to the use of contemporary Western psychological concepts, and has led to the implicit relegation of forms of psychological understanding in other cultures.
Furthermore, this legend obscures the extent to which particular psychologies became dominant through historically contingent events, and, not least, through the rescripting of history.
Here we need to differentiate between various theoretical projects to found a scientific psychology, and psychologies as social formations.
The latter designates the resultant disciplines, practices, and effects which arose.
The projects to found psychology played an important role in legitimating the social formations.
It is clear that the theoretical difficulties which beset projects for psychology did not impede the rise and “success” of psychologies as social formations. Far from it.
As Nikolas Rose points out, it was precisely the lack of homogeneity and lack of a single paradigm that enabled the widespread social penetration of psychologies.
They lent themselves to a variety of applications in a variety of sites.
Whatever one’s purposes, from brainwashing to sexual liberation, there was a psychology that offered itself as ideally suited to the task (1996, 60).
The problems posed by psychology’s “will to science” are not to be solved, as some have tried to do, by simply dropping the rubric of science and declaring psychology to be an art, or hermeneutics.
The critical issue is not whether a particular discipline calls itself a science or not, but the nature of its practices and institutions.
Thus in science studies today, one finds that the question of the demarcation between so-called science and so-called pseudoscience has increasingly become a non-issue.
This has been a consequence of the increasing realization that science, with
a capital “S,” never existed – in other words, that there is no atemporal
essence to something one could call the scientific method. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, Page 8-10
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