Because the Rock Will not Read the Article: A Discussion of Jeremy D. Safran's Critique of Irwin Z. Hoffman's “Doublethinking our way to Scientific Legitimacy”

Abstract

In this commentary I interpret Safran's discussion of Hoffman's 2009 article by turning to the broad historical context in which their exchange takes place. I situate psychology's traditional attempt to claim a scientific warrant for its practices by discussing the 400-year-old modern-era framework first described by Descartes that is still in place today. In the process I introduce philosophical hermeneutics, which I take to be an extended argument against Cartesian distinctions such as mind/body and subjective/objective. I draw from my (1995) suggestion that a historical era can be interpreted by examining how the self, its ills, its healers, and its healing techniques come to light. My subject is the predominant self of the last 30 years, a self that increasingly appears to be understood as a computer, and I interpret the current allure of objectivist evaluative measures and manualization as an expression of that self. Finally I suggest that Hoffman's and Safran's differences are reflective of opposing moral and political responses to our current cultural terrain. Compliance with scientistic dictates about psychotherapy outcomes or graduate school “competencies” does not represent a breakthrough in therapeutic or educational technology; instead, compliance naively but effectively reinforces the political status quo.

I am grateful to Daniel Masler for his helpful comments on the manuscript.

Notes

I am grateful to Daniel Masler for his helpful comments on the manuscript.

¹It is important to note that none of this should be construed to mean that people cannot change; one way that change happens, Gadamer thought, is through an encounter with difference and with the moral questioning that can be the product of a response to difference. That is what he meant by dialogue, and the elaboration of that idea is what saves hermeneutics from becoming a historical determinism.

²This cultural history approach is much indebted to Erich Fromm and his concept of the Marketing Personality (e.g., 1955).

³It is true that there are relational analysts who write about multiplicity and accord the concept of multiple self states an important place in their work (e.g., Bromberg, 1993, 1996; Davies & Frawley, 1992, 1994; Stern, 2010). But these writers are not valorizing the kind of flatness demonstrated in contemporary pop culture. Their theories, like all theories, have their good and problematic aspects. Psychoanalytic multiplicity reflects the hermeneutic belief that there is more than one truth in a text or an issue, and in that way it reinforces egalitarianism. Psychoanalytic multiplicity also supports the idea that individuals are composed of various desires, values, ideals, commitments, and emotional patterns, and therefore the standard should not be that humans can be reduced to one unified, unproblematic self. In this way multiple self theories are in opposition to the unitary, singular Victorian self—they valorize conflict, variation, and difference. However, although psychoanalytic multiplicity is certainly different from the pop cultural multiple self, both seem to be a reflection of the same social world. Because of that, of course psychoanalytic theorists need to be mindful of the pitfalls of multiplicity and vigilant in historically situating therapeutic theory and practice and guard against uncritically accepting all aspects of multiplicity. The worth of a society is determined finally by how cultural characteristics are used and to what purposes they are put.

⁴See, for example, Stern (1997, p. 111) for a discussion about why this is not possible.

⁵The word ensure (i.e., to make something certain) is found 16 times in the eight pages of text, one or more listings in each page.

⁶See Fowers (2010) for a study of instrumentalism in psychology.