Sigmund Koch as critical humanist

Just as Sigmund Koch was a good scientist without succumbing to scientism, he was a good humanist without succumbing to the popular distortions trading on the name of humanism. When humanistic psychology was seduced by the touchy-feely encounter group movement, Koch derided its technology of authenticity as shamelessly meretricious. Later, when postmodern humanists of deconstruction and textual analysis began to be heard in psychology, Koch wryly expressed his preference for the old-fashioned kind of humanism. Koch's interests and his conception of the domain of psychology thus transcended scientific and humanistic labels and boundaries. To be good science, human psychological studies have to start with and be guided by openness to all aspects of being human. No less in the present and future than during his lifetime, the implications of Koch's vision of psychological inquiry warrant discerning and disciplined attention.     

Gifts bestowed, gifts withheld. Assessing psychological theory with a Kochian attitude

Sigmund Koch, along with several members of his generation, insisted on a critical and self-critical stance toward psychological theory. Blending critique and possibility, Koch and others focused on the intricate links between theory and practice, morals and values, and the actual, although usually unacknowledged, choices open to theorists. An examination of "theory biographies" heightens appreciation of the legacy of such analyses as well as the positive promise of a Kochian perspective on psychological studies.     

The artist speaks. Sigmund Koch on aesthetics and creative work

Sigmund Koch is widely recognized as a prime mover of the radical transformation of psychology from a discipline dominated by behaviorism and related views to a multivalenced set of inquiries into human mentality and functioning. It is less widely remarked that Koch saw aesthetic endeavors as standing at the center of human life and thus warranting psychologists' closest attention. Koch's interest in aesthetics and art making is evident in his writings from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s on different states of mind, the notion of value properties, and the theory of definition. Koch's study of creative work in the latter decades of his life with artists of high accomplishment was guided by a set of methodological signposts for the study of creative work, contains formulations relevant to contemporary psychoaesthetics, and generates significant questions for further inquiry.     

Sigmund Koch--philosophically speaking

Sigmund Koch's legacy is not merely a record of robust criticism aimed at (now mostly failed) dominant perspectives in psychology. Rather, his prescient and tutored thought captured particular habits of mind and institutionalized modes of inquiry likely to retard progress in psychology indefinitely. In important respects, it is Koch's critical assessments of his own earlier commitments and enthusiasms that exemplify his project for any "scientific" psychology worth having. It is in these self-criticisms that Koch discloses both the source and the costs of trimming and reducing reality merely to prosecute research of the approved type. Furthermore, it is in these self-criticisms that Koch exemplifies the integrity and disinterested judiciousness so characteristic of science at its best.     

Faut-il investir dans le capital psychologique pour réussir sa carrière ?

Today, to succeed in his professional career, the individual must acquire new career competencies. If the literature shows that the employee must develop his human capital (knowing-how) as well as his social capital (knowing-whom), a new form of capital is now receiving more and more attention. This research aims to examine the impact of psychological capital on career success. We opted for a quantitative approach applied to 235 Tunisian employees. Structural equations analyses with the partial least squares approach (PLS) allowed us to confirm the determining role of psychological capital in both objective and subjective success. Furthermore, the results indicate that the relationship between psychological capital and subjective career success is partially mediated by objective career success. In addition, the effect of psychological capital on objective success appears to be greater for men than for women.     

Approaching archetypes: reconsidering innateness

The question of innateness has hounded Jungian psychology since Jung originally postulated the archetype as an a priori structure within the psyche. During his life and after his death he was continually accused of Lamarckianism and criticized for his theory that the archetypes existed as prior structures. More recently, with the advent of genetic research and the human genome project, the idea that psychological structures can be innate has come under even harsher criticism even within Jungian thought. There appears to be a growing consensus that Jung's idea of innate psychological structures was misguided, and that perhaps the archetype-as-such should be abandoned for more developmental and 'emergent' theories of the psyche. The purpose of this essay is to question this conclusion, and introduce some literature on psychological innateness that appears relevant to this discussion.     

Universality,Particularity, and Potentiality: The Sources of Human Divergence as Arise from Wilhelm Dilthey’s Writings

This study examines the sources of human divergence as arise from Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings. While Dilthey assigns a central role to the human subject, he never synthesizes his major ideas on subjectivity into a unified theory of subjective uniqueness. I will show that such a theory can be derived from his writings through the combination of three ideas that appear in them. These ideas are: (1) the thesis that human understanding is possible because of psychological content that is shared by both the creator and the interpreter; (2) the belief that this shared content is the only content that exists within human beings, meaning that there is no unique psychological content; and (3) the perception of this inner universal content as an accumulation of life-possibilities. When joined together, these ideas create an inspiring theory of human divergence, according to which the uniqueness of an individual is determined through partial realization of universal possibilities.     

Gurdjieff's presentation of emotions: Toward a phenomenology of affective experience

Abstract

This essay presents a phenomenology of emotion by drawing on the psychological account of human beings provided by the Armenian‐Russian philosopher and spiritual teacher George I. Gurdjieff (c. 1877–1949), whose work until recently was ignored by conventional academics. Relatively unknown to the West in his lifetime, Gurdjieff presents in his writings and teachings a detailed picture of the essential constitution of human experience, including the emotional dimension. Although not explicitly phenomenological, his work depicts five affective modes that fit together into a holistic, experientially verifiable conception of human emotion.     

Hutcheson on Natural Religion

Recent scholars have examined the important role of English Deism in the formation of a modern naturalistic approach to the study of human religiosity. Despite the volume of important studies of various aspects of his thought, the role of Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) in this development has been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to show how Hutcheson develops his own account of the origins of religion, consonant with his more well-known theories in aesthetics and moral philosophy, that diverges sharply from the then-prevailing Deist views. Hutcheson pioneers a psychological account of religion that anticipates the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars in important ways. At the same time, Hutcheson incorporates his account of the origins of religion into an overall vision of human flourishing.     

从新行为主义到社会建构主义:班杜拉研究范式的转变

班杜拉的社会认知理论是一种关于人类学习和发展的社会建构主义的观点,标志着其研究范式的转变:从新行为主义到社会建构主义。本文根据社会建构主义的五条基本原则,对他的社会认知理论进行了分析,分析的结果表明其主要的理论原则、论点,以及心理学构想不仅与社会建构主义思想一致,还与关于人类活动的行为主义的观点相对立。因此,对班杜拉研究成果的准确解释于教学、科研和学术成就都具有决定性的意义。     

Jesus the Healer: A Sermon in Honor of the Memory of Donald Eric Capps (1939–2015)

The article below is a sermon preached in 2008. It was inspired by Donald Capps’s book, Jesus the Village Psychiatrist. I offer this sermon in honor of his memory as a creative contributor to the work of the Journal as well as his distinguished career as Professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Many of us have been blessed by his profound psychological and theological insights into the human psyche, his scholarly explorations of the relationship of psychology and religion, and his remarkable sense of humor. We are diminished by his absence.     

Shaping of scientific psychology in Japan

Japanese scientific psychology began with Y. Motora's lecture on pyschophysics at the University of Tokyo in 1888. He had just received his PhD under G.S. Hall at Johns Hopkins University, in the USA. He became the first professor of psychology in 1890 and founded the first psychological laboratory at the University of Tokyo in 1903. He studied many psychological problems, including attention, experimentally and theoretically. One of his first students, Matataro Matsumoto, founded the second psychological laboratory at Kyoto University and then succeeded to Motora's position in Tokyo. Matsumoto was interested in experimental studies of human performance and their applications. He trained many able psychologists and organized the Japanese Psychological Association in 1927. Some of his students founded more psychological laboratories in major universities of Japan. They introduced psychological tests, Gestalt psychology, and behaviourism in the 1920s and 1930s. Psychoanalysis was introduced through mainly nonacademic roots and became familiar to Japanese psychologists in the 1930s. After World War II, a strong influence of American psychology came to Japanese psychologists who had already trained in scientific methodology. The areas of research and applications have been greatly widened and the number of psychologists has increased rapidly up to the present day. Promotion of international interactions and indigenous traditions are both expected.     

Radical behaviorism and psychology's public: B. F. Skinner in the popular press, 1934-1990

B. F. Skinner is perhaps 2nd only to Freud among the most publicly identifiable psychological figures of the last century. This article reviews the popular press coverage of Skinner between 1934 and 1990 to examine how radical behaviorism was interpreted, portrayed, and received by psychology's public. Reactions to Skinner were often skeptical or condemnatory. It is suggested that some members of the public had difficulty accepting his views because of the disparities between the philosophy of radical behaviorism and the phenomenology of everyday experience. Furthermore, Skinner's status as a psychological expert was inextricably linked to the public's perception of his credibility not only as a scientist but also as a human being.     

Florian Znaniecki: Creative evolution of a sociologist

Znaniecki devoted his creative life to aconstant reexamination of the basic problems of sociology: its subject matter and the methodology through which it can be studied. The developments in his thought can be traced with the help of the prefaces to his books, in which he explains the location of that work in his over-all effort to develop a systematic sociology, the major influences on his thought, and his arguments with other theories. Starting as a philosopher with a special interest in the evolution of values, he spent years as a result of Thomas's influence attempting to find a psychological base for human behavior, finally abandoning the attempt in favor of systems of social interaction. He focused on four such systems: social relation, social role, social groups, and societies.     

Interlimb coordination: real constraints and false dichotomies

Despite the recent advances in the field of coordination dynamics addressing the interplay of constraints of different natures in the emergence of human coordination, F. Mechsner (2004) invites us to revive hierarchical and dichotomous thinking b y offering again his exclusive position that coordinated movements are (purely) perceptual-cognitive/psychological in nature. In this comment, the authors address a number of theoretical and methodological issues that might potentially puzzle the readers of Mechsner's article. They contend that the dichotomy proposed by Mechsner (i.e., perceptual-cognitive vs. motor) constitutes a restrictive framework for understanding human coordination.     

Can psychoanalysis help us to understand the causes and prevention of violence?

As the most adequate theory of human personality yet created, including our propensity for irrational, self-defeating, and self-destructive behavior patterns, psychoanalysis is in a unique position to help us solve the most serious crisis that the human species has been confronted by at any point in its evolutionary history: the threat to its own survival that is caused by its own behavior, namely the compulsion to engage in violence on the largest scale that its technology makes possible, even when that causes the death of the self as well as of others. This continually expanding behavior pattern, which reduces even genocide to a minor footnote compared with the self-extinction of our whole species, is created not only by “apocalyptic” fundamentalism and terrorism (“suicide bombers”), but also by the increasing and only partially preventable proliferation of thermonuclear weapons to national rulers of questionable sanity, and the apparently unpreventable continuation of industrial/economic policies and practices that will, if not reversed, make our own small planet uninhabitable. What makes people place a higher value on the continuation of these behaviors than they place on their own physical survival (or that of their children)? That is the question to which this article proposes at least the beginnings of an answer: that when a person feels shamed and humiliated to a degree that threatens the survival of that fragile and vulnerable psychological construct called his “self” (or of the religious or cultural group with which his self has identified), he will eagerly sacrifice his body (and other peoples’) in the attempt to, as he sees it, save his soul, i.e. his self and his self-esteem. The question then becomes: what are the social and psychological determinants of overwhelming shame and humiliation, and how can we protect people from being exposed to those conditions, or at least enhance their ability to respond to them in ways that are life-preserving rather than life-destroying?     

Freud's psychology and its organic foundation: sexuality and mind-body interactionism

Although Freud's neurological education had a great impact on his thinking, a review of Freud's early writings reveals that: (1) Freud adhered to a mind-body interactionist position that was not in accord with the mechanistic neurology of his medical school education; (2) Freud saw psychical processes as intentional, not completely determined by mechanical brain processes--but interactive with them; (3) Freud made functional and psychological interpretations freely without accepting a need to "neurologize" his psychological insights by providing specific neuroanatomical or neurophysiological correlates for such interpretations; and (4) Freud sought the organic base for his evolving psychology in sexual physiology, not neuroanatomy or neurophysiology.     

Rediscovering James' Principles of Psychology

This paper is an introduction to a special issue celebrating the 125^th anniversary of William James' Principles of Psychology. The special issue demonstrates the continued relevance and insight offered by James. It reviews the articles in this issue and delineates three main themes: (1) he recognition of the inherent relationality of psychological phenomena, (2) a science of psychology ought to include biology and sociocultural phenomena (e.g. language); and (3) human consciousness is addressed as the flow of experience from the perspective one living it. It discusses each theme and briefly touches on how they continue to be developed in James' later work, which also provides innovative new directions for psychologists. Undergirding each of these contributions is James' admonition that psychological research is especially difficulty due to the complexity of psychological phenomena. As such, this paper also discusses challenges to doing psychological research that James raises and his ideas that can inform future endeavors.     

John L. Horn (1928-2006)

John Leonard Horn was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on September 7, 1928, and he died in Los Angeles, California, on August 18, 2006. John Horn was a world-renowned scholar of immense intellect, and he was highly respected in his time. I believe his major contributions to psychology, as well as his influence on psychologists, will continue to grow. His challenging factor-analytic methods of the 1960s, the important methodological debates of the 1970s and 1980s, and his continuing resistance to faddish trends in psychological research all represent fundamental contributions. Through his research and teaching he forced people to question popular assumptions and to evaluate all the data available. He challenged us to think longer, harder, and better. His work will continue to inspire important research in the fields of multivariate analysis and human cognitive abilities for many decades to come.