but also by the prehistory of the current stage of their interaction: that A remembers what his former message was in his interpretation – this complex of co-effective factors will then determine A’s counterreply;
B will again react to it according to a similarly complex set of factors, but perceiving the new message will also depend on the interpretation of rules created by the prehistory of the interaction: If this is your answer to my reply, then that will be mine to yours, etc.
10 The most representative studies of the school’s double-bind theory are collected in a volume by C.E. Sluzki and D.C. Ransom (eds.), 1976: DOUBLE BIND: The foundation of the communicational approach to the family (Grune & Stratton. New York, London, San Francisco). For a good summary of the theory, see the introductory study Presentation generale by Y. Winkin in the compendium he edited under the title La nouvelle communication (containing French translations) (Seuil, Paris, 1981).
Thus the interaction by which those involved in it make history implies in each of its steps an interpretative manoeuvering by which they research history.
The ultimate stake of this manoeuvering is to define what functions each of us shall fulfil within our interaction: Am I, for instance, the principal of the on-going process or merely its agent? When in marriage therapy the wife tells the therapist she cannot help raising her voice in despair whenever her husband comes home late at night as drunk as a fish, and the husband tells the therapist that he cannot help drinking a glass or two in his despair when his wife keeps shouting at him at the top of her voice – then both of them interpret their interaction as if both of them were but its agent. In another sort of competition, both parties interpret themselves as the principal of the interaction: at an ironic point in their book Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson illustrate this by interpreting the manoeuvering of the experimental white rat which might express the events of the experiment this thus: “I have successfully conditioned the experimenting psychologist to give me something to eat whenever I push the pedal.”
This bit of irony derives its earnestness derived from the fact that according to the philosophy of the Palo Alto school a sort of game is played between experimenter and experimentee in which the psychologist is a player just as the experimental subject is, though the former tries to describe this latter as a natural scientist describes his object. When doing so, the experimenter as well as the experimentee do interpret the events and thereby manoeuver for managing to turn the other into the object of the processes to be induced in the experiment.
“How hypnotist and subject manoeuver each other?” – Haley asks in the title of a chapter of one of his books11, describing actually not only the hypnotizer’s manoeuvering but in more general terms games psychologists (be they psychoanalysts or practitioners of, say, short-psychotherapy) play with their patients.
One may argue that the psychotherapist is involved in the state of affairs he is dealing with by practically interfering with it, while the research psychologist, contrary to him, merely observes matters with a purely theoretical interest from the outside. However, Haley’s description of the psychotherapist’s attitude is weirdly similar to how one could describe that of the research[ing] psychologist’s on the basis of one’s experiences:
According to Haley’s arguing, the theories of hypnosis focuses on the individual, though this phenomenon is entirely linked to the relation. When Messmer evoked the hypnotic trance by means of his magnets it was quite comprehensible that the theory meant to explain the effect of the magnetism upon humans and didn’t bother itself too much about the relation of the patients to Messmer. But later when suggestion got into the focus of the research work, one would have supposed the moment had come for a shift toward an investigation into the relations between those giving and those receiving suggestions. But the subject of research kept being the individual and suggestion was depicted the same way as the magnet used to be:
like a thing in itself influencing the individual, independently of his relations.
Thus the same is true for the research psychologist. When in 1966 (note that it is the same year in which the psychology as a natural science celebrated its apotheosis at the Moscow International Congress) Rosenthal was publishing his psychological experiments whose object was the psychological experiment itself, it could no longer be denied that in the behavioral sciences a considerable part of the facts produced in the style of natural scientific experiments were laboratory artifacts.12 What this is due to are the implications discussed by
11 J. Haley, 1963: Strategies of Psychotherapy. Grune & Stratton, N.Y.
12 Experimenter effects in behavioural research. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1966. (Enlarged edition:
Irvington Publisher, Inc., New York, 1976 – referred to subsequently). See also: R. Rosenthal and R.L.
Rosnow (eds.): Artifact in behavioural research. Academic Press, New York, 1969; as well as R. Rosenthal
Haley in the above quoted passage: when the psychologist thinks he as the subject of experimentation is manipulating the object of experimentation in the way a natural scientist does, he is, instead, involved in a game in which both players – the experimenter as well as the experimentee – interpret the events and thereby manoeuver for managing to turn the other into the object of the processes to be induced in the experiment.
When the psychologist succeeds, the rest of the experiment may well be like a natural scientific investigation, and the produced research result may accordingly have a degree of reliability. Nevertheless, the manoeuvering phase does differentiate a research of this kind from a natural science investigation that succeeds in experimentation without such a pre-paratory, interpretative phase.
For a long time psychology failed to notice the necessity of this manoeuvering, inter-pretative preparation; this feature justifies the critical revision of psychology’s experimental results achieved without such methodological reflection.
At the beginning of his book Rosenthal gives a long list of cases in which both scholars of natural and of behavioural sciences fall victim to psychosocial issues operating on them, when e. g. they fail to recognize facts that contradict their hypotheses, or fancy the perception with a greater certainty of the happening of the factual event they expect whereas in reality it only occurs with a certain degree of probability. Another group of the cases of distortion listed by Rosenthal include the misinterpretation of correctly observed facts, and in some cases distortion derives from some intention propelled by this or that motive (ambition, colleague’s jealousy, assistant’s over-zeal, etc.).13
However, what may happen to a researcher in psychology is not only what he has in common with the natural science researcher when they lack submitting themselves to the impact of his object of research. Actually, the research psychologist may also (unconsciously but actively) submit his study object to his own influence, and may then observe that object only as operating under that influence.
This feature markedly distinguishes psychology from natural sciences in which it would be absurd to suppose any similar responsiveness of the observed object. Unlike a human being, a celestial or earthly body doesn’t change its speed or acceleration depending on the sex, age, skin colour or religion of the scientist it encounters. An observed natural process does not react, even unconsciously, to the observer’s reactions to that process but an observed mental process does.
It would hardly happen that, say, a double decomposition would be stronger or weaker depend-ing on the extent to which the acid and base chosen as its medium would want involuntarily to further the scholar’s cause, or contrarily, to foil his expectations; or on the extent to which they would like to act in the experiment similarly or differently from the way the scholar would presumably act in their place; or again, on the extent to which the acid, for example, would want to pass itself off as the base.
On the other hand, we know from Rosenthal’s book that such and similar distortions are quite “natural” when behaviour is the studied object. Thus, we must realize how far from a truly natural science experiment a psychological experiment is.
Since the time when, with the spread of psychosocial experimentation, the research psychologist was forced to deal consciously with these special methodological problems, it has been noted that an ever-growing part of the peculiar tricks of experimentation are related to the preparatory phase. These are, specifically, the techniques of manoeuvering by means of which the experiment leader manages to subject individuals to his experiment. It is beyond the scope of this paper to explicate how alien to the methodological logic of research in natural
and L. Jacobson: Pygmalion in the classroom. Holt, Rihenhart and Winston, New York, 1968, in regard to its connections with the topic of the present discussion.
13 Rosenthal: Experimenter effects in behavioural research, pp. 3-37.
sciences is, for example, the social psychology’s routine methodological trick of employing confederates of the experimenter. Whereas in the natural sciences the research techniques is meant to separate the subject of the investigation from its object,14 that trick in social psychology aims to incorporate the subject in the object – via participation of the confederates in the experiment as if they were among its real subjects. Just imagine the methodological absurdity in natural sciences of, for example, a bacteriologist placing his assistant in the bacterium culture under the microscope.15
Does anybody know whether Fraisse, in opening the Paris Congress made the above-quoted statement concerning the new crisis in psychology and the need to shift its paradigm from studying behaviour to investigating man, was aware of the complications linked to the fact that the psychologist is human too?
As a matter of fact, if psychology fails to investigate its object – be it man or behaviour – according to the norms of natural science, it does not follow that psychological research cannot be scientific: it is perhaps scientific by the norms of some other science. That is why it is unfortunate if a psychologist finishes his professional training without learning that the procedural pattern of historical science, linguistic science, literary science, legal science or any other “moral” science might apply to examination of certain questions in psychology just as that of the natural sciences applies to other questions. And it is unfortunate if, consequently, he has no chance of learning that from these two half-sciences the construct of a unified logic of psychology cannot be built by having the logic of one half be denied by the logic of the other.
A well known procedure in this denial is when psychology concedes that beside studying the individual in relation to his natural environment, he must also be examined as faced with his social environment. The moment history is postulated as a social environment, the assumption is tacitly made that the world of history is as external to the person as the world of nature. Thus, it is assumed that the same positivistic method of investigation can be applied to both system of reference as equally separated from man.16
On the other hand, it would not be more fortunate if the matrix were imposed upon psychology, cultivated as a natural science, by the logic of the new tendencies of historical sciences: within such a matrix no insights of that scientific psychology concerning links between mental phenomena, on the one hand, and the survival strategies of the living organism, on the other, would survive.
14 In classical psychological examinations this end was furthered by the trick provided by the use of the detective mirror with the help of which the psychologist observed the subject without the latter being able to notice that he was observed.
15 To be able to judge for himself whether the point in question is real experimentation that would be conform to the norm of natural sciences, I kindly refer the interested reader to Aronson and Linder’s description of a procedure they applied masterfully when the actual subject of their experiment was made to believe he was the experimenter’s assistant charged to observe the behaviour of another person whom he believed to be the subject of the experiment while actually this latter was the assistant (E. Aronson and D. Linder: Gain and loss of esteem as determinants of interpersonal attractiveness. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 1965. 156-172.
16 To judge whether a psychology taking into account such “social scientific” implications as well differs from a psychology taking itself clearly for a natural science, it is worth casting a second glance at Delgado’s above-described experiment which eventually aims at handling of issues of power that is anyhow a subject for social sciences .
The discovery of an alternative?
Now, there is some evidence that world psychology has left behind the phase in which it tried to prove its integrity through the logical imperialism of one or the other hemi-science and has become receptive to alternative attempts aimed at harmonizing the logics of the two half-sciences.
One such attempt is Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory. “It is neither a wholly natural scientific, biological psychology interested only in the emerging events and their causes, nor is it a wholly cultural, hermeneutic venture concerned exclusively with the interpretation of meanings and with motives of human deeds,” one can read in New Ideas in Psychology,17 in a study that discovered, 55 years after Vygotsky’s death, his new ideas in psychology.
Last year an international Vygotsky society was set up18, and on this occasion, Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit organized a Vygotsky forum whose participants sought an explanation to the fact that (while in his native country Vygotsky fell victim to the past-erasing rage) this scholar is becoming fashionable among the academic scholars of psychology in Western Europe and especially the United States. The extent to which it is so is even embarrassing, inasmuch as, for instance, in just one year four international conferences have highlighted Vygotsky’s work without mentioning each other, and on one of these conferences the participants set up another international Vygotsky society practically simultaneously with the Amsterdam move, two, in this case, being somehow less, than one.
Anyhow, at the Amsterdam forum it was generally admitted that the somewhat latish move of spotting Vygotsky and bringing him into fashion seem to be related to what the J. Shotter’s above cited paper calls our attention to: that Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory carries the promise of a synthesis between the two psychological hemi-sciences by studying the factors of mental life as signs and tools at the same time.
The logical implications of such a theoretical construction for combining two hemi-psychologies could be summarized as follows:
The tool fits into the natural determination series of psychosomatic interaction between organism and environment. Instead of becoming the object of a direct activity, such a tool gets integrated like a prosthesis in the acting system which directly perceives and manipulates its environment through this tool as if through a transparent medium.19 The activity directed at the object is unambiguously determined by the nature of the system integrating the prosthesis into itself and that of its environment, all independently of the tool.
The sign, by contrast, is the direct object of an activity that is concerned with its interpre-tation. The sign mediates between the parties only depending on how each of those parties interprets it in an interaction referred to the background of their common or different cultures.20
17 John Shotter: Vygotsky’s psychology: Joint activity in a developmental zone. NIP. Vol. 7 (1989), No. 2, p. 185.
18 The society labelled by the initial-word ISCRAT was set up as the International Standing Congress for Research in Activity Theory by the participants of the 1st International Congress on Activity Theory staged in West-Berlin in 1986. That was transformed into a regular international society in Amsterdam under the name International Society for Cultural Research in Activity Theory, and the 3rd International Congress on Activity Theory to be staged in May 1994 in Moscow is being organized under its auspices.
19 E. g., a blind man do not perceives his stick but through his stick the unevenness of the ground; and a child having learnt to eat with a spoon puts not the spoon itself in his mouth but the soup with the help of the spoon that may not even be noticed.
20 The interpretative manoeuvering taking place in an interaction there have been presented above. For giving an idea about the paradigm that operates when parties in the game interpret the series of moves by unconsciously referred the mediating tools as signs to the background of their common or different cultures consider the following sample of visual patterns that may be interpreted as English words or as French words with comp-letely different meanings: ail (garlic), allure (walk), bail (renting), bale (chaff), but (aim), cane (hen-duck),
For the Vygotsky theory, mediating factors of this latter kind are tools at the same time, as well as the former type mediating factors are also signs.
Much as the Vygotsky school had implications of a synthesis the logic of natural sciences and that of historical sciences it could not avoid the fate of a psychology of that historical period: that of its “hemispheres” that was liable to the first logic got elaborated with Leontiev’s activity theory21. Leontiev considered the sign as tools, i. e. as completely transparent when it operates as mediating factor. No interpretation is needed, according to his theory, for decoding sign’s meaning since it is objectively given in the activity structure as relation between its ends and means. Though Leontiev made a clear distinction between meaning and personal sense, he did not consider any necessity of interpretation for the latter either, the personal sense being equally taken as objectively given in the structure of activity as a relation between its ends and motives.
On the other hand, however Leontiev applied entirely the logic of natural sciences to the psychology his doctrine is an integral part of a theory whose outlook was formulated by Vygotsky in the following words:
“The mental nature of man represents a totality of social relations transferred inside the person, into his functioning. Higher mental functions (e.g., word function) earlier used to be distributed between people, then became the functioning of the person himself. Earlier, psychologists tried to trace social factors back to individual ones. They studied individual reactions found in laboratories and then tried to find how persons’ reaction changed in a collective setting. Contrary to Piaget we assume that the development proceeds not towards socialization but towards the transformation of social relations in mental functions. Earlier, it used to be supposed that the individual has a function in a finished, semi-finished or embryonic form, and in the community it gets developed, combined, increased, enriched or, just the opposite, inhibited, repressed, etc. Nowadays, we may substantiate the assumption
“The mental nature of man represents a totality of social relations transferred inside the person, into his functioning. Higher mental functions (e.g., word function) earlier used to be distributed between people, then became the functioning of the person himself. Earlier, psychologists tried to trace social factors back to individual ones. They studied individual reactions found in laboratories and then tried to find how persons’ reaction changed in a collective setting. Contrary to Piaget we assume that the development proceeds not towards socialization but towards the transformation of social relations in mental functions. Earlier, it used to be supposed that the individual has a function in a finished, semi-finished or embryonic form, and in the community it gets developed, combined, increased, enriched or, just the opposite, inhibited, repressed, etc. Nowadays, we may substantiate the assumption