Existential-Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology: Exploring the Breadth of Human Experience

About this book

When I began to study psychology a half century ago it was defined as "the study of behavior and experience." By the time I completed my doctorate shortly after the end of World War II the last two words were fading rapidly. In one of my first graduate classes a course in statistics the professor announced on the first day "Whatever exists exists in some number." We dutifully wrote that into our notes and did not pause to recognize that thereby all that makes life meaningful was being consigned to oblivion. This bland restructuring-perhaps more accurately destruction-of the world was typical of its time 1940. The influence of a narrow scientistic attitude was already spreading throughout the learned disciplines. In the next two decades it would invade and tyrannize the "social sciences " education and even philosophy. To be sure quantification is a powerful tool selectively employed but too often it has been made into an executioners axe to deny actuality to all that does not yield to its procrustean demands.