Showing papers by "Allen E. Bergin published in 1964"

Psychology as a Science of Inner Experience

Abstract: THE field of psychology originally grew out of concerns with intimately human and ultimately philosophical issues. The natural history of its development from philosophy and theology (Boring, 1950) hardly requires further documentation, but central to the present thesis is the assumption that psychology, indeed, came into being partly in response to the desire to explain and guide the most profound and practical qualities of human experience. There has been a significant period of estrangement from such involvements which is indelibly marked in our history by the behavioristic revolution against the subjective and experiential (Hebb, 1960). No matter how the future may evaluate it, behaviorism and its descendants have been the life-blood of American psychology. Regardless of our current preoccupations or our investments in new pathways, it is this fact that has made the following facetious remark such a poignant commentary upon our scientific past: \"American psychology first lost its soul, then its mind, and finally its consciousness, but it still behaved\" (Waters, 1958). Because of a continuing commitment to the essentials of this behavioristic trend, academic American psychology has had a tendency to turn away from issues of significance for a comprehensive science of man. It seems that the field moved away from those issues perhaps with due cause, but like the prodigal son is now returning with its hard won independence and sophistication to the basic issues of human living it once left. While an estrangement from the weightier dimensions of human experience may have been a temporary necessity during the operational-behavioristic revolution, it is unacceptable as an enduring trait if we are to treat systematically the basic problems which have been spurned as mentalistic and, therefore, misleading for an objective science. Fortunately, the repercussions of the behavioristic revolt have settled and their positive contributions have been absorbed into the main stream of psychological science. Psychology