Seventy Years of Psychology
Paul C. Vitz on Surprisingly Positive Developments in a Very Troubled Discipline
Retirement is, no doubt, a good time to reflect on the years one has spent in the academic world, teaching and doing research, so as I begin my official retirement, here I go. From the beginning of my career, starting about 70 years ago, I have been engaged in the field of psychology.
Twentieth-Century Developments
I will start with my undergraduate years at the University of Michigan, from 1953 through 1957. At the time, the intense focus in psychology was on behaviorism and research with white rats or pigeons, and to some extent also on early psychoanalysis. We human beings were to be understood psychologically as the result of such primary drives as hunger and thirst, sex, aggression, and pain avoidance. These drives, plus schedules of reinforcement, and no doubt our unconscious, accounted for all we are. Even if one studied personality, one had to make sure that the measurements predicted a particular behavior. Nevertheless, it all fascinated me, and I was an enthusiastic major, taking a special program in psychology.
I went to Stanford University for graduate school from 1957 through 1962. There I became aware of a new approach to the field called humanistic psychology, pioneered by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. At least they addressed normal people instead of just the pathological (as in psychoanalysis) and people with relatively modest psychological problems—plus they added some actual mental concepts, especially the Self. All this was a big improvement upon what had come before it in psychology. Nevertheless, it had serious problems, which I described in the 1970s as “self-worship.” It was only with the “autonomous individual” that humanistic psychology had much concern.
In the 1970s and 1980s, while I was on the faculty at New York University, psychology introduced some major corrections to self-psychology. Along came interpersonal psychology, focusing on our relationships with others, especially as adults. Also, family therapy was introduced, which for children expanded the relevant interpersonal world within psychotherapy.
During these same years, cognitive and behavioral therapy became a standard practice. This reintroduced the conscious mind with great emphasis, and human reason now found a home in psychology. Some of our problems came to be understood as due to false or incorrect thinking, such as catastrophizing or seeing things as all-or-nothing.
Around the same time, another important emphasis in psychology came in with emotion-focused therapy. Emotion was now firmly understood as a separate factor in human psychology. During this same period, spirituality somehow came into psychology. It was not focused on religion per se—this was “new age spirituality”—but at least it allowed some sort of religious experience to be taken seriously as part of a person’s life and psychology.
It is interesting to recall that Freud was aware of spirituality; he called it the “oceanic experience.” Since we live above sea level and the ocean is mysterious and murky, such were the implications of what Freud thought of mystical experience. Maslow, however, called it the “peak experience.” What a difference a word makes! Even though Maslow’s understanding of peak experience had nothing to do with traditional religion, it elevated spirituality to a high level of ultimate fulfillment.
Roughly a decade later, in the 1990s, two remarkable Christian psychologists, one Catholic (Robert Enright) and one Protestant (Everett Worthington), introduced forgiveness as a major intervention in psychotherapy. Research on forgiveness and applications of it have expanded greatly ever since.
During roughly the same time period—the late twentieth century—narrative theory was introduced, and it has become quite popular. Narrative theory understands a person’s life as a story, which for the patient in therapy has broken down, and the therapist is there to help the patient construct a new story for his or her life. The successful construction of the new story completes the therapy, and this has often been called explicitly “a redemptive story.”
Twenty-First-Century Improvements
At the start of this century, around the year 2000, came the development of what is now known as “positive psychology,” an approach that is focused on the virtues. Introduced and led by Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, this new approach advocates the growth of virtues as the genuine fulfillment of life. Yes, psychology had finally discovered the virtues—and in a big way. Some virtues are being proposed as relevant interventions in therapy. In short, psychology was slowly but steadily describing the person more truthfully, a development that derived from its evidence-based focus on helping the client. Most of these psychologists were not Christian, but nevertheless, we owe them a great deal.
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