Four Uncanny Moments in Cinema

This blog originally appeared on April 21, 2012.

Recently a friend and I got on the subject of childhood movies and the uncanny. Sigmund Freud took up his own thinking on the uncanny in a essay from 1919 entitled The Uncanny. It is from the essay that most psychologists are familiar with Das Unheimliche. Freud makes a distinction between the heimliche (concealed) and the unheimliche (unconcealed). Freud described the phenomenon of the uncanny as a projection of the repressed id onto the figure which brings forth the discomforting experience. Here are my top 4 examples of the uncanny from familiar films.

4. Mary Poppins

There is something uncanny about the entire Mary Poppins story. This scene stands out for me as a moment of the uncanny.

3. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
I am not alone in sensing the uncanny in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The "Child Catcher" is a particularly uncanny moment. 

2. The Wizard of Oz  
What is it about the Wizard of Oz that is so familiar, yet so strange?

1. La Dolce Vita
My number one moment of the uncanny is the finalé from La Dolce Vita. Fellini is a master of resonating the unconscious.

The Evolution of Erich Fromm

This blog originally appeared on December 12, 2011. 

"Fromm had an unparalleled ability to write for the public; the ability to express sensitive, complicated, and often paradoxical thoughts in a graspable way, while maintaining an intelligent conversation. Fromm was a man interested in actively incorporating his ideas and making them accessible to the man on the street."

Erich Fromm was a central figure of the American counterculture from World War II through the heart of the Cold War era. Beginning with his first English title Escape From Freedom (1941), through his final writings dealing with existential humanism, On Being Human, Erich Fromm created a unique convergence of psychoanalysis, Marxism, humanism, and Buddhism. Not holding dogmatically to any one of these life philosophies, he instead mined each for wisdom that could help in coping with the issues of the late 20^th century. Influences on Fromm’s thinking include the Talmud and the Torah, the teachings of Christ and the Buddha, Master Eckhart, and Goethe. His style of thinking was not singular, but rather, a plurality of convergences that resulted in a voice that helped to organize the voices of four decades of the conscientious.

What distinguished Fromm from other thinkers of his time was his rejection of dogmatism in any form. This free-floating pluralism resulted in a voice truly independent from a school of thought. Most notably might be Fromm’s split from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Through Fromm’s investigation and rejection of certain core, Freudian concepts, he found himself at odds with some of the Frankfurt School tradition. However, Fromm found this to be an experience of liberation, one in which he could retain much of what he found valuable in the Critical Theory tradition, while not being chained to it ideologically.

The most notable shift in Fromm’s thinking came in his 1960 text Psychoanalysis and Buddhism. As a thinker who would not moor himself to any one central piling, Fromm explored key concepts in the Eastern traditions. Not unlike his German predecessors Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger, Erich Fromm found Eastern thinking not only to enhance, challenge, and express many of the ideas of the Western tradition, but also to offer a new way of thinking about the issues that we face. Whereas popular figures such as Alan Watts would edify Zen and Tao, Erich Fromm integrated the Eastern ideas with the Western philosophical tradition. Fromm studied and practiced the life philosophy of Buddhism, however unlike others, it never became the life philosophy. Today the meeting of Buddhism and psychoanalysis has become a tradition of its own. This area of thought first found its voice through Erich Fromm.

The 1930s through the 1960s found Fromm doing most of his American writing. This was a time when academic psychology, as well as pop-psychology, was entranced with American behaviorism. For most academic psychologists Behaviorism was the arrival of psychology as a pure, lawful science. For those psychologists and other thinkers, outside of experimental psychology, behaviorism was yet another manifestation of the Newtonian fantasy. Fromm was not only critical of a dogmatically experimental psychology, but he considered it to be a dangerous ideology. Fromm was informed of the dangers of a purely experimental or scientific worldview through the writings Martin Heidegger. In The Sane Society Fromm takes on experimental psychology with Heideggerian sensitivities.

This discomfort with academic psychology continued when the cognitive movement began in the 1960s. Fromm became increasingly critical of models that overbearingly reduced human being into machines (in this instance computers). Fromm was not alone in this critique of behaviorism and, later, cognitive psychology. Humanistic psychology was the “third force” that reacted not only against experimental, but also, psychodynamic psychology. But Fromm was less interested in promoting any one school of thought than he was in integration of these schools. He was clearly critical of the movements in American, academic psychology, but he was equally as critical of Freudian psychoanalysis. Although Fromm considered his work to be humanist -he goes as far as to consider Marx as a great humanist- he is not the typical humanist of the period. Fromm’s writings and theories are far more developed and theoretical to be considered next to the typical, feel-good, representatives of the humanistic movement in psychology.

Fromm formed a convergence of philosophy, economics, theology, psychology, sociology, and political science. His theories and writings are difficult to place in any one academic department and truly contend the tendency to organize thinkers by subject matter. In Fromm’s texts we find that being human is a social conglomeration of the philosophical, the political, the emotional, and the spiritual. This, of course, reflects the soil in which he first broke through. Frankfurt School thinkers like Marcuse and Adorno had laid out the interdisciplinary approach; the blending of Freud and Marx was necessarily an interdisciplinary project. Fromm continued this project by reinvesting into man as a spiritual being.

Philosophically, Fromm dwells in that group of thinkers that come after the Kantian split. Clearly an existentialist, Fromm is informed not only by Kant but also Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. He finds camaraderie with Spinoza, Master Eckhart, Leibniz, and Pascal and it is not uncharacteristic for him to draw on ancient Greek thinking. He does not, however, fetishize and romanticize Ancient Greece, instead he saves this honor for pre-enlightenment Europe.

Politically and economically, Fromm was a Marxist. However, his radical, humanist reading of Marx set him apart from his cohorts. Although he shared this position with the Frankfurt School thinkers, Fromm took Marxist humanism to a new level. In his 1961 text Marx’s Concept of Man, Fromm presents and discusses Marx's early concepts of alienation and private property. Through Fromm’s pen we find these ideas made practical for the Twentieth Century in critical issues of freedom and a self, based on having.

Sociologically we find Fromm in the company of Marxist theorists. The ideas of Durkheim, de Toqueville, and Arendt resonate with the Frommian spirit. Psychologically, Fromm is a psychoanalyst. His rejection of Freud’s privileging of sexual drives is monumental and intelligent. His 1935 paper The Social Determination of Psychoanalytic Therapy alienated him from both orthodox psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School’s harbinger, Max Horkheimer. Although Freud had focused on culture, society, and civilization in his later writings, he still held culture to be the sublimation of sexual drives. Fromm did not entirely reject this, he did however, show that culture had become a greater influence on human being than biological drives. For orthodox Freudians this was heresy, but for the new wave of thinkers such as Karen Horney, Erik Erikson, and even Wilhelm Reich, Fromm was the pioneer of social psychoanalysis.

Erich Fromm was concerned not only with society and man as independent subjects, but rather of the Gestalt of the social person. Man and culture would not be parsed from one another as is customary in social psychology and sociology. Although he did not play-out the conversation of man and society, and the S/O split to its end, as did say, Jacques Lacan and the French thinkers of the 20^th Century, he did introduce a widespread readership to the possibility of that kind of thinking. We can think of Fromm as someone who was completely aware of what was behind the curtain, but realized that pulling the curtain down too quickly would be uneventful. As a psychoanalyst, Fromm understood that nature resists sudden changes, and that to affect culture as a whole, new ideas were best presented in subtle chippings, rather than mammoth blows. In this way Fromm was much more effective at introducing the layperson to the ideas of Heidegger, Marx, and Adorno, than have been cultural icons such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard. Fromm had an unparalleled ability to write for the public; the ability to express sensitive, complicated, and often paradoxical thoughts in a graspable way, while maintaining an intelligent conversation. Fromm was a man interested in actively incorporating his ideas and making them accessible to the man on the street.

The issues that occupied Fromm’s thinking manifested during the pre-Nazi, modern world of political fascism, through the post-Vietnam War, postmodern world of culture marketing. His writings deal with individual freedom in the age political fascism through the age of technology. Many of his concerns continue to be the concerns of today, and where much of his thinking was premonitory, most of it has become more relevant than when it was written.

Overshadowing the issues of Nazi fascism, the American Civil Rights Movement, cultural colonialism, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and corporate fascism was the impending promise of atomic annihilation. The atomic question took center stage for much of Fromm’s life and became the most urgent issue to be addressed. But behind this external threat of a nuclear apocalypse was another issue of the problem of technology. Fromm was equally as concerned with the ideology, technology, politics, and capitalism as he was the atomic bomb. For Fromm, President Eisenhauer’s warning of a military-industrial-complex, a corporate incentive to go to war, was as threatening to mankind as the bomb.

At the foundation, however, of Fromm’s concerns was a person’s relationship with herself. Based on the human need for a sense of self, Fromm described a modern, social personality that was alienated from an authentic life and enmeshed in an ideology of consumerism. Fromm’s best-known book To Have or to Be is an exploration into the trend of basing one’s sense of self on what they have rather than on what they do. This is the Fromm that dealt with ideology and complex intersection of politics, economy, culture, and psychology in what is called personality.

Erich Fromm is a name that has not become forgotten, but perhaps has become overlooked, in 21^st century thought. Fromm’s accessible, clearly written, and concise writing made him readable by nonprofessional thinkers. His ideas were comparable to those expressed by his Frankfurt School colleagues but did not assume or require a graduate degree to read. For this reason, a generation of revolutionaries came to embrace Fromm’s texts, while academic and public intellectuals have bypassed him for the more obscure writings of Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. Even those German, French, and American writers of poststructuralism hold much in common with Fromm’s writing, if not for his clear and understandable style. For this reason, Fromm has been neglected by the academy and forgotten by the aging generation of 1960s radicals.

Erich Fromm’s thoughts and teachings are increasingly relevant to the issues of today. We will find that many of the issues remain, in addition to new manifestations of old problems. Much of his thinking, based on three thousand years of intellectual history, is timeless and reflects the core issues of human existence. What is unique about Fromm is not only how he presents his thoughts, but also, how he organizes and constructs them.

Rethinking Reductionism With Google Maps

This blog originally appeared on March 28, 2013

"The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone,

the vision is materialistic and depressing.

Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology;

what is higher is explained by what is lower

and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'

-nothing but something else of quite an inferior sort.

You get, in short, a materialistic universe,

in which only the tough-minded find

themselves congenially at home."

 -William James

(The Present Dilemma in Philosophy)

Matthew Giobbi, 2012.

A sea change has occurred in how we understand the structure of knowing in cognitive neuroscience. Today, researchers, writers, and professors of psychology are holding discussions in a way that is much more in-line with the attitude of William James's radical empiricism.

James instructed the emerging science of psychology to embrace a cross-paradigmatic (in today's terms, an interdisciplinary) attitude of investigation. It has been a long time coming for psychology. James, greatly in spirit with his friend C.S. Peirce, was attempting to point the science of psychology in the direction that the other sciences of the 20th & 21st Centuries would take; a trajectory towards semiotics. Much of what Peirce outlined in his works on semiotics, a system of thought that has been the central influence on contemporary science, was unpacked for psychology in James's radical empiricism and pragmatism. Today, it seems that we are closer than ever to the third culture that C.P. Snow had called for in 1959; a truly radical empiricism.

Despite this shift in how we approach knowing, there are two philosophical attitudes that seem to prevail amongst students entering into the university study of the social sciences. It is for these students that I present this essay. It is not a suggestion to reject, but rather, an invitation to expand how we think about knowing through the social sciences. These two attitudes are strikingly present in conversation with most of my first-year students. Both share a common origin in early, classical, concepts of the philosophy of science, as well as an almost taken for granted (captivation-in-an-acceptedness) place in the Enlightenment rules for thinking. In addition these philosophies are closely related to two fallacies of thought, a consideration that is the topic of this undertaking. The two concepts that I speak of are Reductionism and Mechanism.

William James

In his extraordinarily insightful text on the philosophy of science, Worldviews, Richard DeWitt explores the evolution of the scientific knowledge systems since the early Greek thinkers. Just as Professor Hilary Putnam describes, in an interview with Bryan Magee, DeWitt outlines some central attitudes that have been dismissed within some sciences, and privileged within others. Whether this be the result of an internalist attitude within a specific field of study (only learning the history and philosophy of the science from within that science), or due to the absence of the study of the philosophy of science in most university science departments, the question of what science is has a different answer depending on the discipline in which it is asked. This is especially true for the social sciences. The main distinction between physics and the social sciences has been the adoption of Peirce's philosophy in the former, and a forgetting of it (through James's pragmatism) in psychology. This is the context of the problem, but let's turn to the two specific concepts of interest in this discussion; reductionism and mechanism.

The idea of reductionism is woven into the fabric of our sense of reality. Although it seems obvious that bigger is made-up of smaller (subatomic, atomic, cells, organs, etc...), an accompanying sensibility is not necessarily true; that smaller is the cause of bigger. Reductionism, then, is the idea that larger features are caused by smaller features. Examples include the idea that an area of the brain causes a certain behavior or temperament, or that a particular emotion is merely a result of certain neurotransmitters. This attitude of reductionism commits what is referred to as a causal fallacy, specifically, the idea that smaller causes bigger. It is an attractive, almost commonsense, point of view. However, critical analysis shows us that smaller might be correlated with bigger, but, smaller is not necessarily the cause of bigger. As we all learn in the first year of research methods, "correlation is not causation".

C.S. Peirce

Let's consider an example. In a popular Introduction to Psychology text by David Myers, the author correctly points out that brain scans of virtuoso violinists reveal a specific development in the motor strip of the right, frontal cortex. This area of the brain is associated with the left hand and fingers, which are predominant in violin playing. The right hand is mostly used for grasping the bow, rather than fingering notes, which accounts for the difference in neural concentration and activity between the left and right motor cortex. Keep in mind that this is true due to the lateralization of brain function; the left side of the body is associated with the right side of the body. Note the choice of the word associated rather than caused. Even in the use of the most basic words one can infer causation rather than correlation. The point Myers makes is that the violinist's brain has concentrated neural tissue and activity through years of practice of the instrument, and in turn, correlates with greater finger dexterity while playing the instrument. We do not have a clear causal relationship here, but rather, a correlationship. In this example, we cannot say that the brain in causing the violin playing, no more than we can say that brain chemicals are causing an emotion. The idea that the smaller causes the larger is a fallacy that has a history rooted in the 16th and 17th Century Scientific Revolution, a tradition from within The Enlightenment.

At the time, physics was largely developed through Newtonian, or what is now called Classical Mechanics. The idea was that all the structures of the natural universe (from planets to the brain) were merely a mechanized, clockwork structure that are governed by universal laws, just waiting to be "discovered". The way to discovery of this mechanized, lawful natural order was through reduction; dissection, magnification, and peeling away to the ultimate substance. This ultimate stuff, it was thought, would be arrived at through careful observation and measurement. Newtonian notions of science were abandoned in the early 20th Century, in particular with the Einsteinian Revolution which established that stuff at the subatomic level does not follow the same laws as the substances at the atomic level. In other words, Newtonian science does not work at the subatomic level. Today, physicists speak less in terms of classical mechanics, and more in the ideas of theoretical physics; Chaos Theory, String Theory, and subatomic physics.

New models of science, which physics embraced in the early Twentieth Century, were largely based on the influential thinking of C.S. Peirce. Without Peirce's work on semiotics there would be no theoretical physics. Whereas most of the sciences moved away from the "old view" of science, much of the social sciences did not. Despite the fact that the founder of American psychology, William James, called for a scientific psychology greatly influenced by Peirce, the more simplistic system of behaviorism completely overshadowed James in the early Twentieth Century. Radical Empiricism and pragmatism were not alone in this, the Gestalt tradition was also drowned by the behaviorist paradigm, not to return until cognitive psychology emerged in the 1960s. The way in which scientific psychology has been done, since the Nineteenth Century, has largely been based on antiquated notions of a Newtonian Science. Today, as predicted by thinkers including Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, scientific psychology has rethought what "science" is and how it is done.

A rethinking the fallacious assumption, that reductionism infers cause and effect, can be illustrated by using a familiar model from Google Maps. With google maps we have a function that is similar to that of the microscope when looking at a tissue sample; magnification. Through "zooming out" (the - function) we can take a distant of view of the object from afar. As we increase our magnification ("zoom in" with the + function), we are able to approach the street level of a specific neighborhood. We are tempted, when magnifying a piece of tissue, to understand the cells as building the tissue. We are also tempted to understand neurotransmitters (or brain areas) as the "cause" of a simultaneous emotion, behavior, or thought process. However, we would never claim that somehow a street in Newark causes the universe. We do not view the magnification of maps in the same way that we view the magnification of neural tissue or the brain. The question is, why do we assume causation through reductionism, and can we expand our approach and understanding of science, in a radically empirical way, through the Google Map metaphor?

Erich Fromm's Taxonomy of Bad Faith: Sartre & Character Types

This blog first appeared on October 23, 2011.

“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”

-Erich Fromm

I was recently asked to address a group of students on this question: what is the single most important issue facing America today? As expected my fellow guests, a philosopher, a sociologist, and a psychologist, seemed to situate themselves around a predictable hub of economic, ecological, and national security issues. Instead I proposed that the greatest threat to America today was the American attitude itself. It is not an external threat, but rather, an internal locus, a sort of pathological way of being that has come to be a hallmark of success. I want to outline what I had to say in that discussion. It centers on the ideas of two thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, and is nicely articulated by a third, Erich Fromm.

Character and Styles of Being

There is a certain, rather pervasive, personality style that is encountered on a daily basis. This individual can be found in all walks of life, but is mostly encountered in what is called the professions. By professional  I mean those areas of practice in which one exercises the role of the expert, or plays the role of the authority on a certain topic or set of issues. These are the learned folks of our culture: the medical, scientific, academic, and business establishment. This is a tribe that often present not as practitioners of a profession, but rather, as the profession itself, not a person who does business as much as a businessperson.

Erich Fromm

There is a salient feature amongst professionals  in a certain way of being. This way of being is a sort of culturally expected personality style that one adopts, through their training, and then lives up to after graduation. This is the physician who plays the role of physician, the businessman who acts as one should act when one is a businessman, and the professor who becomes the expert  -presenting herself accordingly. Most often it is observed as affected or contrived. It can be experienced as professionalism, authority, arrogance, or inferiority depending on whom it is that is encountering it.

Jean-Paul Sartre described Heidegger's concept of falleness as bad faith.

There is something unconvincing about this style of being. Typically, those who do it cannot seem to be aware of it, seemingly it is only apparent to those outside of the performance. This performance is described by Jean-Paul Sartre as living in bad faith; when one hides from authenticity and instead chooses the safer position of a cultural role called facticity.

Facticity is like an object. One is not a person who is doctoring, but rather is a doctor. One is not someone who dwells with others in thought, but is a professor. Facticity is the objectification of a role; it is where an action becomes an object, almost like transposing a verb into a noun. One is no longer what one does, but rather, what one is titled. It is when one acts-out that title that we find a life in bad faith.

Jean Paul Sartre

Erich Fromm described personality styles that exemplified bad faith.

Erich Fromm described Sartre’s bad faith in five character types. These character types are not diagnosable personality disorders or even inherited personality structures. Fromm’s character types are adaptive ways of being in an evolutionary sense; they are methods of survival within an environment. Over a series of articles I am going to discuss these five character types, which I propose as Fromm’s taxonomy of bad faith. First, though, we must understand the function of personality and its operation in society and culture.

What Makes Human?

We begin from the position that it is society and culture that makes a person who they are and not biology. Although we are biological beings, a function of evolutionary unfolding, we are also transcended beings. Human Being is the activity of dealing with our biological drives in a social way. We are not primarily interested in physical survival, but rather in social survival. We do not strive for our life, but rather for living with others. Although biological drive is a part of being human it is not the dominant force. Homo sapien is influenced less by biological drives and more by cultural forces.

We call this cultural force desire. The social animal is a transcended Being that is not governed by cause-and-effect chains of logic, but rather, by an integrated being-in-the-world in which an individual’s environment is not an objective situation that they are in, but rather, an active interpretation that they are participating in making. We find here a main point in Fromm’s thinking, that we are not confronted with culture, but that we are a vital, shaping agent of culture. This is a sort of feedback-feedforward loop that is experienced as the world we live in. In fact, it is less a world we live in and more a world that lives within us.

Ways of Thinking: From Art to Social Science

This blog originally appeared on September 11, 2013.

The chromatic gradation effect.

I entered into psychology as many of us do; through the life-theorists. I call them life-theorist because they are not merely clinicians who treat the psychologically disturbed, but also, they think about our common experiences of living, and how to go about those experiences most effectively. They can also be called life philosophers because their interest is often less on acquiring facts and more on effective living. Most of us enter into psychology via our interest in Freud, Maslow, Jung, and others that have come to be called psychotherapists. For me psychology was never wholly about therapy and patients; it was more about living, life, and thinking; the psychology of the practitioner.

Once one is in it, one realizes that the field of study is not really a field at all, but rather, fields. We find psychologies rather than psychology. These psychologies each have a unique set of definitions, practices, and ideologies that defines their practices. We sometimes meet another "psychologist" who holds a view similar to ours, of what psychology is.

The first thing we learn about the psychologies is that there are two, distinct, practices. One psychology is that of the research psychologist. Primarily interested in the social, abnormal, personal, cognitive, emotional, perceptual, sensorial, or biological aspects of being human, these folks employ a variety of research methods to either explore, describe, or write the laws of human and nonhuman phenomenon. These psychologists spend their time researching; choosing and using various research methods (choosing the methods that best suit their beliefs about doing research) in order to test, develop, and work through their ideas.

The other side of the field, what we call clinical-counseling psychology, is comprised of individuals who think about, research, and impart strategies for living. This area of study and practice extends from helping the severely mentally ill, considering how to better communicate and interact with others, to exploring the very concept of the existence of the self. Practitioners of this kind of psychology work with others, using their one-on-one and group experiences as research information, to establish their ideas.

I entered psychology as a second profession. I had spent the first  decade of my adult life studying classical music in both European and American conservatories. An art school, music conservatory education is comprised of studio time (we use practice rooms, which are small closets with a piano and a music stand), one-on-one lessons with a master teacher, various classes in the practice, history, understanding, performing, and creation of music, as well as ensemble rehearsal (chamber music and symphony orchestra). There were distinct differences between my music education and my psychology education. Music school, like most art programs, is a unique experience which reminds me of an ancient master-apprentice model of learning. Contrastingly, the academic university system is mostly a classroom experience. In the conservatory we had to perform pieces for our "grade" (something most of my teachers rolled their eyes at), in this university we took tests, delivered and wrote papers for our grade.

Upon entering the university, I was immediately captivated by what was called the science of psychology; the use of the scientific method. I was taught that this is what made psychology a "science".

Not unlike music theory, in which each note is analyzed in the context of its harmony and progression, scientific psychology seemed to get to the foundation of what it was considering. I have always relied on analogical thinking to grasp new ideas. It seemed like an easy enough comparison; music had theorist who analyzed its form, harmony, progression, rhythm, and dynamics; we even referred to these as the elements of music. Like the ingredients of a recipe, things could be broken down and analyzed by the elements and procedures that brought them about. It is important to note that in conservatory we never assumed that these elements caused the music. We looked at analysis as a description, not as an ultimate explanation of music. We all understood the function of a V-chord in an I-IV-V progression, but we never felt that the progression (or the chord) caused the music. We simply understood the harmonic analysis as a symbolic representation of the music itself. I would say that, if asked what caused the music, most musicians would say that it was caused by the composer or the performer. As for the emotional aspect of music, that was enisled to our private conversations. Most of my professional musician colleagues were likely to discuss technical aspects of music rather than the emotional experience of the music. Even when emotion was discussed it was referred to as "interpretation" of the composer's intention.

It seems that music theory is the science of music. The observation, description, and even control (there are long-respected rules of composition that all conservatory students learn) of the musical elements is the mission of music theory. However, we never mistook the theory of music as the cause of the music. In this sense, musicians view analysis as description; not as cause and effect lawfulness.

In science, or more accurately in the philosophy of science, we discuss two different kinds of scientific lawfulness: causal laws and correlational laws. Causal laws describe how events are causally related. Correlational laws describe how a events reliably occur together, but do not necessarily have a causal relationship. In our thought experiment of music theory as a scientific method, we can understand harmonic analysis as a description of correlational laws; the harmonic or melodic progression is not seen as the cause of the phenomenon, but rather, a useful description of it. A graphic analysis of a piece of music might be similar to an fMRI image of the brain, in that it displays a symbolic representation of the elements of the phenomenon. Whereas my first thinking about psychological phenomenon was informed by musical art and the humanities, my second inquiry led me to the natural and social sciences. Each

Science, it has been said, is a method; a step-by-step procedure that, if followed, results in reliable models of the phenomenon being studied (Popper). It has also been argued that science is a social action, one that moves by economic, political, and social pressures (Kuhn). The natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, and some areas of psychology) study physical stuff. The scientific study of society, economy, emotions, cognitions, and behaviors are called social sciences. Sometimes social scientists are dedicated to defending the status of their discipline as a science, against the natural scientists' criticism that it is a soft science. It has been my experience that a scientist's concern with being a scientist is one that is observed more amongst the social scientists than amongst the natural scientists.

Max Wertheimer, originator of Gestalt theory.

One psychological tradition, in particular, has resonated with me both as a social scientist and as an artist. The Gestalt tradition, originating with Max Wertheimer, continues to bridge the two worlds of art and science for me. The Gestalt theorists were interested in how contextual structures determine meaning. In psychology we find the Gestaltists exploring the then new medium of motion pictures, Virtual Reality, art, and social meaning. Kurt Lewin, who is considered to be the founder of social psychology, was a Gestalt thinker. The essence of the Gestalt position is best expressed, I believe, in the chromatic gradation effect in the above graphic. We find here the phenomenon take on meaning in relation to their environment. The Gestalt (the grounding) is the empirical or rational background that the phenomenon emerges within. Like notes in a chord or melody, we manifest not from our environment but with it.

Ways of Thinking: From Art to Social Science

This blog originally appeared on September 11, 2013.

The chromatic gradation effect.

I entered into psychology as many of us do; through the life-theorists. I call them life-theorist because they are not merely clinicians who treat the psychologically disturbed, but also, they think about our common experiences of living, and how to go about those experiences most effectively. They can also be called life philosophers because their interest is often less on acquiring facts and more on effective living. Most of us enter into psychology via our interest in Freud, Maslow, Jung, and others that have come to be called psychotherapists. For me psychology was never wholly about therapy and patients; it was more about living, life, and thinking; the psychology of the practitioner.

Once one is in it, one realizes that the field of study is not really a field at all, but rather, fields. We find psychologies rather than psychology. These psychologies each have a unique set of definitions, practices, and ideologies that defines their practices. We sometimes meet another "psychologist" who holds a view similar to ours, of what psychology is.

The first thing we learn about the psychologies is that there are two, distinct, practices. One psychology is that of the research psychologist. Primarily interested in the social, abnormal, personal, cognitive, emotional, perceptual, sensorial, or biological aspects of being human, these folks employ a variety of research methods to either explore, describe, or write the laws of human and nonhuman phenomenon. These psychologists spend their time researching; choosing and using various research methods (choosing the methods that best suit their beliefs about doing research) in order to test, develop, and work through their ideas.

The other side of the field, what we call clinical-counseling psychology, is comprised of individuals who think about, research, and impart strategies for living. This area of study and practice extends from helping the severely mentally ill, considering how to better communicate and interact with others, to exploring the very concept of the existence of the self. Practitioners of this kind of psychology work with others, using their one-on-one and group experiences as research information, to establish their ideas.

I entered psychology as a second profession. I had spent the first  decade of my adult life studying classical music in both European and American conservatories. An art school, music conservatory education is comprised of studio time (we use practice rooms, which are small closets with a piano and a music stand), one-on-one lessons with a master teacher, various classes in the practice, history, understanding, performing, and creation of music, as well as ensemble rehearsal (chamber music and symphony orchestra). There were distinct differences between my music education and my psychology education. Music school, like most art programs, is a unique experience which reminds me of an ancient master-apprentice model of learning. Contrastingly, the academic university system is mostly a classroom experience. In the conservatory we had to perform pieces for our "grade" (something most of my teachers rolled their eyes at), in this university we took tests, delivered and wrote papers for our grade.

Upon entering the university, I was immediately captivated by what was called the science of psychology; the use of the scientific method. I was taught that his is what made psychology a "science".

Not unlike music theory, in which each note is analyzed in the context of its harmony and progression, scientific psychology seemed to get to the foundation of what it was considering. I have always relied on analogical thinking to grasp new ideas. It seemed like an easy enough comparison; music had theorist who analyzed its form, harmony, progression, rhythm, and dynamics; we even referred to these as the elements of music. Like the ingredients of a recipe, things could be broken down and analyzed by the elements and procedures that brought them about. It is important to note that in conservatory we never assumed that these elements caused the music. We looked at analysis as a description, not as an ultimate explanation of music. We all understood the function of a V-chord in an I-IV-V progression, but we never felt that the progression (or the chord) caused the music. We simply understood the harmonic analysis as a symbolic representation of the music itself. I would say that, if asked what caused the music, most musicians would say that it was caused by the composer or the performer. As for the emotional aspect of music, that was enisled to our private conversations. Most of my professional musician colleagues were likely to discuss technical aspects of music rather than the emotional experience of the music. Even when emotion was discussed it was referred to as "interpretation" of the composer's intention.

It seems that music theory is the science of music. The observation, description, and even control (there are long-respected rules of composition that all conservatory students learn) of the musical elements is the mission of music theory. However, we never mistook the theory of music as the cause of the music. In this sense, musicians view analysis as description; not as cause and effect lawfulness.

In science, or more accurately in the philosophy of science, we discuss two different kinds of scientific lawfulness: causal laws and correlational laws. Causal laws describe how events are causally related. Correlational laws describe how a events reliably occur together, but do not necessarily have a causal relationship. In our thought experiment of music theory as a scientific method, we can understand harmonic analysis as a description of correlational laws; the harmonic or melodic progression is not seen as the cause of the phenomenon, but rather, a useful description of it. A graphic analysis of a piece of music might be similar to an fMRI image of the brain, in that it displays a symbolic representation of the elements of the phenomenon. Whereas my first thinking about psychological phenomenon was informed by musical art and the humanities, my second inquiry led me to the natural and social sciences. Each

Science, it has been said, is a method; a step-by-step procedure that, if followed, results in reliable models of the phenomenon being studied (Popper). It has also been argued that science is a social action, one that moves by economic, political, and social pressures (Kuhn). The natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, and some areas of psychology) study physical stuff. The scientific study of society, economy, emotions, cognitions, and behaviors are called social sciences. Sometimes social scientists are dedicated to defending the status of their discipline as a science, against the natural scientists' criticism that it is a soft science. It has been my experience that a scientist's concern with being a scientist is one that is observed more amongst the social scientists than amongst the natural scientists.

Max Wertheimer, originator of Gestalt theory.

One psychological tradition, in particular, has resonated with me both as a social scientist and as an artist. The Gestalt tradition, originating with Max Wertheimer, continues to bridge the two worlds of art and science for me. The Gestalt theorists were interested in how contextual structures determine meaning. In psychology we find the Gestaltists exploring the then new medium of motion pictures, Virtual Reality, art, and social meaning. Kurt Lewin, who is considered to be the founder of social psychology, was a Gestalt thinker. The essence of the Gestalt position is best expressed, I believe, in the chromatic gradation effect in the above graphic. We find here the phenomenon take on meaning in relation to their environment. The Gestalt (the grounding) is the empirical or rational background that the phenomenon emerges within. Like notes in a chord or melody, we manifest not from our environment but with it.