"One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing. What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way."I've thought for a while that psychology and psychiatry have theoretical ceilings. They are out to understand and define (and medicate) through methodology and experimentation something which is impossibly complex. From this article it seems like psychologists are coming to that conclusion. They simply cannot, in theory, posit about the human mind and its nature because it varies not only upon its environment and influences, but upon the way each human mind perceives, interprets, and internalizes those influences. How do you study that? Even if you could get a person to talk about the way they perceive some event or emotion, their responses would be couched in constructed language and shaped by a layer of consciousness (unconsciousness) whose workings are "more than they can tell," and thus, in the end, impossible to theorize about. Sure, I think we could all admit psychology has shed some light on important human tendencies, but the conclusions always end up isolating and defining behaviors and dispositions whose causes simply are not and cannot be isolated. Despite so such earnestness to be considered an objective science, I think the science of the mind has finally realized its own end.
The Social Psychological Narrative — Or — What Is Social Psychology, Anyway? | Conversation | Edge
