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Notes
It was “higher” both because it dealt with higher psychological processes—cultural processes, as opposed to sensory and motor processes—and because it was more valued (Kusch 1999).
Bartlett frequently and emphatically uses the phrase “an effort after meaning” to describe his various experimental results, in both this publication and others that follow. This phrase comes very close to Ganzheitspsychologie’s “striving for the whole”, though I have not found evidence of direct influence between the two groups. Instead, the notion must have been part of the early 20th century European Zeitgeist.
Vygotsky (1987) famously said, “[E]very function in the cultural development of the child appears on the stage twice, in two planes, first, the social, then the psychological, first between people as an intermental category, then within the child as an intramental category. This pertains equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, to the formation of concepts, and to the development of will” (p. 145). Veresov (2010) has pointed out that the word “category” came from Russian theater criticism and Hegel, where it meant a kind of “dramatic collision”, or in other words “tension” occurring on stage.
Narratology teaches us that narratives are only generated when there is “tension” (or “trouble”) between act, scene, agent, agency and purpose (Burke 1945); when things are going as anticipated there are “scripts”, such as going what is involved going to a restaurant (Shank and Abelson 1977), but not “narratives”.
An excellent example of this is the fate of Lewin et al. (1939) classic study conducted in the USA. They created ‘authoritarian’, ‘democratic’ and ‘laissez-faire’ groups whose differences could then be holistically compared. Lewin thought these different ‘group climates’ could not be reduced to elementary variables. Already by the early 1950s, Lewin’s holistic form of experimentation was incomprehensible to leading American psychologists, even those sympathetic to Gestalt ideas. For example, Festinger (1953, p. 138) criticized it in these terms: “rather than isolating and precisely manipulating a single variable or small set of variables, the experimenters attempted a large and complex manipulation. There was also little attempt at control.” A methodology that did not reduce to cause and effect relationships between variables was demeaned unscientific (see Danziger 1990; 1992; 2000). An exception to this American tendency was the work of Lewin’s student Asch. Though Asch’s (1952) conformity studies remain classics the holistic aspects of his analysis are rarely discussed.
Wolfgang Metzger of the Gestalt school did remain active in Germany during the war by opportunistically reformulating the holistic approach to support Nazi ideology. He recanted post-war and continued to pursue Gestalt ideas.
Bartlett’s (1932) serial reproduction experiments aptly capture the psychological dimensions of this process. They are also illuminating examples of a holistic experimental methodology.
There are important counter examples to this. An anonymous reviewer has aptly pointed out that the holistic orientation is still strong in clinical neuroscience. V.S. Ramachandran, for example, has consistently worked within the ‘romantic’ tradition of A.R. Luria, which extends back to Vygotsky’s influence. Studies in clinical neuroscience cannot achieve the large sample sizes required of aggregate style research due to the rarity of cases. Perhaps this has lead this field to tools for analyzing the complexity of whole single cases.
Floyd Allport (1924, p. 4) is notorious for advocating an individualistic social psychology: “There is no psychology of groups that is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals. Social psychology must not be placed in contradistinction to the psychology of the individual; it is part of the psychology of the individual, whose behavior it studies in relation to that sector of his environment comprised by his fellows.” Before Allport the dominant conception of the ‘social’ was the properties of groups, which could not be predicted from a summation of individuals in the group, such as the customs, values and norms specific to a particular group. The more ‘social’ social psychology was largely comparative in methods, exploring the distinctive mentalities of different social groups (see Farr 1996; Greenwood 2004).
Dialogical theorists have, however, recently attempted to show that the self is much more divided and de-centered than has previously been supposed (see Hermans 2002). Even that being so, it is still safe to say society is more divided than the Self.
See http://www.collateralmurder.com/ (wikileaks 2010)
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Wagoner, B. What Happened to Holism?. Psychol Stud 56, 318–324 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-011-0092-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-011-0092-z