[OhioBlue]

Originally Posted by Sleeping in EQ

So my questions are:

Is there room in mainstream psychology for putting Western and Eastern perspectives in dialectic?

Is there room for this kind of thing in a theoretical sense, but practical realities keep it from happening?

Do you interact with professionals from Eastern psychological traditions?

Do you see the possibility for more of this kind of thing with the growing populations of Eastern and Western diaspora?

Are you guys satisfied with "psychology as science" or are you willing to bring in the unquantifiable?
__________________

I think Danimal did a fine job answering your question in a way that I would agree with. But I'll add my answers as well, because I'm bored and out of my office while it's being painted, and the fumes are already getting to my head.

1. Is there room? Yes, depending on who you ask. Psychology, generally speaking, suffers from a science--practice divide. Or an art--science divide. Bringing Eastern thought to the table often means letting a lot of philosophy and 'art' into the conversation, and there are some hard-core empirical folks who get uncomfortable with this at best, or scoff at it and completely blow it off at worst. This phenomenon is hardly limited to eastern vs western clashes, by the way. The general trend in our very young discipline has been to eschew our roots in philosophy and religion, swing over to a heavily positivistic bent, and play the game the way the natural sciences do. The problem with this should be quite evident to a thinker such as yourself. What's interesting to me, though, is that despite the current zeitgeist toward empirical support for everything, and scientific 'evidence' for what we think/do in psychology, the art/philosophy of the discipline still won't go away. I'm quite pleased with that, and expect that eventually psychology will pull its collective head out and stop trying to ride the coattails of medicine. We'll see, maybe I'm idealistic.

So that got a little off topic, but you know what I mean.

2. Yes, practical realities often keep it from happening. See above. A good case study in what practical realities can do to a field is psychiatry. Today's psychology is what psychiatry once endeavored to include, but it has virtually wholly abandoned everything save a reductionistic medical model of human functioning, and that is now its specialty. Psychiatrists like Szasz or heck even Yalom--philosophers, practitioners of therapy, and medical professionals altogether--have gone the way of the dinosaur. I can count on one hand the number of psychiatrists who do more than a 15 minute med-check once a person has been added to their caseload and gone through the intake procedure.

That's not to say that's a bad thing, it's just evidence to me of what happens when a discipline throws aside theory and philosophy in favor of "what works" (if there is a more ambiguous phrase in our field, I don't know it) and narrows its focus in accordance with the realities and pushes of the economy, culture, and so on. Right now, psychologists in many states are pushing for prescription privilege--a complicated discussion if ever there was one. Suffice it to say I think it's generally a bad idea, philosophically without foundation, and based more than most would like to admit on economics and a heavily medicalized Western culture. These "practical realities" are often followed at the expense of critical thought and with complete disregard for the philosophies upon which our field was founded.

3. Yes. Most practicing psychologists these days, whether they admit it or not, are technically eclectic. As a clarification, I'm realizing at this point in my response that you and I may not be thinking the same thing when we use the word 'Eastern.' I include Freud, Jung, and their contemporaries in Europe among Western thinkers. Eastern to me would include more of what Danimal mentioned--Buddhist philosophy, far Eastern thinkers, different cultural norms and ideas about health and wellness, etc. I have studied and enjoy the Morita and Naikan traditions out of Japan, Buddhist philosophy, and I have training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy which Danimal mentioned. I see a lot of underlying philosophical agreement between these and many of the Existential-Humanist tradition. Especially Kierkegaard, Rollo May, Tillich, and others who have informed the psychological discipline in particular. Interestingly enough, in today's psychological culture of empirical support and scientific rigor, these kinds of contributions are either ignored or kept in a separate category far away from the discussion (not always, but often). Why? Because by their very nature, these philosophical matters do not lend themselves to empirical study. So instead, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) gets all the rave reviews because it can be structured, manualized, and operationalized at a concrete and observable level, while the philosophies that informed our field get too often disregarded. Incidentally I see this happening far more in the ivory towers of academia than I see it in actual clinical practice. Many practitioners have enough experience with the actual complexity of human-ness, and a healthy respect for the same, that they refuse to foreclose on the discussion by wholeheartedly adopting a bunch of cute little technique-y things without critical thought. Wow now I'm really rambling.

4. Possibilities, yes. Likelihood? Not for a while. The pendulum, as I've said, is well over on the scientific, medical, reductionistic side. Find the pain/problem, label it (because somehow that helps), construct a metaphysical coding system to assuage both clients' and clnicians' anxiousness about the ambiguity of many aspects of human existence, then get down to the business of identifying the cause and removing it. IE find the problem and remove it. Works real well with cars and computers, not so well with human beings.

Psychology I believe will probably unfortunately go even further in this direction than it already is before it's fully ready to give up on a completely flawed philosophy and go back to what people were saying at the beginning of the last century. William James et al would be appalled, IMO.

5. Satisfied with psychology as a science? My answer should be abundantly clear by now, if you've made it this far through my discombobulated thought process. Don't get me wrong--science and empirical observation are important and have their place. I'm not so foolish as to suggest we throw the baby out with the...well you know. But that's just it--they have A place. It offers useful contributions, if balanced against a larger underlying philosophy and tempered by a healthy respect for complexity and uncertainty. But empiricism in no way (in my not so humble opinion) belongs at the ontological level or core. A lot of people in my field and others related to it would have a hard time with that last statement.

Anyway, I'll stop there. I could go on for hours. My dissertation delved into much of the same underlying issues that are core to our discussion here, at least in some associated manner. I think though that what Danimal said is true--right now there is a notable absence of critical thought, philosophical examination of what we do in psychology and why. Studies of theory are discarded in favor of studies of technique, or of structured approaches. Levinas' call to honor the "infinite alterity of the other" and the moral obligations that go with that is pushed aside in favor of a manual or book that tells us what the label is for person A's problems, and how to 'fix' or remove a reified list of 'symptoms.' Entiire defenses of psychology are constructed on the basis of showing 'symptom reduction' using Likert-scale assessments that are treated statistically like Interval data when truly they are Ordinal. And it goes on and on. It'll be interesting for me to see where psychology ends up in all this in the next 30 years. Will the divide between art/philosophy and science continue to widen? Or will the pendulum swing the other way? Or will we, as per usual, just wait to see what medicine does?

Fun discussion. Pardon the lengthiness, it was fun to ramble for a bit even though I know that at times I was going far beyond the intent of your questions.

Now back to those paint fumes.