Chapter 2
Acquiring Knowledge of a Person as a Task for the Scientist

What alterations in attitude toward science are called for by this change in world view? Where did these changes come from? What forced them upon our attention? Why is the mechanistic, nonhuman model giving way to a human-centered paradigm?

In my own history this clash in scientific world view first took the form of living simultaneously with two psychologies that had little to do with each other. In my career as an experimentalism in the laboratory, I felt quite comfortable and capable with my heritage of scientific orthodoxy. (See complete bibliography in 51). Indeed it was John B. Watson's optimistic credo (in Psychologies of 1925) that had brought me and many others into the field of psychology. His programmatic writings promised a clear road ahead. I felt - with great exhilaration - that it guaranteed progress. There could be ar e a l science of psychology, something solid and reliable to depend on to advance steadily and irreversibly from one certainty to the next. It offered a technique (conditioning) which gave promise of solving all problems and a wonderfully convincing philosophy (positivism, objectivism) that was easy to understand and to apply, that protected us against all the mistakes of the past.

But insofar as I was a psychotherapist, an analysand, a father, a teacher, and a student of personality - that is, insofar as I dealt with whole persons - "scientific psychology" gradually proved itself to be of little use. In this realm of persons I found far greater sustenance in "psychodynamics", especially the psychologies of Freud and Adler, psychologies that were clearly not "scientific" by the definitions of the day.

It was as if psychologists then lived by two mutually exclusive sets of rules, or as if they spoke two different languages for different purposes. If they were interested in working with animals, or with part-processes in human beings, they could be "experimental and scientific psychologists". But if they were interested in whole persons, these laws and methods were not of much help.

I think that we can understand these philosophical changes best if we contrast their relative effectiveness in handling these scientifically new human and personal problems. Let us ask the questions: suppose I wish to know more about the nature of the human person - about you, for instance, or about some other particular person - what is the most promising and most fruitful way to go about it? How useful are the assumptions and methods and conceptualizations of classical science? Which approach is best? Which techniques? Which epistemology? Which style of communication? Which tests and which measurements? Which a priori assumptions about the nature of knowledge? What do we mean by the word "know"?

NOMOTHETIC AND IDIOGRAPHIC KNOWING

First of all, we should be aware that this question itself about a person, is ruled out by many scientists as trivial or "unscientific". Practically all scientists (of the impersonal) proceed on the tacit or explicit assumption that one studies classes or groups of things, not single things. Of course you actually look at one thing at a time, one paramecium, one piece of quartz, one particular kidney, one schizophrenic. But each one is treated as a sample of a species or of a class, and therefore as interchangeable. (See 31 on Galilean and Aristotelian science.) No ordinary scientific journal would accept a meticulous description of a particular white rat or a particular fish. The main business of classical science is generalization, abstracting what is common to all white rats or fish, etc. (Teratology, the study of exceptions and of "marvels", i.e., of monsters, is of no great scientific interest except as it teaches more about the "normal" processes of embryology by contrast).

Any one sample is just that, a sample; it is not itself. It stands for something. It is anonymous, expendable, not unique, not sacred, not sine qua non: it has no proper name all its own and is not worthwhile in itself as a particular instance. It is interesting only insofar as it represents something other than itself. This is what I mean when I say that orthodox, textbook science normally and centrally studies classes of things, or interchangeable objects. There are no individuals in a textbook of physics or chemistry, let alone mathematics. Taking this as a centering point, as typical and as paradigmatic, astronomers, geologists, and biologists, dealing as they sometimes do with unique instances such as a particular planet or a particular earthquake or a particular sweetpea or drosophila, yet move toward generality as the approved way of becoming more scientific. For most scientists this is the only direction in which scientific knowledge grows.

And yet as we move further away from the central model of impersonal, generalizing, similarity-seeking science, we find that there are people who are systematically and persistently curious about unique, idiographic, individual instances that are not interchangeable, that are. sui generis and happen only once - some psychologists, for instance, and some ethnologists, some biologists, some historians and of course all human beings in their intimate personal relations. (I am sure physicists and chemists have spent as much time puzzling over their wives as they have over atoms.)

My original question was: if I want to know a person, what is the best way to go about doing it? And now I can rephrase this question more pointedly. How good for this purpose are the usual procedures of normal physical science (which, remember, is the widely accepted paradigm for all the sciences and even for all knowledge of any kind)? In general my answer is that they are not very good at all. As a matter of fact, they are practically useless if I want not only to know about you but also to understand you. If I want to know a person in those aspects of personhood that are most important to me, I have learned that I must go about this task in a different way, use different techniques and operate upon profoundly different philosophical assumptions about the nature of detachment, objectivity, subjectivity, reliability of knowledge, value, and precision. I shall try to spell out some of these below.

First of all I must approach a person as an individual unique and peculiar, the sole member of his class. Of course it is true that the normal scientific, abstract, psychological knowledge that I have accumulated through the years helps me to place him at least crudely in the classification of the whole human species. I know what to look for. I can make a rough characterological, constitutional, psychiatric, personological, and intellectual rating (IQ) far better than I could twenty-five years ago. And yet it is also true that all this nomothetic knowledge (of law, of generalization, of averages) is useful only if it can channel through and improve my idiographic knowledge (of this particular individual). Any clinician knows that in getting to know another person it is best to keep your brain out of the way, to look and listen totally, to be completely absorbed, receptive, passive, patient, and waiting rather than eager, quick, and impatient. It does not help to start measuring, questioning, calculating, or testing out theories, categorizing, or classifying. If your brain is too busy, you won't hear or see well. Freud's term "free-floating attention" describes well this noninterfering, global, receptive, waiting kind of cognizing another person.

To the seeker for knowledge about persons, abstract knowledge, scientific laws and generalizations, statistical tables and expectations are all useful if they can be humanized, personalized, individualized, focused into this particular interpersonal relationship. The good knower of people can be helped by classical "scientific" knowledge; the poor knower of people cannot be helped by all the abstract knowledge in the world. As some wit phrased it, "Any dope can have a high IQ."

THE HOLISTIC APPROACH

I don't wish to hazard any large generalizations here, but this I have learned also (as a therapist and as personologist). If I want to learn something more about you as an individual person, then I must approach you as a unit, as a one, as a whole. The customary scientific technique of dissection and reductive analysis that has worked so well in the inorganic world and not too badly even in the infrahuman world of living organisms, is just a nuisance when I seek knowledge of a person, and it has real deficiencies even for studying people in general. Psychologists have tried various atomistic dissections and reductions to fundamental building blocks of knowledge out of which, presumably, the whole was built - basic sensation bits, stimulus-response or associative bonds, reflex or conditioned reflexes, behavioral reactions, products of factor analysis, profiles of scores on various kinds of tests. Each of these efforts has left behind it some partial usefulness for the abstract, nomothetic science of psychology, but no one living would seriously propose any of them as a useful path to knowledge of members of a strange culture or of members of the John Birch Society, let alone of a blind date.

Not only must I perceive you holistically, but I must also analyze you holistically rather than reductively. (If I had the space, I should also like to spell out the effects of Gestalt psychology upon experimental and laboratory psychology; for a fuller treatment, see 38, ch 3).

SUBJECTIVE REPORT

By far the best way we have to learn what people are like is to get them, one way or another, to tell us, whether directly by question and answer or by free association, to which we simply listen, or indirectly by covert communications, paintings, dreams, stories, gestures, etc. - which we can interpret. Of course everyone knows this, and in our ordinary daily life all of us take advantage of this. But the fact remains that it raises real scientific problems. For example, a person who is telling us his political attitude is, so to speak, the only witness to what he is reporting. He can easily fool us if he wants to. An element of trust and good will and honesty is required here that is not required with any other existing object of scientific study. The interpersonal relationships of the speaker and of the listener are very much involved.

Astronomers, physicists, chemists, geologists, etc. need not concern themselves with such problems, at least not at first. It is possible for them to go far before needing to raise any questions about relationships between the knower and the known.

RECEPTIVITY, NONINTERFERENCE; TAOISTIC SCIENCE

Most young psychologists have been taught to use the controlled experiment as the model way of acquiring knowledge. Slowly and painfully we psychologists have had to learn to become good clinical or naturalistic observers, to wait and watch and listen patiently, to keep our hands off, to refrain from being too active and brusque, too interfering and controlling, and - most important of all in trying to understand another person - to keep our mouths shut and our eyes and ears wide open.

This is different from the model way in which we approach physical objects, i.e., manipulating them, poking at them, to see what happens, taking them apart, etc. If you do this to human beings, you won't get to know them. They won't want you to know them. They won't let you know them. Our interfering makes knowledge less likely, at least at the beginning. Only when we already know a great deal can we become more active, more probing, more demanding - in a word, more experimental.

PROBLEM-CENTERING AND METHOD-CENTERING: INSISTENCE ON HIGHER QUESTIONS

For me, the clash with method-centered scientists came only when I started asking questions about the so-called "higher life" of human beings and about more highly evolved human beings. So long as I worked behaviorally with dogs and monkeys and experimented with learning and conditioning and with motivated behavior, the available methodological tools served me well. These experiments could be suitably designed and controlled, and the data could be precise and reliable enough.

I got into real trouble only when I started asking new questions for the researcher, questions which I couldn't handle well, questions about imprecise, undefined, unmanageable problems. I discovered then that many scientists disdain what they cannot cope with, what they cannot do well. I remember counterattacking in my irritation with an aphorism I coined for the occasion: "What isn't worth doing, isn't worth doing well". Now I think I could add: "What needs doing, is worth doing even though not very well". Indeed, I am tempted to claim that the first effort to research a new problem is most likely to be inelegant, imprecise, and crude. What one mostly learns from such first efforts is how it should be done better the next time. But there is no way of bypassing this first time. I remember a child who, when told that most train accidents involved the last car, suggested that accidents could be reduced by eliminating last cars!

Neither can beginnings be eliminated. Even to think this, or to want it, is a denial of the very spirit of science. Cracking open new fields is certainly more exhilarating and rewarding and is also more socially useful. "You must love the questions themselves", Rilke said. The assault troops of science are certainly more necessary to science than its military policemen. This is so even though they are apt to get much dirtier and to suffer higher casualties. Bill Mauldin's cartoons during the war could serve as good illustrations of the clash in values between frontline fighting soldiers and rear echelon spit-and-polish officers. Somebody has to be the first one through the mine fields. (I wrote this first as "through the mind fields"!)

When my work in psychopathology led me to explore nonpathology - psychologically healthy people - difficulties came up that I had never had to face before, problems of values and of norms, for instance. Health is itself a normative word. I began to understand why so little had been done here. By the normal canons of good "normal" research, this was not a good research. (Actually I called it not a research, but an exploration). It is easily criticized and I have done it too. There was a real] question about the possible intrusion of my own values in the people I selected for study. A group of judges would have been better, of course. Today we have tests that are more objective and impartial than any unaided judgment - but in 1935 they didn't exist. It was either do it this way or not do it at all. I'm glad I chose to do it; I learned a great deal, and perhaps others have learned, too.

The study of these relatively healthy people and their characteristics opened up dozens of new problems for me both personally and as a scientist, and it made me dissatisfied with dozens of old solutions and methods and concepts that I had taken for granted. These people raised new questions about the nature of normality, of health, of goodness, of creativeness and love, of higher needs, beauty, curiosity, fulfillment, of heroes and the godlike in human beings, of altruism and co-operativeness, of love for the young, protection of the weak, compassion and unselfishness and humanitarianism, of greatness, of transcendent experiences, of higher values. (I have worked since with all of these questions, and I am confident that it is possible to contribute something toward answering them. They are not untestable, "unscientific" problems).

These "higher" psychological processes in the human being did not fit gracefully and comfortably into the extant machinery for achieving reliable knowledge. This machine, it turned out, was much like something I have in my kitchen called a "disposall", which nevertheless does not really dispose of all things but only of some things. Or to make another comparison. I remember seeing an elaborate and complicated automatic washing machine for automobiles that did a beautiful job of washing them. But it could do only that, and everything else that got into its clutches was treated as if it were an automobile to be washed. I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

In a word, I had either to give up my questions or else to invent new ways of answering them. I preferred the latter course. And so also do many psychologists who choose to work as best they can with important problems (problem-centering) rather than restricting themselves to doing only that which they can do elegantly with the techniques already available (method-centering). If you define "science" as that which it is able to do, then that which it is not able to do becomes "nonscience", i.e., unscientific. (A fuller treatment of this problem is in 38, ch. 2).

THE FEAR OF KNOWING; FEAR OF PERSONAL AND SOCIAL TRUTH

More than any other scientists we psychologists have to contend with the astonishing fact of resistance to the truth. More than any other kind of knowledge we fear knowledge of ourselves, knowledge that might transform our self-esteem and our self-image. A cat finds it easy to be a cat, as nearly as we can tell. It isn't afraid to be a cat. But being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical. While human beings love knowledge and seek it - they are curious - they also fear it. The closer to the personal it is, the more they fear it. So human knowledge is apt to be a kind of dialectic between this love and this fear. Thus knowledge includes the defenses against itself, the repressions, the sugar-coatings, the inattentions, the forgettings. Therefore any methodology for getting at this truth must include some form of what psychoanalysts call "analysis of the resistance", a way of dissolving fear of the truth about oneself, thus permitting one to perceive himself head on, naked - a scary thing to do.

We can say something of the sort for knowledge in general. Darwin's theory of natural selection was a tremendous blow to the human ego. So also was the Copernican way of seeing things. And yet it is still true that there is a gradient of fear of knowledge; the more impersonal the knowledge, the less close to our personal concerns and to our emotions and needs, the less resistance to it there will be. And the closer our probings approach to our personal core, the more resistance there will be. There is a kind of "law of amount of knowledge" that we might phrase so: the greater the distance from personal knowledge, the greater the amount of scientific knowledge, the longer the history of the subject, the safer the study, the more mature the science, etc. And thus it comes about that we know (scientifically) far more about chemicals and metals and electricity than we do about sex or prejudice or exploitation.

One must sometimes talk to one's graduate students in the social and psychological sciences as if they were going off to war. One must speak of bravery, of morals and ethics, of strategy and tactics. The psychological or social scientist must fight to bring truth about the hot subjects.

THE WISH TO BE KNOWN AND THE FEAR OF BEING KNOWN

The person is different from things as an object of knowledge in that he has to want to be known, or at least he has to permit himself to be known. [2-1] He must accept and trust the knower, and even get to love him in certain cases. He may even be said to surrender to the knower (82) in various senses of that term, and vice versa. It feels good to be understood (73), even exhilarating (3) and therapeutic. Other examples are scattered through this book (and through the whole literature of psychotherapy and social psychology).

MOTIVATION, PURPOSES, ENDS

In dealing with persons, you must make your epistemological peace with the fact that people have purposes and goals of their own even though physical objects do not. Our classical science wisely tossed out of its study of the physical universe the projection of purposes, whether of a God or of man himself. As a matter of fact, this purging was a sine qua non for making physical science possible at all; the solar system is better understood so. The projection of purpose is not only unnecessary, it is actually harmful to full understanding. But the case is completely different with human beings. They do have purposes and goals directly perceptible by introspection and also easily studied behaviorally, as in infrahuman animals (71). This simple fact, which is excluded systematically from the model of classical physical science, automatically makes its methods less appropriate for studying most human behavior. This is so because it does not differentiate between means and ends. Because of this, as Polanyi (60) points out, it cannot discriminate between correct and incorrect instrumental behavior, between efficient and inefficient, right and wrong, sick and healthy, since all these adjectives refer to the suitability and efficacy of the means-behavior in actually attaining its goal. Such considerations are alien to the purely physical or chemical system which has no purposes and therefore needs no discrimination between good or bad instrumental behaviors.

CONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS, AND PRECONSCIOUS

Our problems are further complicated by the fact that his purposes can be unknown to the person himself. For instance, his behavior can be what the psychoanalyst calls "acting out", i.e., an apparent seeking for an overtly discernible goal which, however, is not the "real" goal of the behavior but is rather a symbolic substitute that will never satisfy the hunger.

Any comprehensive psychology of science will have to go into great detail about the relations of consciousness to the unconscious and to the preconscious, and of so-called "primary process" cognition to "secondary process" cognition. We have learned to think of knowledge as verbal, explicit, articulated, rational, logical, structured, Aristotelian, realistic, sensible. Confronted with the depths of human nature, we psychologists learn to respect also the inarticulate, the preverbal and subverbal, the tacit, the ineffable, the mythic, the archaic, the symbolic, the poetic, the esthetic. Without these data, no account of a person can possibly be complete. But it is only in human beings that these data exist and for which, therefore, ad hoc methods have proved to be necessary. The rest of the book pursues this same question and some of its offshoots. How adequate or inadequate are the concepts and methods of classical science if our task is the acquisition of knowledge about the human person? What are the consequences of these Inadequacies? What improvements do they suggest? What counterproposals can be offered for consideration and for testing? What can general science learn from person science?