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Self-Regard and Other-Regard: Reflexive Practices in American Psychology, 1890–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Jill G. Morawski
Jill G. Morawski
Affiliation:
Department of PsychologyWesleyan University
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Abstract

Psychology has been frequently subjected to the criticism that it is an unreflexive science — that it fails to acknowledge the reflexive properties of human action which influence psychologists themselves as well as their subjects. However, even avowedly unreflexive actions may involve reflexivity, and in this paper I suggest that the practices of psychology include reflexive ones. Psychology has an established tradition of silence about the self-awareness and sell-consciousness of its actors, whether those actors are experimenters, theorists, or participants (subjects) in research, yet this silence has been established and maintained through sophisticated exercises in self-regard — through sustained reflexive work. Historical analysis reveals some of the ways in which psychologists recognized and then neglected, covered over, or denied reflexivity. Study of those instances where psychologists have engaged in self-conscious reflection or have attended to the sell-consciousness of research subjects indicates both the dangers of reflexivity to governing investigative practices and the resilience which psychology has built against reflexive work. Canonized procedures for scientific work reproduce selves of experimenters and subjects alike, selves who acknowledge only part of their reflexive engagements. Historians of psychology have a special opportunity (and obligation) to explore the reflexive dynamics of investigative practices, and, hence, to theorize about scientists, along with their actions and interactions, just as we theorize about science, its products, and its evolution.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1992 , pp. 281 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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