The hallmarks of modern psychology have been reductionism, determinism, and autonomous individualism, all under girded by a stringent materialism. These tenets reflect the impact of nineteenth-century natural science, which supplied the basis for modern psychology. New developments in contemporary natural science, however, are helping to move modern psychology into a postmodern phase, one which promises to be more hospitable both to human dignity and to personal responsibility.
This essay explores some of the implications of this postmodern psychology, using the psychology of Viktor Frankl as a framework. Frankl is useful here because his position, first published some forty years ago, anticipated important postmodern ideas that are just now coming into prominence.
A major postmodern characteristic of Frankl’s psychology—and it is perhaps what is most widely known about his work—is his emphasis on the human search for meaning. The very name of Frankl’s kind of psychotherapy, “Logotherapy,” incorporates this central theme. For Frankl (1963), a major part of human motivation consists in the search for a higher meaning, and Frankl assumed that the finding of this meaning was of central importance for psychological health.
Frankl’s deep appreciation of the need for meaning came to a significant extent from his personal experience in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. There he observed that those who had a strong sense of the meaning of their life tended reliably to survive, as compared with those who had no such overriding purpose.
Modern psychological thought has, however, ignored higher meaning and has emphasized lower levels as accounting for or explaining the presumed higher levels of human significance. For example, it is often physiology or neurology which is seen as accounting for the life of the human mind. Another common interpretation of the higher mental life of ideals, aspirations, and meaningfulness has been to see such things as epiphenomenal expressions of the lower drives of sex and self-interest. In the same spirit, reason and truth were often interpreted as rationalizations of lower needs and desires. In marked distinction to the modern tendency to materialist reductionism has been Logotherapy’s focus (e.g., Frankl, 1959) on higher meaning and even the human spirit—an emphasis that can be called constructionist.
A second postmodern characteristic of Frankl’s thought is his concern with a person’s free will. This basic assumption is, of course, commonly found in existential positions, of which Frankl’s is one example. Nevertheless, the opposite assumption—that of determinism, especially materialistic determinism—has reliably characterized modern thought. The free will position has been a minority view in psychology, as well as in most other modern disciplines.
One of the most powerful expressions of determinism in psychology has been the behaviorist approach, as expressed in the Russian school of Pavlov and associates and in the United States by Watson, Skinner, and others. And of course Sigmund Freud was well known for his claim that psychoanalysis was scientific, and ultimately based on some kind of physiological determinism. Both Freud and the behaviorists were strongly influenced by materialism and the general positivist character of science in the nineteenth century. Academic psychologists with their keen ambition to be accepted as scientists championed this kind of materialist determinism and found those few psychologists who argued for free will to be embarrassments.
Determinism of a materialist nature has also characterized social theories of human life, as expressed in Marxism and in much of sociology. Here again positivistic science was the controlling model.
Along with determinism and reductionism, modernism also has very reliably emphasized the isolated individual, or the autonomous self. This emphasis is found dramatically in the so-called “humanistic” psychologies of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow (For critiques, see Vitz, 1977/1994; Lasch, 1978; Bellah, et al., 1985). An extreme emphasis on autonomy, independence from others, separation and freedom has infused modern psychology. The meaning of this freedom has been above all antisocial, or anti-other, in nature. (One is reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s statement: “Hell is other people.”)
Here, let me introduce an anecdote about Dr. Frankl told to me recently by a colleague. (This anecdote has been verified by the Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna; 1995, personal communication.) When Frankl first arrived in the United States, he was much impressed by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and with the love of and concern for freedom so prevalent in the United States. Certainly Frankl’s own rejection of totalitarianism and concern for free will is consistent with this emphasis. But the modern focus—most especially in America—has been on freedom from other people: freedom from social restraints, from tradition, and from moral systems. To return to my story: as Frankl became more familiar with the American understanding of freedom, particularly as his visits took him to the West Coast, he began to have serious misgivings about the American veneration of liberty, and he said that the United States should also have a Statue of Responsibility, preferably located in California, perhaps in the San Francisco Harbor.
This story identifies another major postmodern emphasis found in Frankl’s thought: his concern with human meaning as it derives from relationships with others. Thus, for Frankl, the kind of understanding also expressed by Buber in I and Thou (1958) is a major part of his psychological system.
To summarize, then, modern thought has emphasized scientific reductionism, materialist determinism, and autonomous individualism, while Frankl has emphasized the search for higher meaning, freedom of will, and interpersonal commitment. It is for these reasons that Frank can be thought of as anticipating several concepts understood today as “postmodern.”
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We now turn to examples of contemporary theorists who share these basic assumptions. It is unlikely that any of these theorists have been directly influenced by Frankl; many of them have not been influenced by psychology at all. These contributions are coming mostly from the physical and biological sciences, and are having their primary impact in those fields. But we should keep in mind that it is these sciences that developed the original determinist and reductionist paradigms that psychologists, and other thinkers, imported into their respective disciplines. What has impact in the natural sciences may well move on to other domains and disciplines.
First, consider the new cognitive science, especially cognitive psychology, a field which has emerged with increasing power in the last thirty years. I will summarize the understanding of this field as found in the work of Roger W. Sperry, a biologist/brain scientist who received the Nobel Prize a few years ago for his research on the functional differences between the two hemispheres of the human cortex. Most of the characterization of his position is taken from a recent paper (Sperry, 1993) in which he presented in short form his understanding of the theoretical implications of cognitive science:
. . . the cognitive revolution represents a diametric turnaround in the centuries-old treatment of mind and consciousness in science. The contents of conscious experience, with their subjective qualities, long banned as being mere acausal epiphenomena or as just identical to brain activity . . . have now made a dramatic comeback. Reconceived in the new outlook, subjective mental states become functionally interactive and essential for a full explanation of conscious behavior. . . . The cognitive consciousness revolution thus also represents a revolt against the longtime worship of the atomistic in science. Reductive micro-deterministic views of personhood and the physical world are replaced in favor of a more holistic, top-down view in which the higher, more evolved entities throughout nature, including the mental, vital, social, and other high-order forces, gain their due recognition along with physics and chemistry (879).
The cognitive position, as Sperry went on to describe it, means that behavior is mentally and subjectively driven, not merely physiologically or neurologically determined. In the new synthesis of the mental and physical realms, consciousness is understood as inextricably connected to the functioning brain, but consciousness is also seen as a qualitatively new and emergent property. Furthermore, it is an emergent property which can affect levels lower than that of the emergent property itself. The new cognitive understanding of mind is one that accepts two directions of causality: both the traditional bottom-up model of materialistic causality, and the new top-down model elaborated by cognitive science.
This new approach is certainly deterministic in a general sense, but not in the older, now-dated, modern sense of materialist determinism. After all, the newly-understood higher mental levels do “determine” things. And, as Sperry noted: “We would not want it otherwise; we would not want to live in an indeterminate non-causal. . . universe, totally unpredictable and with no reliability or rational higher meaning” (879).
Sperry also pointed out that large numbers of scientists, especially cognitive psychologists, shifted, in the 1965–75 period, from the older bottom-up model of determinism to the new mixed model of bottom-up plus top-down causality.
Particularly in attempts to build computer models of mental activities, it has become clear, in a practical day-to-day scientific sense, that the emergent organization of something is a causal factor not found in the elements from which the pattern or Gestalt is made. A very simple example is the fact that elementary computer program instructions can be combined in many configurations in order to do many different tasks. Programs typically do not differ in their constitutive elements but only in their configurations. Sperry made this same point when he rejected microdeterministic models such as those that might be based upon particle physics. He wrote: “. . . subatomic features are the same for any macro-entity, be it a great cathedral or a sewage outlet” (880).
Apparently the study of mental functions, using computer programs and particularly different levels of programs, has driven home to the scientific community that patterns, at different levels, have their own causative logic which are unpredictable from the laws of the individual components, or even from knowledge of the lower level program. That is, computer models gave clear examples of nested levels of causality in which higher levels can effect the lower levels.
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One of the new theoretical positions that has lent support to the position articulated by Sperry is known as “Chaos Theory.” This theory is not really so much about chaos as about order, and about determinism without predictability in non-linear systems. It is not easy precisely to describe Chaos Theory without a more mathematical discussion than is possible here—nor would this author’s expertise prove up to the task. Nevertheless, the general significance of Chaos Theory is not hard to summarize and to grasp, thanks to several very competent treatments, on which this discussion will draw. (Prigogine and Stengers,1984; Gleick,1987; Wieland-Burston, 1992; Kellert, 1993.)
One of the phenomena that Chaos Theory addresses is the emergence of new levels of organization unpredictable from knowledge of the prior, lower-level states. For example, a typical “chaos” situation goes something like this: A system, only describable with non-linear equations, is in a “relatively” stable situation. However, the values of the different variables describing the system are increasing. At some point, the system suddenly becomes very unstable or “chaotic.” After a period of chaotic turbulence, the system suddenly restabilizes in a new form—a more complex form, of a higher order than that of the lower pre-chaotic period. Of course, not all systems that go into chaos restabilize, much less do they restabilize at a more organized level, but some definitely do. As an example, consider what are known as Bénard convection cells, as described by the physicist Ernst Brun (1985). (This description is based on Wieland-Burston, 1992.) A pan containing alu powder and silicone oil is heated. When the temperature reaches a certain point, an apparently disordered activity starts to take place. Totally irregular cells form—this is the result of convection. These cells move about in a random manner, changing in size and shape. At a still higher temperature, the cells become more uniform in size and shape. They finally come together in a clear pattern—a kind of honeycomb shape. (See Wieland-Burston, 75). The scientist who has done the most in observing and understanding such processes is Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize, 1977), a theoretical physicist who studied thermodynamic systems in far from equilibrium states. It was Prigogine who first noted how component molecules can move from chaos to order. In short, Chaos Theory supports the notion of emergent higher levels of organization within some natural systems.
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Let us now turn to the assumption of determinism, particularly in its cruder materialist understanding, as found in psychology. Again, we will look at Chaos Theory and some of its additional important characteristics.
Large numbers of physical and biological systems, especially those that are even moderately complex, cannot be described with linear equations—that is, with equations that assume simple additivity. Instead, many, perhaps most, complex natural systems can only be described with non-linear equations. (Even some simple systems, especially if they contain feedback mechanisms, require non-linear equations.) In psychology, it has already become clear that predictions of many elementary human responses to a variety of sensory stimuli are commonly non-linear in nature. The interesting discovery, which is central to Chaos Theory, is that often in non-linear systems, it is impossible to predict the system’s behavior. This unpredictability occurs because it is typical for infinitely small differences in the starting conditions to lead to very large and qualitatively different outcomes.
Let’s take an example that was important in the development of Chaos Theory itself. (For discussion of this, see Gleick, 1987; Kellert, 1993.) In the 1960s, a meteorologist and physicist named Edward Lorenz was developing equations for the prediction of the weather. The equations were non-linear, since weather was known to require such. Lorenz had developed a model for forecasting the weather in which the variables were specified to six decimal places, and he had plotted out the predictions that the equations gave for some weeks in the future. At one point, because he was in a hurry, he used the same equations and the same input data, but the variables were specified only to three decimal places. He expected—as did everyone else—that the weather forecast for the weeks to come would be almost the same as when predicted using six decimal places. Instead, what he discovered was that, after a few days, the two predictions completely diverged. That such tiny differences in initial conditions could lead to such large differences in outcome some time later has been called “the Butterfly Effect”: that is, the presence, or the absence, of one butterfly—and of the impact of its wings on wind velocity—can make for totally different weather in a particular place some days hence.
Another common kind of chaos situation goes something like this: a dynamic system goes into a time of turbulence or chaos and then moves to one of two or sometimes more new stable states. Which of these new stable states will take place is unpredictable because of the system’s sensitivity to initial conditions. Of course, the process is deterministic but, as already mentioned, not predictable. In such situations, scientists can study and describe the qualitatively different states of a non-linear system, but they cannot predict which of them will occur.
In the psychological and social sciences, where the relevant starting conditions are often unknown—and if known are rarely measurable to even one decimal point—Chaos Theory solidly undermines the long-assumed goal of being able to predict human behavior. After all, if tiny initial differences can make for very divergent, even qualitatively different outcomes, then predicting human behavior becomes impossible.
Chaos Theory therefore makes a fundamental distinction between determinism and predictability: systems (for example, the weather) can be deterministic, but nonetheless dramatically unpredictable. While the principle of determinism remains theoretically intact, it has lost much of its force. In psychology, such dramatically different states as elation, anxiety, depression, and the like—even if known to be determined by prior emotional conditions (i.e., certain interpersonal experiences or certain brain states) and even if the variables which caused these states were measurable with some precision—still which of these states would actually occur could not be accurately predicted.
The basic idea that small differences in starting conditions can make a big difference in outcome is an important support for the notion of free will. The idea behind free will is not that human beings are indeterminate, or in some sense random, but that the human will, however small a force it is—sometimes hardly larger than a butterfly wing—can be a deciding factor in our behavior. It is the phenomenological experience that the force of our will could be applied to either side of a particular choice that gives rise to the psychological or intuitive evidence that free will exists. Chaos Theory very clearly allows for this possibility.
In summary, the will itself can now be understood as receiving support from contemporary postmodern science in three distinct ways: 1) The will can be conceptualized as a mental force which, however small, exists as an initial condition prior to our decisions. Although the will, like the wind and other aspects of non-linear systems, is part of a deterministic system, its subsequent effects on behavior can be quite substantial yet not predictable (the butterfly effect). 2) The will can be understood as an emergent factor: a factor that could “emerge,” as a qualitative new state, after a period of prior mental turbulence. This emergent phenomenon also follows from the new possibilities inherent in Chaos Theory. 3) The will can be interpreted in a cognitive science framework as a higher level mental factor which can causally affect lower levels. That is, the will can be interpreted as a factor in the new top/down model of causality.
Finally, we will look at some new interpretations of the self which are also postmodernist. To begin, it should be pointed out that a number of recent theorists of the self have argued that the very notion of the autonomous self is incoherent in important respects. These theorists are deconstructing the self, and their critiques signal the beginning of the end of the modern self.
Kenneth Gergen (1985, 1991) has provided an influential description of the crisis of the contemporary self by interpreting today’s self as “saturated.” That is, the variety and complexity of today’s styles of living make for a self that is complex, overburdened, and saturated to the point of incoherence. The contemporary American self often lives in two or three different places each year, relates to people in different cities, jobs, and cultures on a regular basis. Meanwhile the media flood each person with still more lifestyles, historical periods, different values, philosophies and religions, hobbies, types and places of travel. Many of these late-modern selves have had two or three marriages, and have extraordinarily complex and unstable family situations. Many of these selves have had two, three, or four different careers. Just keeping up with all this leaves no time for reflection or integration, no time to develop a coherent core to the self. The result is a self that is so busy responding to immediate, dramatically different situations that no strong, independent self develops. This is what Gergen means by “saturated.”
Philip Cushman (1990) has gone still further than Gergen in claiming that the modern self is basically empty. Cushman is especially interested in showing that the concept of self is always a reflection of the historical and cultural context—something most psychological theories of the self ignore. (For a related position, see Baumeister, 1987.) In his critique, Cushman expresses a clear postmodernist logic, arguing that the modern, so-called autonomous self has always been a kind of an illusion. He defines the modern self as a “bounded masterful self that has specific psychological boundaries, an internal locus of control, and a wish to manipulate the external world for its personal ends” (1990, 600).
His critique develops along the following lines: Cushman accepts the notion of the traditional self—what is often called the pre-modern self: one that is rooted in family, religious faith, tradition, and community. He accepts these relationships as legitimate and as central to the traditional self. However, with the rise of modern industrial and technological society, the individual was rapidly, or slowly, torn away from these relationships.
Cushman, in stimulating and convincing ways, has proposed that the empty self created by the loss of the traditional structures has been filled by two major modern social forces. The first and perhaps most important force is the consumer society, especially its advertising. Thus, today’s self is constructed from the meaning of our purchased products, and from the commercial meaning of our life-styles. The self is now defined by its automobiles and vacations, by its button-down shirts and barn jackets, even by its brands of beer and perfume. Since we now define the self increasingly through consumption rather than traditional relationships, it is not surprising that the pathologies of our time are narcissism and borderline personality disorder, and the inability to maintain long-term commitments to others. Additional media-influenced problems of our day include low self-esteem, values confusion, eating disorders, drug abuse, and chronic consumerism.
According to Cushman, the other force which has filled the void at the center of the modern self has been psychology. Psychotherapy, with its search for the origins of personality, with its emphasis on past traumas, on expressing archetypes, and on self-actualization, has constructed the other half of the modern self. Vitz (1977/1994) has made similar criticisms and has pointed out, for example, that the Jungian theory of the self with its array of unconscious archetypes such as the persona, animus/anima, wise old man, earth mother, the shadow, etc., has provided a new structure for the self—a new set of characters. Once the relationships provided by traditional family and community are removed, psychology fills the void by introducing a new internal “psychological village” made up of new characters, to take their place. Of course, the basically narcissistic character of the psychological “solution” is obvious. A person’s relationship with his anima or her animus is not the same as a relationship with another person of the opposite sex.
In the late twentieth century, developing this kind of “Personality”— whether Jungian or Rogerian or whatever—has taken precedence over building a religious and traditional character. And of course most individuals have turned to popularized forms of psychology to get advice on how to impress others, to become popular, and to achieve monetary success and peace of mind. Advertising strategies have capitalized on this need to glamorize the personality by identifying a particular product with an ideal state of being. Successful ads give the impression that buying the product will free the consumer of personal fears and feelings of inadequacy. Thus both psychotherapy and advertising are attempting to relieve the individual’s sense of emptiness.
Ultimately, of course, Cushman thinks that these modern forces are fundamentally phony, and the self they create is an illusion. He believes that they profoundly fail to satisfy the needs of the self in the way that the older relationships once did. As a consequence, Cushman has concluded that the modern self is like a package covered with beautiful wrapping but empty inside.
Perhaps the most extreme position on the contemporary self is proposed by Robert Landy (1993), who has written that there is no autonomous self at all. Landy writes out of a background in theatre, and has claimed that the contemporary self consists only of roles, as in theatrical roles, which the person chooses. Just as an actor chooses roles, Landy has proposed that the self consists only of these roles, and since they have no coherent focus, there is in fact no integrated autonomous self at all. There are many selves instead—a kind of polyvalent or multi-centered self. Thus we must let go of what has been thought of as the modern self. Landy admits that letting go of this self goes against scores of philosophers, poets and theologians who have advocated a core entity that contains the essence of one’s being and can be known (1993, 19). The concept of a core self implies that certain behaviors are authentic (true self) and other behaviors are not (social masks). Inherent in this view is a moral framework wherein rages a battle “between the authentic and God-given forces of light and the inauthentic, demonic forces of darkness” (1993, 19). But this notion of self, however familiar, is—Landy argues—mistaken and must be abandoned. For Landy, the very notion of an authentic self is inauthentic.
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The preceding postmodern theories of the self are primarily critical or negative, in that they deconstruct the modern autonomous self, but offer no positive alternative. Frankl’s emphasis on committed interpersonal relationships is thus neither modern nor postmodern, but is similar to that of certain other recent theorists, who propose interpersonal commitment as central to the construction and therefore to the basic idea of the self. These contributions include the writings of de Rivera (1989) and some of myself (e.g., 1977, 1987, 1995 in press). In both instances, these theories of the self can be thought of in part as mutualist, or as a fleshed-out understanding of the position of Frankl and others. Because these writers have opposed modernist assumptions, and also because they provide a positive response to the culturally relativistic, nihilist logic of postmodernism, they can be called “trans-modern.” By this term I mean that they transcend both modernism and postmodernism in the interest of reaching a new synthesis.
Let us look at de Rivera’s contributions in a way that can make this trans-modern idea clearer. De Rivera has postulated two basic models of the self that describe the world situation today. The first model he calls “individualist,” and this model is what has been described here as the Western autonomous self. The second model is described as “collectivist” and it is based on family and community relationships. This kind of self de Rivera identifies with many Eastern societies (e.g., China and Japan), and with Europe prior to recent centuries. A name already introduced for this kind of self would be “pre-modern,” since it corresponds to the self created through traditional interpersonal relationships given by one’s status in the family and society into which one is born. After describing the serious limitations of each of these models, de Rivera proposed a third model of self, called “mutualist.” In this model, which is implicitly trans-modern, the core of mutuality consists of loving relationships with others. His emphasis on relationship is important, and it resonates with Frankl’s similar emphasis. I have also written (1987) in this vein, and in the process quoted from the Protestant theologian Thomas Torrance (1983), who has argued that in significant respects, a person or self is constructed from or through relationships. That is, in a sense we are our relationships. Torrance has noted that certain theoretical concepts from physics provide useful analogies. Specifically, in certain ways subatomic particles are no longer thought of as separate elements but “we have come to think of particles as continuously connected in dynamic fields of force where the interrelations between particles are part of what particles actually are” (58).
The notion of relationship is thus central to a postmodern, or better still trans-modern model of the self or person. One crucial new ingredient in this concept of relationship is that of free choice. We can summarize: the pre-modern self is based on relationships without true freedom; the modern self is based on freedom without true relationships; the trans-modern self is based on relationships with freedom. It is such freely chosen relationships which constitute the basis of a mature love of others. So it is finally the case that love, understood as higher than sex or self-interest, is beginning to be taken seriously as central to the formation of the self or person.
There is a great deal more to this kind of “trans-modern” solution to the crisis of the contemporary self. However, its dependence on relationship, freedom and love shows that the contributions of Viktor Frankl’s psychology are still alive and well. In addition, it is equally clear that the “modern” materialistic psychology, with its reductionistic spirit is now rightly understood as inadequate and out-of-date.
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