Introduction to the Psychological Humanities

Psychology is a modern discipline with a unique history which has served particular societal and political purposes. These purposes have frequently had adverse effects on the discipline's developmental trajectory, contributing to a narrowing of its epistemological and methodological commitments. Contemporary psychology suffers the ongoing effects of the narrowing, oftern deploying methods (e.g., natural scientific paradigms) that are ill-suited to its subject-human persons. The emerging field of psychological humanities seeks to restore to psychology a more pluralistic means of understanding of humanity- methodologically and theoretically. This is being accomplished through a revitalization of the connection between social scientific exploration with the scholarship and ideas associated with the humanitites. In this course, students will be exposed to a survey of topics, issues, and traditions associated with the converstaions currently taking place in the psychological humanities. These include phenomenology, critical psychology, indigenous psychologies, existentialism, literary critique, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, global psychology, and social constructionism, all deployed to enlarge psychology's capacity to dialogue across ideas and methods for the purpose of asking the question of what it means to be human.