The Ordinary, the Original and the Believable in Psychology's Construction of the Person*

The psychological subject is preeminently a textual being, born of a confluence of discursive practices. In generating the sense of a subject to be elucidated, the investigator can scarcely escape tradition; to do so would be to fail in achieving intelligibility. Yet, molding character from the available repositories of discourse is a precarious undertaking. Accounts of character — what it is to be a coherent and identifiable person — are first of all possessions of the populace. They are central constituents of ordinary language conventions and, as a result, intimately intertwined in daily patterns of human relationship. Thus, when people speak of their intentions, beliefs, wants, hopes, fears, and the like, they are not only generating and solidifying agreements concerning the ontology of personal being, they are also carrying out patterns of relationship in which such terms are essential integers. (The utterance "I adore you" not only asserts the condition of adoration to be a central essence of human beings, but simultaneously participates in a form of relatedness that equally determines what it is to be human.) The psychologist's position is thus precarious in two senses: first with respect to his/her symbiotic relationship with the existing language communities and second with respect to the life forms that such writing may either disturb or destroy.1

It is the question of achieving intelligibility that is the chief focus of the present paper. The textual construction of the person is critical not only for novelists, biographers, and autobiographers; it is also of pivotal importance to historians, political scientists, legal theorists, philosophers of knowledge, psychologists, and many others. All are challenged with the problem of rendering in words a sense of recognition, a sense that "I know and understand the person whereof they speak." At the same time, in all these cases the writer is faced with a subtle but consequential problem: he or she must rely on the discursive forestructure supplied by the culture and yet perishes by its repetition. The writer must rely on the existing argots of understanding or cease to be intelligible. To write of someone who "feels pickle" or who "wishes in the horizontal" fails in the cooperative achievement of making sense. At the same time, to reproduce the existing forestructure is to fail in generating moments of distinction — a sense that the subject is significant, worthy of distinction in the ongoing hurly-burly of daily activity. If the writer does not estrange the audience from the commonplace, voice is lost. At worst, the writer simply expands the domain of tedium.

How is it then that the professional psychologist, as a writer, navigates between the shoals of the banal and the absurd, making claims about human nature that are simultaneously at variance with the commonplace? The problem is interesting from several standpoints. While rhetorical analysis has traditionally centered on the writing of fiction, the fiction writer occupies a very specialized role within the culture. And, although this role does undergo historical change, it has long been defined in terms of its liberty. That is, violations of the rules of common intelligibility are anticipated —or even desired for the forms of entertainment, enlightenment, or escape which they allow. Thus, along with other rhetorical processes, analyses of character formulation in fictional writing may be misleading if generalized to other forms of literary construction. Indeed, as rhetorical consciousness has expanded in recent years, analysts have become increasingly concerned with the literary dimensions of the human sciences. Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse, Donald McClosky's The Rhetoric of Economics, Bruno Latour's Science in Action, and James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture, along with sociological works by Bryan Green (Literary Methods and Sociological Theory) and Richard Harvey Brown (Society as Text), and the psychiatrically oriented writings of Donald Spence (Narrative Truth and Historical Truth), and Patrick Mahony (Freud as Writer), are among the most visible works of this genre. The present analysis extends this line of endeavor to inquire, most particularly, into the scientific psychologist's construction of character.2

In light of the role played by scientific psychology within the culture, such an excursion takes on special significance. For as traditionally reasoned, the rigorous and objective study of mental processes should ultimately lend itself to an enhanced quality of cultural life. With greater knowledge of the emotions, thought processes, memory, motivation, personality dispositions, and the like, we should be able to make more informed decisions concerning educational practices, child rearing, career choice, and a host of other matters including the care and prevention of mental disorders. In effect, scientific accounts of mental processes are candidates for truth status, and to achieve truth is to claim superiority over (and thus to marginalize) all competing forms of discourse. Yet, regardless of the extent and rigor of the research practices, the resulting account is a textual achievement. No less than the novelist, the psychologist must employ techniques of literary construction to render scientific accounts acceptable. Most importantly, to the extent that such techniques dominate the scientific account, observational practices — regardless of rigor — cease to make an imprint on the rendering. Methods of experimentation, systematic measurement, and sophisticated statistical devices lose their power, both to possess the text and to warrant its truth. They neither control the discursive rendering of "the subject," nor do they justify it. Thus, to penetrate the textual devices for creating the subject within the psychological literature simultaneously undermines the objectivity of such accounts and serves as a means for liberating otherwise marginalized discourses.

The present attempt is not to assay the full range of rhetorical techniques in current use. More modestly I shall outline three sources of constraint in the writings of professional psychology and the way in which these constraints enter into the fashioning of the person. I will direct attention first to issues deriving from the psychologist's membership in the culture at large, then to problems emerging within the scientific subculture, and finally to the textual character of laboratory practice. To echo the initial refrain, my special concern in each case with the the psychologist's attempt as scientist, to equilibrate between the opposing necessities of conventionality and originality.

Creating the Subject in Cultural Context

Constructing the Person in the Scientific Culture

The Person in Laboratory Context

Conclusion

References