Creating the Subject in Cultural Context

The psychologist's ultimate challenge is to present a compelling picture of human functioning to an audience whose lifelong effort has been that of functioning humanly. For the most part, people are relatively secure in their "knowledge of people" and will cite their everyday adequacies as proof of their discernment. Of course, professional psychologists are no less members of the culture at large, and as a result they share in the common conceptions of the person. It is indeed just this background which enables them ultimately to meet the challenge of intelligibility. In the same what that seventeenth-century Robert Burton could turn commonsense beliefs in melancholy into a 500 page treatise on the causes and cures of this affliction, psychologists of today enter the laboratory already committed to the belief that persons possess rational thought, emotion, memory, and the like. The culture's ontology of personhood is seldom brought into question, and thus the psychologist's accounts are typically congenial to the surrounding ethos.3

It is in this context that one is sensitized to the subtle shifts in the professional construction of the person ocurring over the past century. As I have tried to describe elsewhere, nineteenth-century romanticism revitalized and refashioned the medieval "reality of the deep interior." (Gergen, 1991) That is, the literary, musical, architectural, and artistic ventures of the time conspired to define the person in terms of a deep energic force, often equated with soul and rooted in both the spiritual and natural world. It was the expressions of the deep interior, whether in terms of inspiration, devotion, grief, or moral commitment, that gave personal existence its significance. These suppositions are, of course, reflected in the character of major protagonists of romantic novels. And in psychology, it is this cultural context that served both to stimulate and to render intelligible Freud's theory of the unconscious. Without the forestructure of romantic discourse (see Whyte's The Unconscious Before Freud), psychoanalytic theory could have neither been penned nor proliferated.

Yet, in the twentieth century, as romanticism has been replaced by the Zeitgeist of modernity, the deep interior recedes from view. In modern psychology curricula, Freudian theory receives but scant attention (often viewed as a historic relic or relevant only to circumscribed problems of mental health). In the scientific laboratories Freudian theory is remarkable for its absence. For in the modernist culture, we find a prevalent return to Enlightenment assumptions of human functioning. Within the present century, the deep interior as the core around which character is constructed has largely been replaced by what we believe to be the more accessible processes of observation and reason. That is, persons are rendered intelligible as persons primarily by virtue of their experiences and thoughts. It is reason and observation that, in the modernist vein, lead to essential knowledge or understanding, not only in the domains of science, but also in the visual arts, architecture, music, dance, and so on. And it is on the powers of reason and observation that we can rely for continued progress and prosperity.4 The psychological sciences have drawn from this same repository of cultural beliefs in their fashioning of the twentieth-century being. The two most central lines of research within the mainstream have explored, first, the process of learning (through observation) and, second, information processing (the character of thought). The works of J. B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov (as popularized within the United States), B. F. Skinner, and Clark Hull were canonical texts within the former realm. All were concerned with the processes by which individuals acquire knowledge of the world or learn to adapt to the world as it is. All served to inform the reader that the individual is defined in terms of his/her capacities to know (through experience) and adjust. The emphasis on learning has been replaced in recent years by concerns with information processing ("the cognitive revolution" in psychology). The enormous research literature on processes of attention, comprehension, cognitive heuristics, information storage, and memory systems signifies to the culture that the critical ingredients of human character are processes of thought.

Yet, to declare that the common suppositions about human nature are true is simply to assert that psychological accounts have been appropriately absorbed by the prevailing ethnopsychology. The psychologist would simply murmur assent to that which everyone knows and thus fail in the task of generating "insight." This leaves open the question of transcendence — how the profession secures voice by moving beyond the commonplace. In my view, where successful, this end is largely accomplished through metonymic implication. That is, elements of the common vernacular are used as token parts of more general but unarticulated wholes. By elaborating or filling out the images implied by the fragments, the scientific psychologist retains the commonsense conventions, but offers what is effectively a fresh body of insights. Thus, for example, to speak commonly of persons "knowing their way around" and having a "good sense of direction" is, by implication, to suggest a more general image of the individual as possessor of some form of map. Given the more general emphasis within modernist culture on processes of reasoning, the resulting theory is felicitously cast in terms of "cognitive mapping." Thus, researchers from Charles Tolman in the 1930s to ecological psychologists of the 1980s offer to the culture a corpus of theory (and supportive research) on the nature of cognitive maps (see, for example, Neisser's volume, Cognition and Reality). Such theorizing is intelligible largely because it relies, at base, on the commonsense conventions. However, in its fuller elaboration of the image implied by these conventions, it carries the sense of an original scientific contribution.

There are two features of this process worthy of special attention, the first involving psychology's expansion of the culture's concept of the person and the second in its constriction. In the former case, once the theorist has elaborated the general image suggested by various fragments of sedimented discourse, its implicature may be explored by a process of propositional unpacking. That is, given the psychologist's location of a guiding image or metaphor of the human being, he or she may then move on to develop deductively an array of corollary propositions. By unpacking the implicational network, the theorist advances a new array of propositions about human nature not directly contained in the common language. For example, one of the most rhetorically powerful images in the recent psychological literature is that of the mind as computational device, or form of computer. The metaphor is invited by numerous commonsense accounts of persons who "calculate," "carry information in their heads," "possess memories," and so on. However, once the metaphor is in place, the theorist can flesh out the picture of the human being in terms of discourse borrowed from the domain of computer technology. Current theories, for example, treat such topics as feature detection, information storage, storage capacity, working memory, information retrieval, semantic codes, sensory storage, and encoding processes — none of which were initially part of the commonsense idiom, but which may become so as the psychologist's constructions of the person gain status as "accepted knowledge."

At the same time the elaboration of the dominant images leads to fresh conceptualizations of the person, there is also a way in which the profession circumscribes the cultural construction of character. In their natural habitat, that of informal communal life, the signifiers of personal being are subject to continuous catachresis. Fragments of person description are inserted into various and newly emerging contexts without risk of social sanction. Or, in Derridian terms, the signifiers enjoy a relatively high degree of freedom, and thus, the destiny and complexity of their traces are constantly expanding. However, once the scientific psychologist has appropriated the cultural argot, sealed it within the confines of a particular image, and disseminated the language to the culture in the form of "scientific knowledge," the cultural signifiers are thereby constrained. They are discounted or derogated as "mere folk talk." Thus, for example, as the profession increasingly defines human character in terms of the computer, common terms such as "calculate,' "plan," and "think" lose their connotative richness. To "think about it," for example, is no longer a matter of "seeking inspiration from within" (one connotative trace for such a phrase), but of "accessing programs of propositional logic" — just as a properly programmed computer would do. Not only is linguistic flexibility lost in this definitional fixing, but as the computer metaphor is normalized, such terms as "spirit," "passion," "soul," "creativity," "mood," and "lust" become moribund. They are inconsistent with the dominant imagery of mind as computer and thus irrelevant to understanding human character.5