Intellectual rant about psychology

One of the biggest issues I faced in my senior year as a psychology major is my belief in the value of psychology and how right is it that I’m in a program that predisposes me as a student to believe and commit to the values psychology as a field aim to espouse. This personal struggle was reflected in my initial decision to take myself away from Dr. Teh’s class of parapsychology which I thought was going to be a class on Rogerian counseling and transplant myself in another class. I thought parapsychology will no doubt kill psychology for me since I was coming from an impetus of pragmatism. I’ve always had an issue in the applicability of the concepts taught to us since most of the knowledge brought to us via the discipline of psychology seem to have arisen and sometimes only lay useful to Western contexts. Instead of going for classes that will take on the same attempt to take an in depth plunge on the existing fields of psychology such as counseling psychology or critical thinking, the eclectic approach of the choice I made seemed more appropriate in responding to my internal struggle. It was obvious that from all the choices I had, I chose the class on Philippine and Filipino Psychology. In this, believe I made the right choice. Rest assured, the analysis and reflection on a movie regarding its Sikopil-ness will come, but I have to humor myself in sharing where I am in this struggle of mine. I hope that this does not become my folly, but in hope, it becomes the charm I might earn through this similar to the Filipino tendency to digress as an actual part of revelation.
I’ve surmised that my insatiable bedazzlement with philosophy and literature have always been obstacles to my assimilation of the psychological sensibilities with which I should have internalized by now that I’m a senior psychology major. I’ve decidedly pursued minors in both philosophy and literature and they probably have been more personally rewarding than my experience as a psychology major. As I reflect on why, I came to the conclusion that it was because of the nature of knowing espoused by the two fields. To put it simply, I really don’t believe in empiricism especially in its application in the human and social sciences. I think the admission of the limiting effect of our own categories and methods of knowing have a greater effect than whether or not we try to confirm our knowledge on the basis of parallelism and demonstration in the realm of human and social reality. I think the way psychologists think, we need a humbler outlook on human and social reality. We shouldn’t take our knowledge as truth, but constantly project it upon the framework of a historical dialogue with which truth is not an intrinsic component of our knowledge, but an extrinsic end of it. We need to admit that what we know are mere stolen shots from the bigger picture, that we should know that we know only little, if at all.
Despite this, I do not intend to leave psychology. The topic of the human psyche is still more interesting than the vague concepts of “wisdom” in philosophy and “texts” in literature. I think what I would want to do is to transplant that more humanistic approach of the humanities to psychology and with which I may find myself more satisfied with the knowledge I might contribute. With the focus on the quantitative and experimental sides of psychology in the Ateneo curriculum, I believe there is a tendency to see the psyche as merely a mechanical system that can be unraveled with enough rigorous wielding of the scientific apparatuses of statistics and experimentation. If the natural sciences are having a mystical turn to nature in their theories of quantum mechanics, I believe psychology whose focus is on the self-detemined reality of the human person, is obviously supposed to have this kind of attitude, more of it even. The human psyche needs to be approached as if we psychologists are mystics as we bow to the psyche as it allows itself to be revealed via our primitive instrument of knowing called “psychology.”
Going back to my reflection about my struggle as a psychology major, I believe psychology tends to dampen and thin out the experience of hope and solidarity in its viewing the human person as a predictable entity. I see the value in trying to understand the human psyche in the field of psychology, but I believe it’s doused with a certain kind of arrogance, even of machismo that although it might admit to know only little about the human psyche, it still must acknowledge that what little it knows must be taken with a grain of salt.