Are you a STEM person or a humanities person? A better question is where we ever got this idea that interest in the natural and the human diverge. How did we come to believe that empirical knowledge and humane understanding are distinct skillsets? Why did we invent such a strange educational ritual: Please form two lines, depending on whether you care about what works or what matters. It is time to declare your major: facts or values?
This is the bread and butter of the humanities, denaturalizing the bits of non-sense that congeal into “common sense.” The educational philosopher, John Dewey, had already diagnosed the false dichotomy between naturalism and humanism by 1916. Unfortunately, Dewey is only read by humanists, so the dichotomy is good at covering its own tracks. One of my colleagues shared a startling anecdote. When he taught the history of psychology in a leading clinical psychology program, all of the students had the same astonished reaction: “no one ever told us that psychology had a history!”
In fact, there are two histories: the standard, shallow account and a deeper, counter-narrative. On the standard account, it was not until the 19th century when psychology finally climbed out of the murky waters of religion, philosophy, and folk understanding onto the dry land of experimental science. The second history counters that we have in fact been “working out the logic of the soul” (Jonathan Lear) for millennia. Only the pathologically myopic would squint at the back issues of a couple dozen contemporary journals when the entire history of humane letters offers rich insights into our frailties and prospects, our flourishing and floundering, our nature and condition.
How could such a myopic account become the default? Perhaps because it protects a pair of shaky assumptions animating mainstream psychology: (1) that the psyche constitutes an independent (and transhistorical) object of study; and (2) that normative questions may be bracketed in psychological inquiry. As “self-interpreting animals” (Charles Taylor), we cannot fully separate our efforts to form and to understand ourselves. Every culture features “a peculiar configuration of self, illness, healer, technology” (Philip Cushman). What emerged in the labs of Helmholz, Wundt, and G. Stanley Hall is best read not as the birth of a new science but as another chapter in the long history of “our relation to ourselves” (Michel Foucault).
“ If you want to accompany your patients into deep waters, you yourself must have some familiarity with the depths. Narrow, technical training is insufficient. Only a therapist who has widely explored the human scene will be responsive to the full range of material brought into sessions. ”
And when we look into this longer history, we note something interesting. For hundreds of years, no one doubted that healing and humane learning were complementary. Avicenna and Averroës were physicians, as were Maimonides and Rabelais. Later physician-humanists include Vesalius and Paracelsus, Linacre and Symonds. Schiller and Keats also had medical training and careers, if short-lived. And the tradition of the writer-physician continues in such figures as William Carlos Williams and Walker Percy.
Nor is it hard to find examples in psychotherapy, where the urge to heal and the desire to understand have long gone hand-in-hand. Freud wrote not research reports but humane essays, ones shaped by both his dialogues with patients and his avid reading in philosophy, archaeology, and literature. Jung studied mythology, folklore, and world religions. Fromm studied law, philosophy, political economy, and the Talmud. Erikson went to art school. Clinical work is deeply intertwined with humane study for Kristeva (semiotics), Lear (philosophy), and Adam Phillips (literature).
It is no coincidence that these exemplars of humane learning are associated with depth and relational approaches to psychotherapy. If you want to accompany your patients into deep waters, you yourself must have some familiarity with the depths. Narrow, technical training is insufficient. Only a therapist who has widely explored the human scene will be responsive to the full range of material brought into sessions. If you want to receive your patients not as clusters of symptoms but as persons whose specific ailments link up with the broader human dilemmas of lifeleading, you yourself must enliven and deepen your moral imagination.
“ The Boston College Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology will situate clinical training within this broader humanistic frame, offering a vision of psychotherapy as both the alleviation of suffering and the search for understanding, mining the arts and humanities for insights into the painful predicaments, beautiful breakthroughs, and perennial hopes in our messy, all-too-human lives. ”
The Boston College Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology will situate clinical training within this broader humanistic frame, offering a vision of psychotherapy as both the alleviation of suffering and the search for understanding, mining the arts and humanities for insights into the painful predicaments, beautiful breakthroughs, and perennial hopes in our messy, all-too-human lives.
This program represents a partnership between the Woods College and the Lynch School’s Department of Formative Education (DFE). DFE is devoted to the interdisciplinary, humanistic study of formative experience and aims. Drawing on the arts, humanities, humanistic social sciences, and learning sciences, we explore the human quest for meaningful lives and just communities. And we explore the formative dimensions of the defining crises of our alienated, algorithmic age of disappearing work, fragmented attention, offloaded judgment, decaying democracy, and climate catastrophe.
The new Psy.D. fits beautifully our mission to educate engaged scholars and reflective practitioners, seeking to cultivate practical wisdom in all of its forms. We are proud to contribute to the formation of therapists who are skilled and knowledgeable, sensitive and imaginative, socially conscious and self-aware. We are excited to accompany our students as whole persons as they prepare to foster authentic, hopeful, healing dialogues with those who are searching and suffering.