Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
2 total works
This is a critical, personalized approach to reframing the discipline of psychology through a singular narrative in the form of a memoir written by a successful research psychologist.
In this book we follow Martin’s unique career, which has allowed him to understand and adopt different perspectives and ways of approaching psychology, from working in applied areas like educational and counseling psychology to more specialized areas like theory and history of psychology. His journey through and within the field describes his movement away from scientifically based psychology, which views teachings and interventions to be primarily underwritten by hard scientific evidence. Martin exposes the flaws in this approach and highlights the importance of focusing on the study of persons in their life contexts over the use of aggregated group results to ensure that the discipline survives and flourishes.
This is an impactful and universally applicable book with valuable insights for students and scholars of psychology today, particularly those studying history of psychology, theoretical psychology, and philosophical psychology.
This book illustrates how Life Positioning Analysis can be used as a theoretical and methodological approach to sociocultural psychobiography.
Life positioning psychobiography studies lives as they unfold within a world of interactivity. It recognizes and portrays us as social beings embedded and developing within our life relationships and circumstances and striving to make something of our lives. Here, Jack Martin presents both single-subject and dual-subject studies of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, existential humanist Ernest Becker, American heiress and child advocate Dorothy Burlingham and her life partner, renowned psychoanalyst Anna Freud, and indigenous athlete Jim Thorpe and his college coach Glenn “Pop” Warner. These case studies provide vividly memorable demonstrations of how we are positioned by circumstances and others, and come to position ourselves as socioculturally constituted, psychological persons. In so doing, they offer a systematic framework for studying the lives of people that shows sociocultural and social psychological development without resorting to mentalistic theories, concepts, and interpretations.
The book will be of interest to students and scholars in areas related to sociocultural and developmental psychology, the psychology and sociology of personhood, theoretical psychology, qualitative methodology, and social science and life writing more generally.