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Much theorizing in psychology and related disciplines begins with a given model of the mind that is then applied in research projects to study concrete phenomena. Sometimes psychological research can be theory-driven in quite an explicit way, approaching the logic of the hypothetico-deductive method. Others reject this and prefer to work inductively, and, in the extreme case of positivism, perhaps try to avoid theorizing altogether. In this article I shall suggest another way to think of the relationship between psychological theories and psychological phenomena. My suggestion is not simply to replace the hypothetico-deductive model with an inductive one, but to argue that the most direct route to theories of the human mind that grasp its complexity is to begin with the Kantian question of transcendental philosophy: X exists – how is X possible? In the context of this article, I apply this questioning to the phenomenon of grief: Grief exists – what general psychological theory of the mind do we need in order to account for its possibility? I attempt to extract three general psychological points from the existence of grief, viz. (1) the deep relationality of the self, (2) the limitations of evolutionary accounts, and (3) the normativity of psychological phenomena. I shall argue that these are general psychological lessons to be learned from grief, although they could also be arrived at by considering several other significant psychological phenomena.

William James famously defined psychology as the science of mental life. Much ink has since been spilled over the concept of the mental, but less so over the notion of life. In this article, I argue that psychologists should address life as an equally important concept. First, I briefly articulate Aristotle’s idea of the soul (or mind) as a life principle. Second, I argue with reference to Wittgenstein that the division between the living and non-living is more basic and important than that between mind and matter. Third, I introduce the work of the philosopher Hans Jonas, who made the phenomenon of life central to his existential interpretation of biological facts and argued that nature should be seen as a source of value. My conclusion is that psychology as a science of life must be a biographical science—a science of what it is to live a life.

In the fifth edition of the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (the DSM), published in 2013, a new diagnosis for complicated grief was included named “Persistent complex bereavement disorder”. When the World Health Organization will publish its next edition of its system, the ICD, in 2018, it is expected that a new diagnosis called “Prolonged grief disorder” will also be included in this manual. In this article, I first briefly present the emerging diagnostic criteria for grief and situate the rise of the psychiatric grief diagnoses in the context of what has been called the “diagnostic culture” of contemporary society. I then raise the question about the legitimacy of diagnoses for complicated grief. I discuss the diagnoses in light of four general theories of mental disorders: The naturalist theory of Boorse, the harmful dysfunction theory of Wakefield, the phenomenological theory in the tradition of Jaspers and the nominalist theory of Bolton. I end with a general discussion of thinking of grief as a mental disorder and recommend a cautious approach, according to which grief should primarily be thought of as an existential condition that may lead to mental disorders, but which is not a mental disorder in itself.

This article introduces the notion of foundational emotions, using grief as a central example. Unlike so-called basic emotions, some of which humans share with other animals, foundational emotions are constitutive of human selfhood and subjectivity. First, anxiety, shame, and guilt are presented as emotions that have been singled out as foundational emotions in philosophical and biblical texts. Second, grief is introduced as a foundational human emotion in the sense that it connects the human being to existential issues of love and death that are uniquely important for us. Some general implications are discussed that follow from the notion of foundational emotions.

Disputes about the origins of psychology in the history of the discipline are functional not for our understanding of the past, but as normative signs that regulate the construction of ideas in the future. We introduce the notion of open-ended normativity that regulates the development of a given discipline towards its future. Hence the question of the cultural origins of psychology becomes contested in the 21st century as an important topic. It proves that the history of psychology is an active participant in the making of psychology, as it is creating its future.

As one commentator has recently argued, “diagnoses have become part of how we make sense of ourselves, each other, and the world” (McGann, 2011, p. 343). It seems that this applies in particular to...

Almost 25 years ago, psychologist and qualitative methodologist Steinar Kvale conjectured that psychology might become obsolete or redundant in a postmodern age due to the modernist legacies of this science. This, of course, has not materialized, but the question of redundancy reemerges today in new philosophical guises related to the rise of posthumanist philosophy and what has come to be known as postqualitative research. In this article, I aim to (1) introduce the posthuman and postqualitative critique of conventional qualitative research with an eye to its relevance for psychology, (2) introduce a distinction between ontological and advocacy issues concerning the post qualitative critique in order to (3) propose the idea that qualitative psychologists can accept much of the ontological theorizing developed by posthuman and postqualitative scholars, and yet advocate a humanist agenda for both scientific and ethical reasons. Historically, this was attempted by pragmatists such as James and Dewey...

From a hermeneutic viewpoint, human beings are self-interpreting creatures.History involves a development of the interpretive resources that humans have available for understanding themselves. Building on Charles Taylor’s interpretive approach to human subjectivity, this article attempts to outline some significant changes in such interpretive resources. It is argued that different forms of subjectivity go hand in hand with changing modes of self-interpretation: From a premodern notion of character, through a modern notion of personality, to a postmodernidea of identity. In a culture of character, people primarily interpret themselves according to a moral and religious perspective; in a culture of personality, a psychological (scientific as well as romantic) perspective becomes prominent, stressing individual personality and its development; and, in a contemporary cultureof identity, more fluid self-interpretations centred on a consumerist perspective gain in importance.

The relationship between facts and values is tremendously intricate in psychology, as in the other human and social sciences, which take as their object of interest human beings as acting persons. Often, two premises are taken for granted in ­scientific psychology: First, that only statements of fact can be objectively true, while statements of value can be nothing but expressions of subjective preferences. Second, that there is an unbridgeable logical gap between factual and evaluative statements so that no descriptive statement can entail an evaluative statement (without the addition of some evaluative premise).

The hermeneutic tradition in psychology and the social sciences claims that we should understand human identity in terms of self-interpretation. This article is an attempt to spell out what it means to think of identity as self-interpretation. First, two dimensions of identity as self-interpretation are outlined: that we can only have an identity if we are committed to issues of moral worth; and that self-interpretation involves a temporal dimension that has a narrative form. Second, I outline four levels of self-interpretation in order to show that identity is not confined to either social or mental representations, but is dispersed across bodies, persons, practices, and society. Often there are discrepancies and conflicts between levels of self-interpretation, which can lead to social progress but also to social pathologies. Finally, I analyse some pathological aspects of a dominating Western self-interpretation in the current consumer society, which frames identity formation in terms of self-realization.

This study explores work stress as a cultural phenomenon, distributed socially and materially, by introducing the metaphor of a landscape of appraisal and coping. By using this landscape analogy, it is emphasized that concrete contexts invite employees to appraise the situations at work in a certain way and afford using certain coping strategies rather than others. This study uses data based on a field study in one department of a multinational company and demonstrates how definitions of stress, appraisals of the working environment and coping strategies vary across professional groups. Furthermore, the study indicates that these different appraisal and coping practices are deeply embedded in the concrete context in the sense that the different aspects of the working environment such as the physical surroundings, the workorganization, the social interactions and cultural characteristics both separately and combined invite the employees to engage in distinct appraisals and coping practices and limit the use of others. By invoking the landscape metaphor, we aim to expand our understanding of stress as something more than a transaction between the individual and a specific stressful situation at work.

This article discusses what it means to be a good qualitative researcher. The aim is to deliberately blur the distinction between epistemic and ethical goodness by arguing that there is a close connection between being a good qualitative researcher in the epistemic and the ethical senses. First, the relation between researcher and researched is articulated as a power relation giving rise to certain ethical demands. Second, some similarities between the discourses on ethics and qualitative research are brought forth, and it is argued that many key capabilities that enable qualitative researchers to deal well with their subject matter are also moral virtues. Finally, the concepts of objectivity and validity in qualitative research are discussed as moral matters.

This paper argues the Wittgensteinian point that we can undo the psychologizing of psychology by conceiving of mental life as lived in the space of reasons. It is argued that mental life - human action, feeling and thinking - is constituted by normative connections and necessities rather than causal ones. The consequence is that mental life is irreducibly moral, and if the sciences of mental life are to become adequate to deal with their subject matter, they should construe themselves as what was once referred to as moral sciences. It is argued that the source of the normativity of mental life is found in historically evolved social practices, although not all normativity is conventional or historically contingent. Finally, some objections to the idea that mental life is normative are discussed; first, that this idea represents an intellectualist or rationalist fallacy, and second that it violates our conception of mental illness as something mental, yet outside the space of reasons.

Recent work in the historiography of psychology has suggested that the discipline must be seen as involved in the constitution of its own subject matter. Two questions arise. First, what does this tell us about the subject matter of psychology? Second, how should we understand and investigate the processes through which such ‘making up people’ occurs? This article addresses these questions by arguing, first, that psychological categories refer to human rather than natural kinds. In contrast to natural kinds, human kinds can exert effects on themselves. Then two different approaches to the ‘looping effect of human kinds’ are sketched: a Foucauldian analytics of the techne of psychology, and a hermeneutic understanding of humans as self-interpreting beings. It is argued that Foucault’s perspective, while rich in its critical potentials, lacks an adequate understanding of those values and meanings which are a part of human practical life.

Brinkmann, S. (2005). Moral understanding in psychotherapeutic practice. Nordisk Psykologi, 57, 250–270. Psychotherapy as a social practice has been criticized for being part of a subjectivist culture in which clients' feelings and self-realization become the ultimate moral authority. In this article, this form of critique is confronted with psychologists' own experiences of moral situations in their work. On the basis of interviews with 8 psychological psychotherapists, an understanding of moral cognition and ability in practice is sought developed. On a reflective, theoretical level, the interviewees primarily understand morality as a system of conventional rules of behaviour. Yet when they give concrete examples of moral issues from their work, rules hardly play a role, and moral and professional dilemmas intersect. Moral situations emerge when everyday practices are “disturbed” and “break down”, which demands situational perception and judgement. A generalist theoretical discourse and a particularisti...

The idea that the human world contains moral properties, that is, moral values and goods, raises a fundamental challenge to the prevailing methodological paradigm in psychology, which is connected to a problematic metaphysical worldview that excludes values from the world. In contrast, this article conceptualizes the human world as a moral ecology; as a meaningful world with moral properties that present human beings with moral reasons for action. The concept of social practice is employed to understand the nature of moral ecology. Thinkers such as Aristotle, Heidegger and Dewey, who emphasize our practical dealings with the world as the basis of understanding, along with the perspectives on morality found in Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, help provide the framework of moral ecology. The article concludes by addressing key problems related to the nature of psychology, relativism and identification of moral properties and practices.

In cultural psychology, semiotic mediation refers to persons' use of signs to regulate thoughts, acts, and emotions. Drawing on an ongoing fieldwork in a support group for adults diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), this paper highlights three specific functions that psychiatric diagnoses can have as semiotic mediators in the lives of the diagnosed: (1) an explanatory function in relation to experienced problems (even if a diagnosis is a description of symptoms, it is often used to explain these very symptoms), (2) a self-affirming function (in the sense that a diagnosis provides a framework according to which numerous phenomena appear as “symptoms”), and (3) a disclaiming function in relation to responsibility (with the possibility of medicalizing aspects of moral life). The legitimacy of each can be discussed, which in itself might add to the distress experienced by adults categorized by a contested diagnosis such as ADHD.

This article presents the fundamental paradigmatic principles of evolutionary psychology, which are then subjected to criticism. It is argued that evolutionary psychology suffers from both a number...

Unlike his ideas about education and philosophy, John Dewey’s psychology has been largely neglected. This article begins the rediscovery of his transactional psychology by seeking a synthesizing reading of those of his works that pertain to psychology. The article first outlines his transactional approach and also his metapsychology, which conceived of psychology as involved in the constitution of its own subject matter. Then some central psychological concepts such as habit, thinking, self, mind, meaning, and consciousness are explained within the transactional framework, and some similarities are highlighted between Dewey’s psychology and ecological psychology. It is argued that Dewey’s psychology is still very relevant in the 21st century.

Methodological recommendationsfor qualitative interviewing, that is, using semistructured conversations for research purposes, often suggest that interviewers ask respondents to describe concrete experiences. Concreteexperiences from the past, however, are autobiographical memories (specific memories), and as such the interviewer may benefit from having knowledge of research on specific memories. While descriptions of specific memories potentially provide the interviewer with access to rich layers of experience, there are alsosome possible limitations in asking for and interpreting specific memories. First, specific memories do not correspond perfectly to the original experience, and the associated thoughts, emotions, and meanings may change over time. Thus, interviewers should be aware thatspecific memories reflect re-interpreted versions of the original experience. Second, specific memories are not representative of experiences more generally; they are retained as specific memories exactly because the experiences they refer to were perceived as novel, emotionally intense, and/or important. Thus, interviewers need to becareful when attempting to generalize from contents or themes in specific memories. Lastly, given these limitations, we suggest some strategies that interviewers may find useful when asking for and interpreting specific memories, that is, concrete experiences.

Damasio’s theory of emotions and feelings has recently become influential in psychology and related disciplines. The theory states that feeling an emotion consists of having mental images that arise from neural patterns that represent changes in body and brain (and these changes make up the emotion). In this article, I first criticize Damasio’s general theory of the mind, before moving on to a critique of his theory of emotions. This critique involves four points. I argue that it is flawed to say (1) that we observe our feelings, (2) that feelings necessarily involve experiences of changes in body states, (3) that feelings are private, and (4) that feelings are always caused.

In the course of the 20th century, human beings began to understand themselves in light of psychological concepts and theories. Freud taught people that they possessed unconscious drives and educat...

Steinar Kvale, professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus, Denmark, passed away on the 12th of March, 2008. He was 70 years old. Steinar Kvale was a researcher based in Scandin...