The Image of Man.

The article informs that psychology has been far more concerned with being a science than with courageous and self-determining confrontation of its historical subject matter. Psychology (and social science) has constructed a language which renders virtually impossible its living up to its promise. The trouble with this account is that psychological language is not an arbitrary construction but a reflection of the way psychology has confronted its subject matter. If the language is defective, then this is because the subject matter is being violated. The proper source of discontent is that psychology has failed to live up to its promise to itself, not that it has failed to live up to its promise to the humanities. The contrasting and, among psychologists whose careers are devoted to the advancement of the science, the prevailing image of man is that of an impotent reactor, with its responses completely determined by two distinct and separate, albeit interacting, sets of factors, the forces impinging on it and its constitution. Response is at all times and at every moment an automatic consequence of the interaction of body and environment. Man, as such, plays no role in determining the outcome of the interplay between constitution and environment.