| This study argues that psychology's attaining to a genuinely scientific status is incumbent upon its capacity to adequately address human experience. Critical assessments of the discipline are unanimous in agreeing that psychology has to date failed to accomplish this aim. The historical roots of this failure are traced to the Enlightenment and the emergence in nineteenth century Germany of the disciplinary order of research that composes the modern university. The organization of intellectual life into disparate disciplines is critically analyzed and, through the manner in which psychology has gained institutional autonomy in the United States in the twentieth century, its disciplinary identity is argued to be the most prominent barrier to psychology's capacity to develop a genuine science of human experience. It is argued that a fundamental alienation of knowledge from life proves to be the very premise for psychological theorizing, and by extension suggested to be the case for the human sciences in general. An expository reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's existential-phenomenological approach to perception is offered as a corrective and as exemplary of an incipient science of experience; the exposition is accompanied by a critical evaluation of the thesis in light of the problem language raises for his account of perception. Merleau-Ponty's account demonstrates the manner in which psychology as a science of experience can be pursued, as issuing inescapably from a philosophical stance towards its human subject matter and necessarily in terms of human beings as personal agents. Examination and elaboration of the themes of embodiment, expression, and history that are fundamental to Merleau-Ponty's work provides a framework for situating psychology in relation to philosophy as well as the other human sciences, and addresses the discipline's problem of alienation through rooting psychological inquiry within the broader social order and arguing for the existential recognition that this order, and human life in general, be understood as expressive of human agency. |
