Human
Science Section
This “section”
of Division 32 originated at the 1994 winter retreat in Santa
Fe, when the executive committee divided into “interest
groups” to have focused discussions. Like the more recently
formed Transpersonal Section, as well as the earlier formed sections
for Humanistic Psychotherapy and Humanistic Education and Research
(from which the current section “broke off” at the
Santa Fe retreat), the Human Science Section does not hold formal
meetings, but rather exists as a way of reminding ourselves that
we as a division should continue to keep ourselves mindful of
those areas to which we can make an important contribution.
My first real
assignment as “human science chair” came in 1995 when
Ruth Heber (the President of Div. 32) appointed me Liaison to
the Science Directorate for Div. 32, in response to the Directorate’s
new liaison program, intended to give all divisions a voice in
the science directorate programming. I went to Washington in the
fall of 1995 to lobby for humanistic psychologists to be represented
in the following year’s Science Weekend at the annual convention
in Toronto. Because of the disruption of “business as usual”
that resulted from this one-time inclusion of all divisions in
the planning of science weekend, the liaison program was discontinued
the following year! But this has not stopped us from making our
concerns known to the Science Directorate. The latter, which is
supposed to serve all members and divisions of the APA, has been
dominated by the interests of a very few divisions, and it was
these same divisions who apparently protested our input into Science
Weekend 1996. We responded by writing a letter to the Directorate,
claiming that they were biased toward experimental research and
suggesting that they change the name of Science Weekend to Experimental
Research Weekend, in order to allow for another “weekend”
– a “qualitative research weekend” – to
be presented under the auspices of the Science Directorate. This
would finally mean that the Science Directorate was serving all
of our interests instead of the interests of a minority of divisions.
The Directorate
barely paid lip service to our earnest efforts to communicate
with them, and they made it clear that they were not really interested
in supporting our research interests. Hence one of our current
concerns is how to make the general membership of APA aware of
this bias within the Science Directorate.
Beyond lobbying
for our interests within the APA at large, the human science section
of Division 32 promotes convention programming as well as publication
of “human science research”. We try to make our membership
aware that without published research, we will never make our
presence known in psychology textbooks. And without a presence
of humanistic psychology in professional publications (including
introductory textbooks), we will remain a marginalized division
within the APA, and might be condemning ourselves in the future
to being but a footnote in the pages of history of psychology
textbooks.
To this end,
I am in the process of trying to merge Methods: A Journal
for Human Science (for which I have served as Editor since
1989) with The Humanistic Psychologist. Methods
would survive as a fourth yearly issue of THP. The idea
is to keep our membership mindful of the importance of conducting
and publishing research in humanistic psychology.
Readers of
this newsletter might reflect for a moment and ask themselves
how we might work together to carry out investigations of human
psychological life that highlight phenomenological as well as
transpersonal dimensions of psyche and to put into print
our vision of psychology. If you have ideas, articles, unpublished
research that you would be interested in submitting to me, please
contact me at cscott@udallas.edu.
