Canonical Narratives as a Tool of Analysis in Psychology

Abstract

In this article, I develop the concept of canonical narratives, drawing on Jerome Bruner’s (1915-2016) later writings on the central role of culture in shaping human psychology. I argue that we can develop the concept of canonical narratives past its initial purpose in explaining how folk psychology acquires meaning for individuals and develop the concept into a tool of analysis that can shed new light on the broader dialectic between academic psychology and social-cultural environments. I examine the role of canonical narratives in contemporary psychology by focusing on the narrative that human beings are best conceptualized as machines. I argue that not only are psychology’s constructs shaped by social-cultural environments, which have been well established but that their meanings are, to some extent, established through a dialectic with canonical narratives.

Introduction

Jerome Bruner (1915-2016) is well known as one of the founders of the American cognitive revolution of 1956, which cemented the notion that cognitive processes could be conceptualized in computational and information-theoretic terms (Gardner, 1985; Miller, 2003). Bruner’s hope for the cognitive revolution was, to put it simply, that using the computer metaphor of the mind would shed new light on human beings’ mental lives: the world of subjectivity, intentionality, drama, and passion. The metaphor was intended to reintroduce subjectivity back into scientific psychology after such concepts were banished by the behaviorists—or so the story goes (Bruner, 1983). Although the cognitive revolution did diminish behaviorism’s dominance in American psychology, it did not reintroduce the world of mental life back into the discipline as Bruner had hoped. In fact, Bruner (1990) would later argue that the computer metaphor of the mind and the stubbornly unreflective ontological and methodological assumptions of American psychology led the discipline away from the initial promise of the cognitive revolution.

Bruner’s (1990) critique of the long-term effects of the cognitive revolution is best exemplified in his book, Acts of Meaning, which at the time presented a new vision for psychology. It attempted to lay the groundwork for an interpretative, narrative-oriented psychology that could investigate the complexities and nuances of human subjectivity. Bruner begins his argument with the axiom that culture is fundamental to—and inescapably part of—any science of the mind. We are born and socialized into a world where the symbolic systems and patterns of social behavior that we find meaningful in our environments—embodied in religious beliefs, moral convictions, social norms, and rituals—are already established. Therefore, any science of the mind ought to incorporate the embeddedness of the individual in its network of values if it is to produce legitimate knowledge of human psychology.

Bruner’s critique of the cognitive revolution’s effects on academic psychology’s aims and methods are to some extent echoes of those already made in the humanistic tradition, such as the need for a holistic psychological program that could do justice to subjectivity and lived experience. As DeRobertis (2021) shows, from the inception of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1961, humanistic psychologists have been arguing for the importance of a plurality of methods and subject matter(s) in academic psychology. Bruner’s (1990, 1991) arguments for the importance of culturally canonical narratives in psychological life fit well with the humanistic tradition’s early advocacy for qualitative methods at a time when the metaphors and theories dominant in the field were reductionistic and limiting. DeRobertis (2021) notes that early humanistic psychologists were well aware of the problems in relying on reductionistic metaphors (such as the human being as an information processing machine) and how they limit the potential for understanding human subjectivity. For example, Andrian Van Kaam (1961) states: “The orientation of scientific research depends on the predominant modes of being in a culture. Which modes of being are prevalent in society today? How do they influence contemporary psychologies?” (p. 97). These were the kinds of questions that Bruner would later explore in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986) and Acts of Meaning (1990), which can be seen as building upon the ideas within the humanistic tradition.

The fundamental reasons Bruner (1990) gives for why the role of culture is so crucial to any psychological inquiry are the following: participation in a culture is a precondition for the practice of generating scientific knowledge; what is meaningful is determined by agreed-upon standards in the public sphere; and folk psychology is a reflection of the canonical expectations set out in a cultural environment which people rely on for understanding their conduct within a social nexus (p. 12). This last point is the most significant, as folk psychology was (and still is) sometimes viewed as something psychologists and cognitive scientists need to explain away (e.g., Churchland, 1988). But as Bruner (1990) notes, “folk psychology of ordinary people is not just a set of self-assuaging illusions, but the culture’s beliefs and working hypotheses about what makes it possible and fulfilling for people to live together, even with great personal sacrifice” (p. 32). According to Bruner, these beliefs and hypotheses reflect the canonical expectations placed on social behavior by the culture one lives in. When these expectations are breached, we are impelled to construct a narrative to make sense of the anomaly, and these narratives used to explain breaches from conventional social expectations are themselves instantiated in culturally canonical narratives.

An important aspect of this conceptualization is that different cultures will provide different canonical narratives for people to use. Wang’s (2011) discussion of the connections between the concepts of “existence” (understood from a Western existential perspective) and “Zhi Mian” (understood from a Chinese existential perspective) provide an interesting example of this. As Wang (2011) notes, Zhi Mian as a concept can be understood as a confrontation with life in all its complexities, and from a psychotherapeutic perspective, can be used to form narratives of transcending suffering and moving toward the realization of an authentic self. Putting this existential perspective alongside something like Cushman’s (1990) conception of the particularly American consumerist “empty self” shows how difficulties and uncertainties in life can be expressed differently given different available culturally canonical narratives. Different cultural expressions of the self’s trouble can provide insight into the folk psychology of everyday life, as well as highlight the invariant aspects of human psychology.

It is well established that human beings make sense of their experiences and selfhood through narratives (Bruner, 1990, 1991; Freeman, 2009, 2014; Sarbin, 1986) and that the kinds of narratives on offer are very much specific to a culture. This becomes apparent when one reflects on the fact that the adoption of cultural scripts and storylines into one’s own life story is not necessarily something that we consciously choose to do as individuals. As Mark Freeman (2009, 2018) has shown with his concept of the “narrative unconscious,” culture and history can be seen as constituting important aspects of one’s life story which may not be explicitly articulated by an individual, but nevertheless provide a foundation of potential meanings and insight. For Bruner (1991), the unarticulated aspects of a life story may take the form of the “‘culturally canonical accounts’” (p. 70) of various ways of being that are promoted and expected in a particular time and place. Indeed, Bruner (1990) notes that narrative is “built around established or canonical expectations and the mental management of deviations from such expectations” (p. 35). Although Bruner’s focus was on the importance of canonicality for folk psychology—and so, how individuals understand themselves in an everyday manner—I suggest that we can expand this line of thinking into the domain of academic psychology to investigate the broader context by which canonical expectations are established and maintained.

The Role of Canonical Narratives in Academic Psychology

Canonical narratives are the conventional stories made available in a particular time and place. Following Bruner’s (1986, 1990, 1991) conceptualization, we can understand these stories as expressing the implicitly agreed-upon expectations and deviations about human conduct and self-understanding. Narratives are used to explain and organize our mental lives around certain themes, moral principles, and aesthetic values, and the kinds of narratives available vary widely across environments. Given that psychology deals with “human kinds” and so it constructs—to some extent, at least—its own subject matter (Brinkmann, 2005; Hacking, 1995; Sass, 2022), it is worth exploring the role that canonical narratives play in the kinds of psychological knowledge that gets produced. In this sense, canonical narratives are part of the “background practices” of a culture: the shared assumptions about what a human being is and how they should act. This makes the concept of canonical narratives share some elements with myths, but I argue that it is ultimately a different phenomenon. I use the concept of canonical narratives instead of myths in this context primarily because myths are often meant to express falsehoods and delusions: such as in the dichotomy of science and myth. The use of the word myth in the context of science can set up an oppositional stance even though the two may be more connected than we tend to think—as seen in the historical relationship between logos and mythos (Fowler, 2011).

Both canonical narratives and myths guide and shape inquiry instead of directly dictating what the results of inquiry should be. As Bickhard (1992) notes in his critique of the mythologies of contemporary science: “They [myths] are implicit in the organization of thinking, rather than explicit in the contents of thinking” (p. 322). In this sense, canonical narratives are in the same boat as myths. They are part of the background knowledge and assumptions that allow communication to successfully take place in the first place and they operate largely behind the scenes. Canonical narratives can be considered part of what the philosopher Charles Taylor (1991) considers to be the “background of intelligibility” (p. 37) or the “horizons of significance” (p. 39) which frame certain things as important and meaningful while necessarily obscuring others. Canonical narratives do this by highlighting certain ways of being over others, and so there is always an element of a value judgment. It is important to note that because of this, canonical narratives can be used just as much for oppression and exclusion as for solidarity and unity. Indeed, as Julian Rappaport (2000) puts it, the recognition of dominant narratives is essential for the community project of “turning tales of terror into tales of joy” (p. 7). And such “tales of terror” are often the product of corrosive narratives that are difficult to dispense with.

This connects to the final shared element between canonical narratives and myths, which is that myths can become out-of-date and in need of replacement by new ones, as Bickhard (1992) rightly argues is the case with the remnants of logical positivism in psychology. I argue that this is also the case with the narrative in scientific psychology that the human being is best conceptualized as a kind of machine. Canonical narratives, like myths, can be replaced and changed but not eliminated entirely. Canonical narratives are interwoven into the context out of which we arrive at science and truth, and so, their relationship with psychological knowledge is more complicated than strict opposition. Although the case can be made that myths are also inextricably interwoven into the fabric of science—and perhaps they are—I think that the concept of canonical narratives can account for this in a different way: one which does not reject the importance of myths and their role in human understanding (including scientific knowledge).

As noted earlier, canonical narratives take part in the structuring of one’s own life story, and so, there is the inescapable role of subjectivity involved. Indeed, the concept of canonical narratives can be further expanded upon when considering current ideas about socio-subjectivity (Teo, 2017, 2019). For instance, narratives about the self that come out of neoliberal background practices are necessarily going to make more sense—and appear more legitimate—than other ways of thinking about the self. In this sense, the way psychologists conceptualize the intentionality of individuals cannot be something isolated from the larger narratives of a culture. By looking at the larger narratives informing psychology, we can get a better sense of why certain views of subjectivity are valued more than others. For instance, subjectivity conceptualized in the context of neoliberalism will be bounded within the individual and lead one to see the world in terms of cost–benefit analyses. Subjectivity itself may be conceptualized as a kind of software system that runs models that anticipate other people’s social behavior—a kind of prediction-generating machine running on assumptions of rationality (e.g., Dennett, 2009). I would argue that this mechanistic conception is still dominant in academic psychology. However, there has been a large variety of conceptions of the self that do not rely on mechanistic assumptions and in fact stand in opposition to that perspective. For example, Hoffman et al. (2015) show that a coherent myth of the self is essential—especially when living in times of uncertainty and rapid change—and they offer an existential perspective that values the paradoxical nature of trying to pinpoint any one conception of a self.

Conceptions of the self or subjectivity always have the self-constituting element of Ian Hacking’s (1995) “looping effects” at play in that a new kind of person is being created as the self-descriptions made available interact with the process of identity formation in individuals. Mechanistic conceptions rest on neoliberal assumptions of individualism and autonomy: valuing the individual’s ability to be separate and self-sufficient from others. In this way, mechanistic conceptions of the human being entail solipsism, which is consistent with what Louis Sass (2022) argues to be emblematic of modern Western subjectivity: our strong proclivity toward ironic detachment, self-doubt, individuality, and inwardness. Teo (2018) notes that under neoliberalism there is a noticeable reduction in the complexities of the self, in that distinctions between different identities and modes of being—aesthetic, interpersonal, religious, and so on—are colonized by neoliberal principles. The self in this case becomes something to be controlled, both by the external economic demands of everyday life, as well as internally through self-control. One mechanism by which self-control is achieved (and prescribed and sold to the public) is of course through the discipline of psychology.

Canonical narratives express values for acting in certain ways, and these values can inform the kind of discourse people use when talking about themselves. One particularly stunning example of the relationship between canonical narratives and subjectivity is found in Sherry Turkle’s (1984) The Second Self. In one section, Turkle describes her interviews with MIT students and relays the language that the students use to describe themselves. One student describes their own mind in mechanistic terms:

There is a computational part, that’s the part with the agents that somehow through their interaction have real intelligence come through. This part does my reasoning, my logic, my math homework, my ability to learn history. But then I have another system. It is built up from instincts. Evolution. My animal part. It is involved with love, feelings, relating to people. It can’t control the computer part. But it lives with it. Sometimes fights with it. And this is the part that gives me the feeling of being me (p. 268).

Here there is a narrative being invoked about two adversarial aspects of the self—the animal and the machine—and it is told as though they are autonomous entities with their own drives and goals.

This theme is repeated by another student that Turkle quotes, who says:

In general I see my mind in terms of continual processing by internal programs. But the weight given to the output of these programs can be influenced by emotion. And then when they come up to consciousness, they come up to a level where there is this other kind of agent—the special agent. The one in touch with my history and with evolution (p. 268).

We see again this hybrid conception of the self-invoked, where the computational parts are expressed in stark contrast with the human or animal parts. Both accounts give more weight to the animal/human part in constructing one’s sense of self and claim to rely on their information processing parts for more abstract intellectual functioning. Finally, another student states: “‘All that there is a lot of processors—not thinking, but each doing its little thing. . .Nobody is home—just a lot of little bodies’” (p. 265). I argue that descriptions of folk psychology like these can be seen as examples of how culturally canonical narratives are used for self-descriptions. It is important that these are students’ self-understanding, as their descriptions are likely informed by the kinds of narratives they are exposed to in scientific psychology, whereas individuals from a different population would likely rely on very different kinds of narratives.

The activities and products of the scientist and theorizer cannot be separated from the culture in which they are embedded. Science does not occur in a vacuum; what counts as science is agreed upon and so it is a social and public affair. However, emphasizing the influence that canonical narratives have on psychological science goes against the taken-for-granted perspective that psychology is a value-free natural science. As Teo (2020) argues, mainstream psychology can be seen as a “hyper-science” which “inflates and complicates its methodological activities in order to conceal the temporality and contextuality of psychological phenomena” (p. 761). It is possible that a good deal of psychology’s credibility as a natural science comes from its willingness to ignore the influence of culturally canonical narratives on its constructs and to generate particular kinds of knowledge as if they arose out of a vacuum. Ignoring the context out of which psychological knowledge is produced can lend it the appearance of a “proper” natural science. I argue that the concept of canonical narratives can be used as a tool to analyze the values of psychology and can provide possible explanations as to why certain values are adopted over others.

The Canonical Narrative of the Machine

The canonical narrative that human beings are primarily mechanistic entities is largely taken for granted in psychological science. This may be because of its practicality in justifying the perceived ideal type of explanation in science: cause and effect reasoning. But this assumption could also be explained in terms of ideological commitments. These commitments manifest themselves in the insistence on measurement and instrumentality as how scientific knowledge of a person is possible to establish. This way of looking at the subject of psychological inquiry has been intensified with the growing necessity of dealing with technological and bureaucratic procedures in everyday life. As Jeff Sugarman (2007) notes, “Modern technology is not merely the means to instrumental ends but a way of understanding being itself” (p. 186). It is in this sense that the canonical narrative of the human being as a machine has an intuitive appeal in psychology. A mechanistic conception of the person is a necessary component in the commitment to the kind of “practical rationality” (p. 177) we see in psychology today. From this perspective, the person is not limited or shaped by historical circumstance or embodiment, so long as they exercise their ability to reason—which has long been considered to be the defining feature of human beings. The capacity for rationality is assumed to be something intrinsic to the individual and this does not accommodate the possibility that what we deem to be rational or objective may itself be subject to changing circumstances and times (e.g., Daston & Galison, 2007). It is in this sense that I argue psychology has a vested interest in the canonical narrative of the rational machine—including the ontology and ethics that follow.

The historical roots of this narrative are complex and beyond the scope of this paper, but it is reasonable to consider it as a kind of Enlightenment narrative. It emphasizes what the philosopher Isiah Berlin (1965) has called the three assumptions characteristic of Enlightenment thinking which have dominated Western thought in some form or another for centuries. These three assumptions are that: “all questions have true answers, all true answers are in principle discoverable, and all the answers are in principle compatible, or combinable into one harmonious whole like a jigsaw puzzle” (p. 78). This metaphor is revealing, as it illustrates the idea that rationality—or what we could call the scientific method today, in so far as it maintains its logical positivist roots—can unify all the different branches of knowledge and facts about human beings into a single coherent whole. This narrative that rationality is an ahistorical, unifying force for good is very much alive in contemporary psychology. Jeffrey Yen (2010) has argued that the rhetoric of the discipline sometimes seems to suggest that: “America can, and indeed has a moral obligation to offer the ‘light’ of science and civilization ‘to the world,’ and positive psychology is just such a science of high civilization” (p. 71). This, along with the search for unification—in the case of positive psychology being the science of the “complete human condition” (Gable & Haidt, 2005)—does suggest a broader cultural narrative about the immense value of instrumental utility that mechanistic thinking provides.

The canonical narrative that the human being is a rational machine assumes that there is a “code” or algorithm that one can implement to navigate a world of binaries: of positive and negative emotions and experiences. For example, McNulty and Fincham (2012) argue that in positive psychology there are often assumptions about there being an objective positive-negative dichotomy inherent in one’s life experiences. Assumptions such as these do not hold. For example, the authors argue that psychological processes such as optimism and positive thinking can be both beneficial and harmful for marriages—depending on the context they occur in. This is a challenge to psychology’s dedication to mechanistic thinking, in that there is no straightforward, algorithmic way to get to happiness or well-being. However, recognizing that this binary is more likely the product of a narrative, rather than an empirical fact about our nature, is a step toward imagining alternative perspectives psychology can take to do justice to the contradictions at the core of our lives.

The canonical narrative in question presents the idea that there is a kind of special power to mechanistic thinking, as though through the careful application of instrumental rationality and algorithms, psychologists can uncover the unknown universals of the human psyche. Indeed, this desire for unification and generalization ties back to Berlin’s jigsaw puzzle metaphor of the Enlightenment, and our faith in rationality to put all the pieces together. For this reason, it is important for psychologists to acknowledge how a culture’s values effect research, because, as Henrich et al. (2010) have shown in their famous paper on the use of “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples in behavioral science, researchers have a tendency—and a strong incentive—to generalize their theories and empirical evidence further than is reasonable. The tendency for psychology to appeal to the universal aspects of the human condition is not a problem in and of itself—in fact, that is where some of the most interesting speculation happens—but constructs are sometimes argued to be much more universal than they may be. For example, Terror Management Theory posits death anxiety as a universal human motive directing all our behavior. Many aspects of the human condition can be explained with reference to this one theory and the narrative it presents to us. As Roy Baumeister and Finkel (2010) notes, “According to Terror Management Theory, sexual activity, achievement motivation, prejudice, emotion, and other phenomena studied by social psychologists are all ways of coping with the threatening idea that we will eventually die, and with the terror that this idea evokes” (p. 10). The notion that scientific constructs created by psychologists can qualify as universal “master motives” (p. 10) is still part of contemporary psychology and reflects a faith in a specific kind of rationality to empirically “prove” ideas which may not be possible to prove in such a way.

Henrich et al. (2010) acknowledge that there needs to be stronger incentives in place for researchers to justify their generalizations more thoroughly and to release more detailed information about the kinds of samples they are generalizing from. One of the potential solutions to this problem of over-generalization is to include more cross-cultural studies. But as Barrett and Stulp (2013) point out, even in the case of cross-cultural studies, researchers often use paradigms which rely on a deeply Western worldview. To avoid this, psychologists will have to focus more on the theory and background practices of the discipline. However, Henrich et al. (2010) distance themselves from critics of mainstream psychology, specifically figures like Kenneth Gergen, in cautioning that “Many radical versions of interpretivism and cultural relativity deny any shared commonalities in human psychologies across populations” (p. 2) and then emphasize that this is not what they intend to do with their argument. I argue that the concept of canonical narratives can be used as a tool for analyzing the presuppositions that psychologists bring to their science, without denying that there are many commonalities across different populations. In fact, canonical narratives are easily—perhaps, unfortunately—transferable, which speaks to the importance of taking them into consideration.

It is important to recognize canonical narratives in psychology because they can present an ontology as well as an ethic—and this is especially consequential when the narrative is dehumanizing. The narrative of the rational machine is also an ontology of the human being, relying on what the philosopher of biology Daniel J. Nicholson (2018) calls the “machine conception of the organism (MCO)” (p. 140) which dominates the life sciences. In this view, the human being is a mechanical object: not unlike the inanimate “things” we make and put out into the world. The person is a feat of engineering—in this case, via the process of evolution by natural selection. The MCO is assumed in psychology to be the scientific answer to the question of what a human being is, and as noted earlier, it is treated as a fact, rather than a ontological assumption. The MCO is a particularly striking example of canonical narratives in psychology because of the ethic that comes along with its ontology. Of significance here is that the MCO can be used as a scientific justification of the values of neoliberal ideology. This is important for psychology, given psychology’s tendency to adopt neoliberal values: concepts such as optimal functioning, social capital, and productivity make sense against the background of the machine narrative. The ethics are implied in the ontology: people are replaceable, they are prone to error and degeneration, they are the mere sum of their parts, they have a designed function, and they are made to follow algorithms.

One could argue that this canonical narrative gives philosophical support for the values of ideal modern personhood: independent, confident, efficient, and skilled at marketing oneself. These values then provide the model of what a person ought to be, and so this creates an incentive for psychologists to treat and brand deviations from these ideals as problems, or at the most extreme, psychological disorders. Indeed, psychology has allowed normal behaviors and reactions to unpleasant social situations—such as shyness or awkwardness, for instance—to be conceptualized as pathological in the form of various social-related anxiety disorders (Sugarman, 2015). In this sense we can see that canonical narratives highlight certain ways of being above others, and in the case of the machine narrative we see a reinforcement of neoliberal values. For example, Sugarman (2015) notes that positive psychology sustains neoliberal values in its research principles in that a person’s well-being is often conceptualized in explicitly economic terms: “under the influence of positive psychology and coaching, relationships are reduced to means-ends calculations, and pursued solely for self-interest and emotional self-optimization. Acts of love, friendship, benevolence, and generosity are valued to the extent they increase individuals’ social capital” (p. 111). This kind of economic language provides a misplaced sense of concreteness and certainty, very much consistent with how one would describe a machine.

Conclusion

I have attempted to show that we can expand on Bruner’s concept of culturally canonical narratives to shed some new light on the complex and well-documented relationship between psychology and culture. I suggest that canonical narratives do indeed inform everyday folk psychology, but they also are deeply intertwined in the practice of psychology as a science, and so, they reach into the very production of psychological knowledge. This can be seen in how narratives about human beings as machines become entangled in neoliberal principles, which can shape conceptions of the self and subjectivity. It is possible that canonical narratives not only shape the kind of knowledge that psychology produces but also reinforce certain forms of subjectivity and selfhood in those that produce such knowledge. I argue that the concept of canonical narratives can be used as a tool of analysis in psychology to show how various assumptions and ethical commitments are built into the practice of psychology. I suggest that renewing Bruner’s concept would be a productive step toward finding new narratives that do more justice to lived experience and help us move past those that limit psychology’s potential to create new self-understandings.