The Past in the Future: Consciousness and Tradition

Abstract

If we complicate the psychological process by insisting that consciousness counts in human behavior, then the phenomena of remembering and anticipating become central problems for psychology Remembering and anticipating are relations that are very different from the cause-effect relation that frames the work of science Remembering and anticipating are dialectical relations The implications of this complication go beyond the usual humanistic critique of natural science models Specifically, they include (a) a new vision of how our work is related to tradition, (b) a new vision of remembering and anticipating as psychological processes, and (c) a new vision of the meaning of humanistic psychological work This article broaches these three implications With respect to our relation to tradition, I argue that our forgetting of the prebehaviorist psychologies has led us to define humanistic psychology in merely antiscientific terms Our tradition was not born as opposition to John Watson; humanistic psychology is not the afterbirth of behaviorism With respect to remembering and anticipating, a distinction is made between reflective and prereflective consciousness, and a dialectical relationship between these experiences is outlined.