The Loss of the Romantic: Gain for the Science

Abstract

This article rejects the idea that the crisis in psychology (if crisis there be) is to be explained by the loss of the romantic, by our failing to take advantage of the kind of literary descriptions of personality that our great writers and other artists provide us. Science gains understanding by reducing information to essentials, not by reproducing the complexity of the phenomena it seeks to explain. In defense of the “objective” approach to psychology, it is also necessary to point out that the study of individuals in all their glorious individuality can be accomplished by objective study, particularly by behavior analysis but also by psychologists following other models. Finally, a cold empirical look at the data shows that our intuition is often quite wrong and very rarely to be preferred to objective data when the latter are available.