Subjectivity and method: Why psychology needs more armchair scholarship

Abstract

The argument is based on the premise that method follows subject matter. A representational view of methodology is discussed, arguing that a natural–scientific approach based on variabilization and subdivision of mental life is epistemically insufficient. Subjectivity as the subject matter of psychology must be studied with methods that are capable of addressing wholistic entities and integrating a mostly sociohistorical object, which can be addressed through the psychological humanities. The methodologism of psychology leads to a representational self-misunderstanding that simulates knowledge about human subjectivity but is based on artificial distinctions that are embedded in research practices removed from psychosocial reality. The case is made for representational as well as nonrepresentational psychologies that are grounded in the idea that parts of subjectivity address what is possible and not only what exists. It is concluded that psychology needs a much broader knowledge base and methodological canon, including armchair reflection, for an understanding of human mental life.

Subjectivity and method

The question of whether psychology should follow the methods of the natural sciences, whether this entails experiments, quantification, or just empiricism (or something more specific), can be answered empirically. As such, after accumulating more than 150 years of scientific research, the epistemic accomplishments of millions of psychological studies that have embraced the logic of the natural sciences (in a psychological understanding) can be assessed. The question can also be answered conceptually, because evaluating the knowledge and practices of the discipline as well as its possible shortcomings depends on onto-epistemic assumptions and frameworks that can be challenged. Addressing both streams of study can be done in the armchair (including the couch or office chair) of the theoretical psychologist, because the critical review and assessment of the ontological, epistemological, and ethical accomplishments of a discipline that understands itself as a true science (i.e., natural science) requires reflexive and theoretical considerations.

At the end of the 19th century, Scripture (1897) argued that “the development of a science consists in the development of its means of extending and improving its method of observation” (p. 2). Scripture, credited by Boring (1950) for coining the term arm-chair psychology, advocated for a new psychology based on experiments, statistics, and measurements, traditionally understood as methodic tools of the natural sciences. Yet, one can ask: Have the clear technical advancements in methods led to a better understanding of human mental life, more specifically, of human subjectivity? Indeed, critics would argue (e.g., Holzkamp, 1983; Koch, 1993) that the solution to knowledge questions cannot be found primarily in improving methodology detached from content or ontic considerations (see also Teo, 2005, 2018).

Armchair reflections on the appropriate method for psychology center on a series of issues that are at their core onto-epistemological. Does a method represent or constitute reality? Should a method be able to represent or be allowed to create reality? More generally, is psychology representational or nonrepresentational? Do psychologists believe that they do representational work when they produce nonrepresentational knowledge using their research tools? Do deliberate nonrepresentational methods contribute to a better understanding of mental life, when envisioning and enacting, for instance, future possibilities? Again, deciding if a method is capable of representing (or not) a lived psychosocial reality requires theoretical inquiry.

This article does not debate whether the natural–scientific method is a myth or whether psychologists understand the practices and methods of the natural sciences correctly. The article also does not discuss the various meanings of science in various languages, or the methodic differences between natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, or biology, and their subfields, basic or applied, or to what degree natural scientists follow the steps outlined by methodologists or philosophers of science. Method is captured based on what psychologists do in their everyday research practices and their teaching, that is, in their intentions to follow the standards and principles of the most advanced sciences. Thus, it is more appropriate to address an ideology about scientific methods or a methodological attitude, rather than specific methods themselves (such as factor analysis).

A representational view of methodology in psychology

It is reasonable to suggest—based on the ways in which methods are used and embedded in research and teaching—that most scientific psychologists employ methodology to access a psychological reality, with the assumption that the most advanced methods borrowed from the natural sciences provide a better or truer account of the subject matter of psychology. Core to the discourses and practices of scientific psychologists are operationalization, variabilization, quantification, hypothesis testing, experiments, causality, data, facts, objectivity, and so on. Yet, what is the subject matter of psychology? If one suggests that the subject matter of psychology is subjectivity as the totum of first-person human somato-psychological life (Teo, 2023), then one can theorize and empirically validate (in the armchair), whether method (or methodology) is doing justice to this subject matter. Suggesting that mental life is an entangled wholeness in a concrete person’s being (subjectivity) that needs to be accounted for is an onto-epistemic framework itself. Yet, the degree to which the tools of scientific psychology are capturing the entanglements of first-person somato-psychological life is a legitimate question.

Giorgi (1990) argued that psychologists need to capture subjectivity as it is, which means employing methods and approaches that capture this “totality” and not distort it. From a representational point of view, in which method is about doing justice to an object, event, or topic (in the case of psychology, mental life), the subject matter ought to determine the adoption of method (Holzkamp, 1983; Teo, 2021). Admittedly, any understanding of the subject matter is already grounded in psychological results based on existing research, reflections, as well as everyday experiences. This seemingly circular problem can be solved by articulating historically and culturally accumulated knowledge of the psychological, as well as through an analysis of traditions and assumptions that generate knowledge. Given the complexity of knowledge, increasing comprehension of the psychological should include the adoption of previously ignored methods, developed at the margins of the discipline (e.g., arts-based methods, Leavy, 2009; methodologies of the oppressed, Sandoval, 2000).

Arguably, Gadamer (1960/1997) developed the most sophisticated argument about the limitations of natural–scientific methods when it comes to human mental life and its products, and contended that method is not the path to truth in the human sciences. Academic or cultural traditions and prejudices infuse research practices, theorizing, and applications. When research is conducted in the human sciences, “we” cannot abandon “our” history, culture, and society, and pretend a view from nowhere. This is obvious, for example, when it comes to research on race and the psychological variables that have been used to study that issue (Gould, 1996). It is more appropriate to label the empiricist approach to the study of such topics as European epistemologies that have framed how we should approach research problems (Teo, 2022). The subjectivity of the researcher, who lives and works in a certain location and time, and from a particular social position, is entangled with the research topic and the method. Problems of replicability, the doubtful causal nature of psychological findings from experiments and the lack of prediction can all be understood as practices that are highly susceptible to personal, interpersonal, and sociohistorical constraints.

In addition, from an ontic perspective, the successes of the natural sciences and their methods, particularly those in physics, depend on a subdivision of the subject matter, which has been highly generative in the natural sciences. However, empirically and conceptually, the continuing subdivision of mental life, a core dimension of psychological research practices, has not been epistemically satisfying, because an understanding of the totum of first-person human mental life requires synthesis, apperception, and knowledge integration, which are typically ignored and not rewarded in the discipline. The entanglement of cognition, emotion, and motivation, together with the entanglement of the social, historical, and cultural, with interpersonal and personal processes, requires an integrative (synthetic) and not a subdividing (analytic) methodology. A framework that gives primacy to natural-scientific methods is not equipped to account for such complex entanglements.

A research practice focused on the operationalization and variabilization of concepts and the relationship between variables, and that ignores the relationship between concepts and objects/events, has limited value for understanding human subjectivity because there is legitimate doubt about whether operationalizations and variabilizations are able to represent psychosocial life (Teo, 2018). Such a research practice transforms an object/event or a concept into something that can be measured, thus abandoning questions of representation (e.g., natural versus human kinds; see Brinkmann, 2005) while drawing on, constituting, and reifying the object/event or concept in everyday language use (see also Gould, 1996). Indeed, lay people often have an intuition that an operationalization is not capturing the complexity of a psychological object/event or concept. In addition, different psychological conceptualizations of the same topic exist that all claim empirical support while contradicting each other (e.g., consider empathy: Barnes, 2014; Lux & Weigel, 2017).

The enduring call for qualitative methods (Gergen et al., 2015) is based on the idea that such methods are better qualified to address the lived experiences of people. Historical pioneers of psychology have made a similar case. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) famously understood that there is a distinction between psychological and physical causality, and that only very basic psychological processes can be caught by the methods of the natural sciences (Danziger, 1983). Dilthey (1894/1957) made the well-known distinction between what “we” would now call the psychological sciences and the psychological humanities, with the latter drawing on disciplines such as history and the arts for an understanding of the psychological. Arguably, the arts still function as a resource for understanding and describing human mental life (consider, for instance, cinematic arts).

The enduring popularity of psychoanalysis and, to a lesser degree, phenomenology, both outsiders to the disciplines of academic psychology, can be attributed to the fact that both have frameworks to address human subjectivity (see also Frie, 1997). Both provide a more complete framework for understanding human mental life than the subdivided and research-based knowledge fragments of a natural-scientific intended psychology. From the perspective of these approaches as well as qualitative psychology, methods developed for human subjectivity, sometimes borrowed from the arts or humanities, provide a better representation of human mental life. However, this is not the place to assess psychoanalysis, phenomenology, or qualitative methods in terms of their representationalism.

From a critical–theoretical perspective, a representational method in psychology must address the entanglement of sociosubjectivity, intersubjectivity, and intra-subjectivity (Teo, 2023). Human mental life is embedded in history, culture, and society, and in interpersonal and personal realties. It would be limiting to reduce psychological competences and performances to intra-psychological dispositions and tendencies because they must be studied in nexus to real-life activities that take place in cultures and epochs into which subjects suture themselves. For instance, in order to represent resilience, psychologists need to address resilience as a personal, interpersonal, as well as a cultural–historical activity that takes place in concrete societies (see also Morgan, 2023). A natural-scientific approach based on a subdivision cannot account for that complexity through its methods and is unable to capture the entanglement and the dialectic interrelationships between those dimensions. It is epistemically insufficient to account for those entanglements through variables (e.g., or the construction of culture as a variable, ontologically separated from other variables). Studying the entanglement of subjectivity requires reconstructive work that is achieved more appropriately through the psychological humanities (Freeman, 2023; Malich & Keller, 2020; Sugarman & Martin, 2020; Teo, 2017).

This argument does not dismiss all knowledge that has been developed through the subdivision of the human mind. However, from an epistemic point of view, to account for the accomplishments of psychology, it is now more important to synthesize empiricist knowledge in a systematic way in a theory of subjectivity, which can be accomplished in the armchair, and requires, for instance, philosophical methods and practices (to provide more “objectivity”). Such theorizing needs to address empirical research but is based on methods developed within the humanities (e.g., hermeneutics). If one takes a representational view of psychology and method seriously, then the tools of the traditional natural sciences are significantly limited. In addition, the psychological humanities understand that representationalism is always constrained by subjectivity, society, culture, and history (and language). One could argue that the same holds for the psychological humanities. Yet, the psychological humanities do not aim, for instance, at general explanation. It may be the case that psychology needs to develop autochthonous methods to do justice to the psychological subject matter, to human subjectivity. Yet, at the moment, neither the humanities nor the arts, nor unique methods developed for studying human subjectivity, play a significant role in the academic discipline of psychology.

A representational self-misunderstanding of psychological science

Representationalism in this argument is not understood as the perfect mirroring of an object/event through concepts and theories, but rather representationalism allows for intersections with culture, history, and society, interpersonal dynamics, research programs, and the subjectivity of researchers (including their idols; see Teo, 2019). Better and worse, narrower and broader, and more or less limited representations do exist. Similarly, objectivity is understood as connected to historically acquired patterns of interpretation (Daston & Galison, 2007). Such an understanding of representation differs from an assumed mirror-like representation of an object/event that arguably cannot be achieved in psychology. Indeed, for an assessment of the degree to which a concept or theory represents, distorts, or creates psychological reality, onto-epistemic investigations are necessary, which are not part of the methodological canon of psychology. For instance, by giving variables an ontological status (Bickhard, 2017; O’Doherty & Winston, 2014; Valsiner, 2023), without debating their ontology, a new reality can be created that did not exist or was irrelevant before the variable was introduced (consider clinical–psychological concepts). As such, psychological concepts used in research are given away to the public, without debating their onto-epistemic character, and they inhabit a new selective and selected reality (see also Hacking, 1995).

Scientific methods do not solve that problem, because ontological problems precede method. For that reason, historical studies of psychological core concepts (Danziger, 1997) should be crucial in teaching and advancing research methods. Psychological variables are nonrepresentational of the totum or complexity of human subjectivity, but they may be representational of a second-order or artificial psychological world that has been created by psychologists. For instance, the variable or concept of IQ and its testing are nonrepresentational of the complexity of human intelligence in relation to culture and history (and societal stratification), but they are representational of a practical reality created by psychologists, sometimes useful, but more often, problematic, from a historical point of view (Tucker, 1994). This second-order or artificial representationalism is misunderstood as mirroring a natural object/event that can be accessed through method. Yet, method itself is not capable of addressing the problem of representationalism, and thus, the assumption that method can solve the issue is also a self-deception. Not only does internal validity take precedence over external validity in psychological science (e.g., for the concept of psychopolitical validity see Prilleltensky, 2008), even the many problems of internal validity are not discussed sufficiently (see Slaney, 2017).

Nevertheless, psychological objects and concepts constructed or employed in the research practices of psychologists are real in a cultural–historical sense, the same way laws constituted by humans or national borders are real (see also Baudrillard, 1981/1997). Borders are the results of history, including the outcomes of political conflict and negotiations, and do not reflect a natural order (although naturally designated borders such as rivers may exist). This does not mean that natural–scientific methods cannot be used to study borders, but that an understanding of the meaning and content of borders requires knowledge and methods, for instance, of history. Borders are ideal and material (e.g., they comprise border stones or gates, and are often patrolled by armed border personnel), they are constructed by people, and they have significant implications for people, whether living inside or outside the border. A piece of art can be studied with natural–scientific methods (e.g., the chemical composition of a marble sculpture can be analyzed), but the meaning and content of the art requires the tools and knowledge of the humanities and arts.

It is a self-misunderstanding to assume that the methods of the natural sciences will be able to capture the sociocultural and historical–political dimensions of psychological objects/events. More importantly, using the traditional methods of the natural sciences obfuscates the sociohistorical dimension of psychological objects/events (and their concepts). The traditional methodological apparatus disguises the ontic quality of its objects/events and concepts, whereby a complex technological jargon and practice, the usage of machines, and the rhetoric of science, simulate a natural science, and psychology becomes a hyper-science that pretends to be a science (Teo, 2020). The “mirror” does not reflect a subjectivity that is entangled with culture, but constructs a caricature based on method. In choosing the primacy of a natural–scientific method, psychology prejudges the nature of its objects/events, misunderstands its own subject matter, and in doing so also becomes an obfuscation science (and its methodological apparatus becomes a tool of obfuscation). The obfuscation may not be done intentionally by individual actors but is based on a disciplinary misunderstanding of the relationship between object/event, concept, and method. It serves as a public relations program whereby psychology is promoted as a true science (see also Davies, 2015; Ward, 2002).

It should not be denied that psychology has been highly successful in the psychologization of all life (De Vos, 2012) and in producing ideas that have been spread around the world. Concepts created by psychologists may relate to everyday experience, as they shape, change, and constitute such experience, and become part of everyday conversations and interactions. People begin to understand themselves through psychological practices and to express themselves using psychological concepts, and researchers find empirical support for the existence of a concept. The process is circular when constructions and empirical support dynamically reinforce each other, and when constructions that have become embedded in social life are “found” in empirical research (Teo, 2010). It appears as if a measured psychological concept is representational of human life, as it may capture certain aspects of this reality (the relevance of which needs to be theorized).

The methodologism of psychology (i.e., the primacy of method; see also Danziger, 1985) is reinforced in this circular research strategy but ignores questions regarding the ontological character of an object/event, or regarding whether a method does justice to the object/event. From a psychological humanities perspective, understanding concepts such as intelligence requires an understanding of the history of the concept of intelligence (and what was ignored), the history of intelligence testing, and the history of research on intelligence, including the role of scientific racism and classism in the history of psychology. This argument does not suggest excluding presumed natural–scientific methods in psychology, but rather refraining from giving such methods primacy in a subject matter that is social, historical, cultural, political, and relational. There is no doubt that certain issues in psychology need quantification and hypothesis testing, but certainly these practices should not be the presumed choice.

A representational self-misunderstanding occurs when methods or principles do not address the temporality and contextuality of psychological phenomena, the subjectivity of the researcher, as well as power relations and interests. A method may capture subdivided parts of subjectivity at a point in time and in a particular place, or over several times and places (as exercised in longitudinal or cross-cultural research). Yet, no scientific opinion pollster would claim that a result is valid for all humanity and for all times (e.g., opinions of a political figure may change within a week after a public scandal). Yet, psychology claims to have found general principles or evidence of causality through experiments, although issues of temporality and contextuality apply to such research as well (see Henrich et al., 2010). If one considers the nature of psychological phenomena, the assumption that experiments can inform us about universality, generalizability, and physical causality, is a self-misunderstanding. Replicability cannot be solved through technical means but requires an understanding of the ontology of objects/events (e.g., some having longer/shorter “lifespans” or broader/narrower spatiality; see also Wiggins & Christopherson, 2019). Armchair theorizing asks questions about the time and space of a result and about the distortions of objects/events or persons when attempting to provide a mirroring snapshot.

Considering all such reflections, it is reasonable to argue that a psychology that is based on a natural–scientific understanding is intended as representational but is in effect nonrepresentational of a first-order psychosocial reality, and, thus, misunderstands itself. This argument may apply to other frameworks in psychology (including disciplinary maligned psychoanalysis). However, it follows that psychological science as a hyperscience obfuscates basic philosophical problems and functions as an interpretative framework that allows one to understand psychological phenomena through the lens of scientific simulacra. Such a lens includes the variabilization and subdivision of human mental life, which neglects the contextuality and temporality of psychological phenomena, as well as the power of psychology itself; as such, a comprehensive and integrated theory of human subjectivity is missing. Based on the primacy of method that has produced millions of bits and pieces of psychological knowledge lacking synthesis, the content of mental life through which meaning is established is missing.

Finally, within the natural–scientific method, questions about equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are secondary or often ignored. Not attending to EDI at all stages of the research process obfuscates the reality of diversity of mental life. Psychological science based on the assumed objectivity of method does not address the fact that inclusion at all stages of research is epistemically more rigorous. Of course, the psychological humanities have made the case for EDI from feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theories perspectives (e.g., Harding, 2008). Diversity considerations must be included when asking questions, testing hypotheses, interpreting findings, and translating knowledge. From the perspective of the psychological humanities, psychologists must assume that an effect (or even a question) found in one context cannot be generalized to other contexts, and that Other people must be included not only as participants but also as researchers, in framing research questions, but also throughout the research process. Such an approach would not amount to cross-cultural research but rather denotes cultural research from the bottom-up (see also Eckensberger, 2015). Even equity is a value that needs to be accounted for because its neglect has left psychology with a racist, sexist, and homophobic legacy (see American Psychological Association, 2021).

Occupying the armchair, the practice of slow science, or reflecting on what was accomplished, debating the epistemic, ontic, and ethical sources of academic psychology, learning from the lived experiences of people, addressing first-person experiences in psychology, and theorizing, should be accomplished not solipsistically but in collaboration with the Other (occupying more than one armchair). A research industry focused on a constant increase of output, based sometimes on minute variations in research practices, will not answer questions about knowledge in psychology. This is not a critique of natural science, but rather a critique of its emulation by psychologists, who make unfounded assumptions about psychological knowledge or misinterpret its actual meaning. There is no such thing as a methodological theory of truth (according to which method leads to truth)—an approach that seems to guide explicitly or implicitly much of the research practices of psychologists.

Towards a nonrepresentational psychology with a representational intent

The arguments presented above support a representational project (with all its limitations) based on the idea that method follows object or event. Yet, such an undertaking must account for a subject matter that is also nonrepresentational, should it constitute part of human mental life. Such a program differs from a psychology that has become nonrepresentational without intent through its methodologism (i.e., traditional psychology), but also differs from streams of intentional nonrepresentational approaches: Gergen’s (1994, 2015) work is known for advancing a postmodern, social constructionist psychology. However, I would argue that most psychologists sympathetic to social constructionism have moved beyond postmodernism, to postpostmodernism, accepting certain tenets, but also proceeding beyond its core assumptions and contradictions. Nonrepresentational theory and methodology, as discussed in the social sciences more recently, is considered the heir to postmodernism. Some of the topics that Vannini (2015) presents as topics of nonrepresentational research such as relations, performances, backgrounds, or affects, can also be studied from critical representational points of view, in moving beyond a positivist methodology and beyond postmodernism.

This is not the place to debate the complexities and varieties of nonrepresentational methods, but to include the perspective of subjectivity. Beyond the social construction of mental life based on needs, anxieties, fears, interests, and desires of a person, group, community, or culture, psychological theories and methods must articulate not only what is but also what is possible in human life. Assessing the move from what is to what is possible requires nonrepresentational studies with a (prospective) representational intent (something that can be studied as a possible reality in the future). The idea that psychology is not only about actuality but also potentiality can be traced to Christian Wolff’s (1740) distinction between empirical and rational psychology. What is possible can be formal (“I” can go to the moon), objective (“I” can write poetry), factual (the inclusion of non-Western sources tells “me” more about human mental life), or real (“we” can contribute to a more inclusive and diverse psychology), and imaginary or combinations thereof (see Bloch, 1954–1955–1959/1986).

What methods are required by studies of not only of what exists and occurs but of what is possible in human mental life? How can one justify the move from adaptation to resistance, from neoliberal consumer freedom to critical agency, from the idea that “we” can change only “ourselves” to the idea that “we” can also change discourses, practices, lifeworlds (including our disciplines), systems, and even the world, clearly not individually, but together as a community or collectively? To address these questions, which implicate human subjectivity, nonrepresentational methods (that are connected to a possible reality) are needed. Shared theoretical speculation, which moves from imaginary utopias to real possibilities, is needed, while scientific research on aspects of such possibilities should not be ignored (see, e.g., Kvavilashvili & Rummel, 2020).

From this perspective, research methods should not only be status-quo supporting but status-quo transcending, not ameliorative but transformative, as community psychologists have referred to it (e.g., Evans & Loomis, 2009). Social researchers have developed methods for this purpose, but in psychology, the exemplary method is participatory action research (PAR), a method that moves from what is to what is possible and includes persons most affected by sociohistorical impediments (see Fine & Torre, 2021). In epistemic terms, such methods require an assessment of the status quo, an imagining of a transformation of the status quo, actions that change the status quo, and the inclusion of participants at all stages of research (for some problems, see Dege, 2023). This requires an onto-epistemic shift from studying “x” as a problem to understanding the problems that “x” encounters in a given context. One could add that by changing “our” life-conditions, “we” also change “ourselves” and our subjectivity.

Thinking about the tools (methods) and the realizations of possibilities must occur not only in research, but also through art or activism, both of which can be guided by the imagination of possibilities. Such an orientation will not draw primarily from the methods of the natural sciences, but from the ideas and practices of the humanities and the arts. This important dimension of subjectivity (possibilities) requires methods outside of the traditional scientific canon, and I suggest that most psychologists, including research psychologists, would agree that the arts can provide knowledge about human subjectivity. For instance, literature engages and teaches “us” about human mental life in a concrete–psychological mode that is not achieved by highly technical research articles.

Because psychologists consider the subjectivity of other people from the horizon of their own subjectivity, psychology is inherently a reflexive discipline that requires interrogations that cannot be exhausted by the natural sciences. For instance, the racism of psychology requires an analysis of the culture, history, and society in which racism has developed, a decolonization of the colonial view that still exists in psychology, and a move to equity, diversity, and inclusion in knowledge. Such insights do not derive from the epistemologies of the natural but of the critical social sciences (Teo, 2018). Sadly, a natural–scientific psychological approach that examines historically established differences is only able to identify such differences; it cannot articulate the sources for differences without knowledge of history, culture, and society, and as such, it often reinforces a colonial view of the Other. Psychologists must move away from such distorted and upside down versions of representationalism.

Conclusion

Both the assumption that natural science methods must be excluded in psychology and the assumption that natural science methods are the best gateway to knowledge must be rejected from an onto-epistemic point of view. An understanding of human subjectivity includes natural science methods as well as the tools and ideas of the humanities without accepting them naively (Held, 2021). Both streams must address the problem by doing justice to the problem and must understand that certain historically constituted areas of psychology are closer to the natural sciences. Decisions on what should be used, how, where, and when depend on armchair theoretical reflections based on experiences in or from the field. Many epistemic problems of psychological science could be avoided if a different logic of research would be advanced (for alternatives, see also Brown & Stenner, 2009). For instance, instead of a grandiose claim that an experimental finding is causal and universal, a more modest inference that a finding is local, contextual, and temporary could be made. This approach to the interpretation of findings could evade misunderstandings and address the limitations of variabilization, operationalization, and subdivision of psychological objects/events.

Psychology needs to reintegrate its subdivided subject matter and research landscape. Frankenstein’s monster may be an imagined outcome but it does not capture the totum of human subjectivity. A homunculus based on bits and pieces of subdivided research is not a person who conducts life in the real world. Overcoming self-misunderstanding and obfuscation cannot be accomplished with the methods of the natural sciences but requires reflexivity and theoretical competencies that can be learned, for instance, from philosophical inquiry. Continuing status-quo research practices will not solve the onto-epistemic problems of the discipline. Repeating the argument that psychology is a young discipline and that one day the scientific method will solve the knowledge crisis in psychology appears, at this point in history, foolish. Psychology must open its research to nonrepresentational methods to understand the full complexity of human mental life. Armchair reflection is required to grasp the limitations of one’s own approach, whether scientific or humanities-based.

Certainly, the boundaries of what could be considered a natural–scientific methodology or a methodology of the psychological humanities can shift, overlap, and expand to the degree that psychology develops a methodology that is able to account for the totum of a first-person somato-psychological life, temporality, and contextuality. One can learn from the humanities as well as nonrepresentational theories and methods that a final theory of subjectivity is impossible. Subjectivity remains an open project because the contents of subjectivity change (consider the development of technologies and their impact on mental life), history changes, languages transform, and academic interests adjust as well. To understand the totum of subjectivity, psychologists must begin with a conceptual reflection of what an entanglement of socio-, inter-, and intra-subjectivity means. In order to understand the historical, societal, and cultural dimensions of subjectivity, psychologists must expand their awareness to the insights of the psychological humanities. Understanding the ways in which subjectivity is unique or irreplaceable, as well as the potentiality of subjectivity, requires theoretical examinations. The idea that subjectivity is mediated or constituted by actions, discourses, and materialities (including technologies) requires theorizing.

The primacy of scientific method, rightly or wrongly attributed to the natural sciences, but certainly a credo of psychological science, must be challenged using arguments but also the historical–empirical record. Methods should follow the object/event and their possibilities, despite the many complexities involved. In many cases, the most profound understandings have been derived from reflection, conceptual work, theory integration and comparison, and assessments of temporality and contextuality. Nowadays, the methodologism of psychology—the call for a natural–scientific foundation of psychology—has won the epistemic struggle over any dualistic or pluralistic imperative invoked by pioneers of psychology. Further, armchair reflection as a method of psychology has no legitimate standing because of the reward structure of academic capitalism (see also Dafermos, 2023), which reinforces quantitative productivity, achievable through existing research practices. Thus, psychology will continue its onto-epistemic shortcomings, obfuscated by the application of big machines and complex research designs, mysterious and fascinating to lay persons as much as to research psychologists themselves. This mystification hides the real onto-epsitemic problems of the discipline. Yet, even if methodologism has won the epistemic struggle at this point in the trajectory of psychology, it does not mean that critical theorizing is obsolete, as disciplinary reality and public scepticism demonstrate–or that such theorizing is any less crucial.