Between Obligation and Inspiration

Abstract

This story depicts a therapeutic interlude in the author’s life that took place in 1981. Trained as an experimentalist in the tradition of positivist social science, the main character comes to therapy in the middle of a crisis in meaning stirred by a growing awareness that the social sciences are increasingly devoted to triviality, disciplinary fragmentation, and the production of mountains of data devoid of concern for the serious problems and moral dilemmas of human life. Already invested in a successful career as a quantitative methodologist, the client struggles to come to terms with the conflicts he feels between the obligations that restrain him and the inspirations that arouse him. In the course of therapy, he revisits the “voices in his head”—the mentors who have influenced the direction of his work and his life—and the institutional forces that can inhibit or impede one’s desire to choose a life course consistent with who one takes one’s self to be.