Psychology, Education, Gods, and Humanity

Based on the author's experience, this discussion of psychology as a human science (rather than a natural science) outlines classroom techniques integrating narrative psychology and dynamic interpersonal psychotherapy as a means of teaching and demonstrating the core curriculum. The core theory integrates modern evolutionary psychology, cognitive constructivism—especially as represented by the works of Jean Piaget and Robert Kegan—social constructionism, and socially-oriented interpersonal psychoanalysis. The sections on teaching techniques blend the above into a theory of student-teacher interactions with Lev Vygotsky's theory of education as an interpersonal process. The book is developed in four parts. Part I is a single chapter that discusses the inadequacy of the lecture method to teach courses in psychology; Part II, comprising of three chapters, lays the philosophical foundations of a postmodern view of psychology as a human science concerned with the phenomenological understanding of the development of human conscious experience and the adaptive process. Part III details the processes of cognitive, affective, and phenomenological change as developing individuals adapt to the physical, political, social, and cultural worlds that enfold around them. Part IV critiques traditional forms of education and describes a more individualized and humanized approach to teaching with its reliance on the student's written narratives. The final chapter is comprised entirely of fragments of student narratives that demonstrate the exciting outcomes of teaching human psychology in a humanistic fashion.

LAURENCE SIMON is Professor of Psychology at Kingsborough Community College at the City University of New York and maintains a private practice in Bellmore, New York. He is the author of Psychotherapy (Praeger, 1994).