Abstract
The present article is a book review essay about James T. Lamiell’s Primer in Critical Personalism: A Framework for Reviving Psychological Inquiry and for Grounding a Socio-cultural Ethos published in February 2024. In the beginning of the paper, I am outlining the core tenets of the book that is its separation into two major sections. In the first, Lamiell shows us the origins of psychological research in Germany in the laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and his peculiar notion of generalizing knowledge. Here, the American psychologist explains that Wundt and his assistants were far away of generalizing knowledge in the way mainstream psychology does today – that is on an aggregate, population-based knowledge. On the contrary, Wundt and his colleagues were generalizing knowledge more in a systemic manner – something which is also in line with the work of William Stern and his critical personalism. Lamiell applies the core tenets of critical personology – that originate in the notion of the adoption of self-purposes (values) which become then linked to foreign purposes/values and produces something higher over the course of that process. Lamiell expands this successfully to the domain of informal focus groups discussing racial issues and how psycho-demographic research comes to fixate individuals into categories that do not apply to the individual level. As such, the American psychologist accomplishes to show that inferential statistics is not only scientifically unsound for many research questions but that it also comes with moral and ethical concerns that should be addressed by scientists. At the end of the book review essay, I point out several pathways of future research – that is the link between critical personalism, phenomenology, existentialism and psychoanalysis as well as how Lamiell would construct and co-construct concrete interventions to facilitate introception to take place in his informal focus groups. I conclude the article by stressing the major highlight of Lamiell’s book – that is the interpersonal benefits of adopting a critical personological perspective in science and in life.
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Stern came to re-actualize his very own position towards psychoanalysis later on (Bühring, 1996; von Fircks, 2024) and even developed a theory of his own on the conscious and un-conscious domain of Lebnisse and Erlebnisse (Stern, 1935). It would be interesting to hear Lamiell’s view on that within his given theory as elaborated in the book discussed at hand.
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Ich danke meinem baltischen Freund Jaan Valsiner für seine bedingungslose Unterstützung und die Einladung, diesen Artikel zu schreiben.
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von Fircks, E. Raising Questions with Lamiell about Future Research Directions of Critical Personalism: A Book Review Essay. Integr. psych. behav. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-024-09825-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-024-09825-z