Overview
- Critically examines mainstream academic psychology and highlights the fragmented nature of it
- Offers a new vision for the field, a unified system of knowledge for understanding both animal and human behavior
- Explores how this vision make sense of the relations between matter, mind and social and scientific knowledge
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology (PSTHP)
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Table of contents (16 chapters)
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Front Matter
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The Problem of Psychology
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Front Matter
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The Unified Theory of Knowledge and Its First Two Key Ideas
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Front Matter
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A Descriptive Metaphysical System for Modern Empirical Natural Science
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Front Matter
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Defining Behavior and Its Deep Connection to Modern Science
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Front Matter
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Defining Mental Processes and Grounding the Domains in Metatheory
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Front Matter
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Keywords
- theoretical psychology
- philosophy of psychology
- metatheory
- science of behavior
- metapsychology
- metaphysics
- natural science
- integrative psychotherapy
- the mind-body problem
- the Enlightenment
- the crisis of psychology
- epistemology of science
- Behavioral Investment Theory
- Justification Systems Theory
- mental behaviorism
- Unified Theory of Knowledge
About this book
In this incisive analysis of academic psychology, Gregg Henriques examines the fragmented nature of the discipline and explains why the field has had enormous difficulty specifying its subject matter and how this has limited its ability to advance our knowledge of the human condition. He traces the origins of the problem of psychology to a deep and profound gap in our knowledge systems that emerged in the context of the scientific Enlightenment.
To address this problem, this book introduces a new vision for scientific psychology called mental behaviorism. The approach is anchored to a comprehensive metapsychological framework that integrates insights from physics and cosmic evolution, neuroscience, the cognitive and behavioral sciences, developmental and complex adaptive systems theory, attachment theory, phenomenology, and social constructionist perspectives and is well grounded in the philosophy of science. Building on more than twenty years of work in theoreticalpsychology and drawing on a wide range of literature, Professor Henriques shows how this new approach to scientific knowledge fills in the gaps of our current understanding of psychology and can allow us to develop a more holistic and sophisticated way to understand animal and human mental behavioral patterns. This work will especially appeal to students and scholars of general psychology and theoretical psychology, as well as to historians and philosophers of science.
Reviews
“This integrative masterpiece exemplifies the best of cognitive science. It pursues a synoptic integration of many different literatures to generate a new, highly plausible framework for understanding the mind. Henriques is a modern Aristotle whose overarching vision is not only cogently and rigorously argued, but it also affords a conceptual vocabulary and theoretical grammar for the scientifically grounded practice of psychotherapy and the existential understanding of the human condition needed to address the current meaning crisis. This book should be required reading for any undergraduate psychology program, and it should be studied and discussed in depth within graduate programs. The field of psychology needs to be transformed in a way that can address both its internal problems and the external problems of mind and mental health facing the world today. Henriques book does this masterfully.” (John Vervaeke, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis)
“We live in an age that requires a new and better vision of what psychology is and can be, which is to say that today we need a new metapsychology. Gregg Henriques offers one of the most comprehensive and academically rigorous metapsychological visions available today. Moving across ‘Big History,’ epistemology, and nearly every subfield of psychology, Henriques offers an impressive metamodern synthesis, and provocative cultural play. If this book has the reception it deserves, the field of psychology will never be the same.” (Dr.Zak Stein, Co-Founder Civilizational Research Institute & Consilience Project, Co-President; Center for World Philosophy and Religion, USA. Author of Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society)
“A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology is a dazzlingly ambitious attempt to close the gap between lawful objective and contextual interpersonal science; a gap left wanting since the advent of the Enlightenment. Through the promising voice of metamodernism – along with synthetic elegance – Henriques moves us toward a fuller, richer, and wiser psychological worldview.” (Kirk J. Schneider, Ph.D., author of Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy, The Spirituality of Awe, and the forthcoming Life-Enhancing Anxiety: Key to a Sane World)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Gregg Henriques is Professor of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University, USA. Dr Henriques advises and teaches courses in the Combined Clinical and School Doctoral Program on integrative psychotherapy, personality theory and assessment, cognitive, and social psychology.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology
Book Subtitle: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap
Authors: Gregg Henriques
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18493-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and Psychology, Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-18492-5Published: 11 December 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-18495-6Published: 12 December 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-18493-2Published: 10 December 2022
Series ISSN: 2946-2452
Series E-ISSN: 2946-2460
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 505
Number of Illustrations: 25 b/w illustrations, 12 illustrations in colour
Topics: Philosophy of Mind, Critical Psychology, History of Psychology, Philosophy of Science, History of Science