A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology

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.

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

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

1. Preface: A New Solution to the Problem of Psychology.- Part I The Problem of Psychology.- 2. Psychology, We Have a Problem.- 3. Modern Empirical Psychology and Its Inadequacies.- Part II The Unified Theory of Knowledge and Its First Two Key Ideas.- 4. The Unified Theory of Knowledge: A New Metapsychology for the Twenty-First Century.- 5. Justification Systems Theory.- 6. The Tree of Knowledge System.- Part III A Descriptive Metaphysical System for Modern Empirical Natural Science.- 7. A New and Better Map of Big History.- 8. Toward a Coherent Naturalistic Scientific Ontology.- Part IV Defining Behavior and Its Deep Connection to Modern Science.- 9. Behavior: The Central Concept in Natural Science.- 10. The Periodic Table of Behavior: Mapping the Levels and Dimensions in Nature.- Part V Defining Mental Processes and Grounding the Domains in Metatheory.- 11. Mental Behaviors and the Map of Mind1,2,3.- 12. A Metatheory for Mind1.- 13. Mind2: Subjective Conscious Experience in Animals and Humans.- 14. Mind To Be and the Relational World.- 15. Mind3 and the Culture-Person Plane of Existence.- Part VI Conclusion.- 16. A New Vision of Mind and Psychology that Transcends the Enlightenment Gap.