Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

By LiAnna Davis

Psychology originated as a subdiscipline of philosophy, but Dr. James Lamiell rues the rigid barrier now erected between the two. Dr. Lamiell, a professor in Georgetown’s Department of Psychology, believes a philosophical understanding of modern psychology could solve some of the critical problems facing the discipline. He finds that understanding in the works of a turn-of-the-century psychologist and philosopher.

Dr. Lamiell is one of the world’s leading scholars on William Stern (1871-1938), who is best known as the inventor of the intelligence quotient, commonly referred to as IQ. Stern, who spent his career in Germany until fleeing to America during Hitler’s rise, eventually came to distance himself from IQ because in the way they were applied, IQ tests were taken to reveal some fixed and unalterable capacity of an individual, as opposed to simply providing an indication of the level at which that individual was functioning at that particular time. After rejecting IQ, Stern fell into obscurity. Dr. Lamiell only vaguely knew of Stern as “the IQ guy” when colleagues approached him at a conference in Germany in 1984 to suggest that his presentation complemented Stern’s philosophy. After a perusal of Stern’s writings, Dr. Lamiell was hooked on this “neglected thinker.”

For Dr. Lamiell, IQ is the least interesting facet of Stern’s work. Instead, he delves deeply into the history of psychology to reveal Stern’s conceptualization of “critical personalism,” which he believes can inform psychology today. Critical personalism is founded on the philosophical separation between persons and things. Persons participate actively in the construction of their wholeness, while things do not.

“Persons evaluate—project value out—whereas things do not,” Dr. Lamiell explains. “A thing can be passively evaluated by a person, but value must inhere in persons: Persons are inherently valuable in ways that things are not.”

Dr. Lamiell believes much of contemporary mainstream psychology research relies on the idea that persons are things. Such a presupposition, however, renders the conclusions based on that idea invalid. Citing the work of contemporary scholars Max Bennett and Peter Hacker, Dr. Lamiell points to instances in the current cognitive neuroscience research literature where thoughts and actions are attributed to parts of the body—“the brain makes guesses,” for example. Such cases illustrate what Bennett and Hacker call the “mereological fallacy,” from mereology, the study of the part-whole relationship.

“Stern told us persons are different than things,” Dr. Lamiell says. “But critical personalism teaches us not only that things should not be mistaken for persons, but also that parts of persons should not be mistaken for persons. Stern’s contributions can inform the work of cognitive neuroscientists. In order to avoid the mereological fallacy, they need a conceptualization of persons that they do not currently have. Within the framework of critical personalism, Stern has one to offer.”

Dr. Lamiell, who became fluent in German so he could further his study of Stern’s work, says critical personalism is just one of Stern’s contributions to psychology that is still applicable today. Diaries that Stern and his wife and scientific collaborator, Clara, kept about their children for 18 years formed the basis of much of the contemporary understanding of developmental psychology. The more than 5,000 hand-written pages recorded all aspects of their three children’s psychological and behavioral development. Stern’s work could also apply to a methodological understanding of contemporary psychology, Dr. Lamiell believes. Psychology in the 20th century became a method-bound discipline, he says, but Stern’s writings suggest that strict laboratory methodology cannot explain every facet of human behavior.

In 2004, Dr. Lamiell served as the Ernst Cassirer Visiting Professor at the University of Hamburg, of which Stern was a co-founder. While in Germany, Dr. Lamiell gave a series of public lectures on the life and works of Stern and taught a seminar in psychology from a Sternian perspective. One eager Hamburg student was Uwe Kirschenmann, who wrote his undergraduate senior thesis and master’s thesis on the history of psychology and its ties to philosophy under the supervision of Dr. Lamiell. Although the philosophical base of academic psychology emanated from Germany, Kirschenmann was unable to find a supervisor with Dr. Lamiell’s expertise in Germany.

“Nowadays it’s all about statistics, empiricism, and evaluation,” Kirschenmann says. “I heard one of Dr. Lamiell’s Stern lectures and was at once ‘on fire.’ Not only was he talking about subjects that until then I craved for in vain, because no German scholar would talk or even knew about them, but he was also very responsive to my questions. I remember exactly the first time that we discussed a theory of Stern right after one of his lectures. We were standing in front of the lecture hall, and he really took his time for me. We talked for almost an hour. This has motivated me deeply, because he showed me that there are really alternative ways of seeing things and that psychology is still very alive.”

Dr. Lamiell has also translated several of Stern’s works into English, including an upcoming English edition of Stern’s “Psychology and Personalism,” which, ironically, will appear in a journal titled New Ideas in Psychology. Additionally, he has organized several world symposia on Stern’s research and has plans to write an English-language biography of him. Stern is also featured prominently in Dr. Lamiell’s Georgetown courses, including General Psychology and History of Modern Psychology.

“I see my main mission as getting Stern’s work in front of contemporary thinkers,” Dr. Lamiell says. “Stern can be a very useful model for maintaining a bridge between psychology and philosophy. In my courses, students are continually reminded through the content of the relationship between psychology and philosophy. Not all questions about human behavior can be answered empirically in the lab.”

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