In psychology that recognizes itself as a humanistic discipline, culture is considered to be the very fabric of human experience. Accordingly, human activity aimed at the creation and interpretation of culturally significant phenomena should be accepted as paradigmatic. At the beginning of this chapter, I attempt to emphasize this point by contrasting the traditional model of scientific methodology with methodology derived from the humanities. This latter methodology calls for greater attention to human culture. It emphasizes interpretation rather than prediction, and it takes as a guide semiotics rather than physics.

In the literary model for psychology, literature can serve two functions: as a prototype of the most advanced forms of human psychological life and as a concrete psychological tool that mediates human experiences. Humanistic psychology, therefore, has two complementary goals. One of them is to inquire into human psychological life as authoring in potentia. The other is to investigate the role of actually internalized literary modalities as mediators of human experience. These two possibilities are illustrated by the analysis of the relative contributions of decontextualized thinking and intertextually rich discourse for cognitive maturity, and in the possibility of using higher-order “psychological tools” such as the whole literary work as an instrument of cognitive change.

Scientific versus humanistic psychology

For a long time, psychology has been faulted for being an inexact science. Such criticism is provoked by the disparity between psychology's actual performance and its continuing insistence on the scientific character of its methods and findings.