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Annette Karmiloff-Smith¡¯s cautionary remarks on the limitations of neuroscience in the field of psychology are to be welcomed (¡°Brain scans go deep, but you need intuition for light-bulb moments¡±, 16 May); but the critique arguably needs to go much further. Neuroscience is typically reductionistic, materialistic and deterministic, and thus fundamentally contrary to the existential-phenomenological worldview to which many humanistic and transpersonal psychologists subscribe. A thorough-going eliminative materialism has nothing to say about the kinds of existential meaning-making experiences that many psychologists see as being key to the work of a true psychology.

Karmiloff-Smith is right in implying that many academics drop their critical faculties in the face of the seductions of neuroscience, as if something that is new and ¡°scientific¡± necessarily contains something of value for psychology. Yet at the very least, serious psychologists have a deep ethical responsibility to tease out, and make explicit, the metaphysical assumptions that are entailed in a neuroscientific worldview before we uncritically apply them to the work of the psychological sciences.

In The Reluctant Adult, Jill Hall argues that in late modernity we have embraced a quasi-deterministic view that human beings are all essentially ¡°caused¡± by, and are therefore victims of, our personal histories and/or our brain chemistries. This worldview has all kinds of implications, most especially in terms of blaming the world/the other/our parents/our genetics for our discomfort or suffering. Psychology is crying out for a reinstatement of ¡°the soul¡± and the ¡°imagination¡± in its cosmology as a counterweight to these one-sided developments.

Exactly 40 years ago, in a seminal address to the American Psychological Society, the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers said that until we develop an authentic human science, one that takes account of the ¡°exploration of inner, personal emotionalized meanings¡­based on understanding the phenomenological world of man¡­,we are but developing a technology for the use of planners and dictators, not a true understanding of the human condition¡±.

Amen to all that - and not a brain cell in sight.

Richard House
Senior lecturer in early childhood studies
Department of education studies and liberal arts
University of Winchester