Kenneth J. Gergen
Kenneth J. Gergen is an American social psychologist and emeritus professor at Swarthmore College. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and his PhD from Duke University.
Biography
Gergen was born in Rochester, New York in 1935. His parents were Aubigne Munger and John Jay Gergen, the chair of the Mathematics Department at Duke University who has a series of lectures named in his honor. He had three brothers, one of whom is David Gergen, the prominent political analyst. Gergen grew up in Durham, North Carolina. After completing public schooling, he attended Yale University. Graduating in 1957, he subsequently became an officer in the United States Navy. He then returned to graduate school at Duke University, where he received his PhD in psychology in 1963. His dissertation advisor was Edward E. Jones. Gergen went on to become an assistant professor in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, where he also became the chairman of the board of tutors and advisors for the department and representative to the university's Council on Educational Policy.In 1967, Gergen took a position as chair of the Department of Psychology at Swarthmore College, a position he held for ten years. Subsequently, he became the Gil and Frank Mustin Professor in Psychology. After his retirement in 2006, he took the position of Senior Research Professor. At various intervals, he served as visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Marburg, the Sorbonne, the Sapienza University of Rome, Kyoto University, and Adolfo Ibanez University. At Swarthmore, he spearheaded the development of the academic concentration in interpretation theory. In an attempt to link his academic work to societal practices, he collaborated with colleagues to create the Taos Institute in 1993. He now serves as the president of the institute.
Gergen was married to Mary Gergen, who retired as professor emeritus at Penn State University. She was a major contributor to feminist psychology and performance inquiry, from 1969 until her death in 2020. She was the author of over 50 articles and was the co-author of books on social construction and performative social science. They published the Positive Aging Newsletter with a readership of around 20,000.
Contributions
Gergen's earliest studies challenged the presumption of a unified or coherent self and argued that the person is not only socially constructed but varies depending upon context leading to the concept of the saturated self. He then raised questions about the value of altruism, by exploring the ways in which helping others leads to the recipient's resentment and alienation.A major point in Gergen's career was his 1973 article "Social Psychology as History". In the article, he argues that while empirical research attempts to establish general laws or principles, the empirical support is always derived from historically situated observations. Yet, because patterns of human action undergo continuous change, support for any principle may wax or wane over time. Further, the scientific knowledge of the laws and principles of social interaction are variable over time, and that the scientific knowledge generated by social psychologists actually influences the phenomena it is meant to passively describe. For example, studying obedience to authority may reduce the likelihood of obedience. He argued therefore that social psychology was not fundamentally a cumulative science, but was effectively engaged in the recording and transformation of cultural life. The article proved widely controversial, and was ultimately listed as a "citation classic" in the Social Science Citation Index. Also contributing to what was called "the crisis in social psychology" was Gergen's subsequent publication on generative theory. Here he proposed that, because theoretical suppositions were not so much recordings of social life as creators, theories should not be judged so much by their integration of "what is" as their potential to open new spaces of action.
Combining these ideas with developments in literary and critical theory, along with the history of science, Gergen went on to develop a radical view of socially constructed knowledge. This view was proposed as a successor project to what Gergen considered an inherently flawed positivist conception of knowledge. From Gergen's perspective, all human intelligibility is generated within relationships. It is from relationships that humans derive their conceptions of what is real, rational, and good. From this perspective, scientific theories, like all other reality posits, should not be assessed in terms of truth, but in terms of pragmatic outcomes. Such assessments are inevitably wedded to values, and thus all science is morally and politically weighted in implication. As he saw it, this same form of assessment also applies to social constructionist theory. The question is not its accuracy, but its potentials for humankind.
This latter conclusion informed most of Gergen's subsequent work, in areas including therapy and counseling, education, organizational change, technology, conflict reduction, civil society, and qualitative inquiry. In one form or another, this work is concerned with transforming social life. For the most part, his preferred direction of change is toward more collaborative and participatory relationships. Additionally, he has been concerned with fostering a "relational" view of the self, where the "traditional emphasis on the individual mind is replaced by a concern with the relational processes from which rationality and morality emerge." He is also known for his comment "I am linked therefore I am" as an answer to Descartes' proposition "I think, therefore I am". Most of these developments are summarized in Relational Being, Beyond the Individual and Community, which attempts to demonstrate that what are considered mental processes are not so much "in the head" as in relationships. It also attempts to answer charges of moral relativism with a non-foundational morality of collaborative practice, and to outline a way to bring science together with concerns for the sacred.
He has played a central role in the development of social constructionism, relational theory, and their professional applications. He has also considered relations between ethics in a pluralistic world and qualitative inquiry in the social sciences; explanations of human action, and reconstructing the conception of ageing.
Gergen has been President of two divisions of the American Psychological Association - the Division on Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and Division of Psychology and the Arts. He has served on the editorial board of 35 journals, was the Associate Editor of The American Psychologist and was co-founder of Theory and Psychology and Qualitative Psychology.
Notable concepts
Concepts that Gergen has written about include:- Enlightenment effects. The moral and political effects on cultural behavior of disseminating scientific knowledge.
- Generative theory: Theory that unsettles common assumptions, and opens up possibilities or new forms of action.
- Deficit discourse: By constructing the world, and particularly individuals, in terms of problems, there is an objectification of deficit and a suppression of positive possibilities.
- Cycle of progressive infirmity: With the dissemination of information about categories of mental illness, people come to see themselves in these terms. As a result, they seek help from the mental health professions, which are in turn, expanded in numbers. With the expansion of the mental health industry, new diagnostic categories are developed and disseminated. The society becomes progressively infirmed.
- Multiphrenia: The condition, largely attributed to technologies that increase social contact, of being simultaneously drawn in multiple and conflicting directions.
- Pregression. To unsettle the modernist value placed on progress, the proposal that for every change that is effected in societal life, the repercussions will unsettle multiple conditions that people define as positive.
- Positive aging: As an alternative to the pervasive view of aging as decline, it is possible to discover and construct myriad ways of creating later life as a period of unparalleled growth and enrichment.
- First and second order morality: All collaborative relationships will be about some understanding of the good. With multiple groups proclaiming their own good, the stage is set for interminable conflict. Second order morality is achieved through practices that bring otherwise embattled groups into a condition of positive collaboration.
- Transformative dialogue: Forms of dialogic practice that dissolve the barriers of meaning separating otherwise conflicted parties.
- Co-action. One's actions have no meaning in themselves, but come into meaning through another's collaborative action. At the same time, another's potentially collaborative actions only become so as they are supplemented. All human intelligibility emerges not from individual actors but through co-action.
- Multi-being. What is commonly viewed as the individual subject is the common intersection of multiple relationships.
- Future forming research. In a world of increasingly rapid change, research focused on what is currently the case rapidly loses relevance. As a result, research should shift its emphasis to creating the future. Action research is illustrative.