The radical potentials of human experience: Maslow, Leary, and the prehistory of qualitative inquiry.

Abstract

are 2 of the most well-known American psychologists from the mid-20th century. Less well-known, however, is their pioneering methodological work. In this article we explicate their transgressive research, their epistemological visions, and their struggles to enact a more existential, historical, relational, participatory, and experientially focused human science. Using their personal documents, as well as published and unpublished works, we weave their stories to create an assemblage of these unknown, unacknowledged, or forgotten histories. We try to show that, for both Maslow and Leary, the phenomena and questions they sought to understand drove them from the prevailing modernist ethos and toward new ways of thinking and working. In the process, they fashioned methods for, and visions of, science that have striking echoes in the contemporary qualitative traditionsexperimenting with unquantified stories and texts as data, with iterative interpretive methods, with participatory research relationships, and with existential and postmodern philosophies of science. Of course, these bold forays into the unsanctioned forward edge of psychological inquiry were disciplined in different ways-expulsion for Leary and assimilation for Maslow, erasure for both-and this also is instructive for us. The experiences of these influential scholars reveal how the challenges and potentials of the use of personal documents in research were (and are) embedded in a broader struggle over the scientific and political value of human experience.

Multicontextuality in narrative inquiry.

“…Accordingly, the findings I summarize in this article should not be viewed as attempting to feign objectivity (Haraway, 1988), but rather as the result of situated knowledge production that was coconstructed between me and the teachers who were embedded in their own interpretive communities. These constructions, which are themselves snapshots in a dynamic interpretive process, establish the foundations for this iterative and evolving research program in which I built the second study from the first, and constructed each analytic project from the findings of the previous project and/or projects (see Head, Quigua, & Clegg, 2019 for discussion of the role of iteration in the prehistory of qualitative inquiry). As both the participants and I were/are engaged in the active process of interpretive construction, we are the coproducers of the research findings (Fassinger, 2005)—“working together to put together a joint multilayered jigsaw puzzle” (Josselson, 2006, p. 4).…”

Introduction to special section: Using personal documentary sources in psychological research: 1940–1970.

“…And to achieve this, psychology would have to employ methodological alternatives to variablefocused experimental research models. Head et al (2019) present a finely detailed scrutiny of the diverging theoretical and practical approaches each psychologist followed in their studies of experience. For Maslow, these included iterative and recursive examination of personal experience from existential, hermeneutic, and phenomenological perspectives.…”

“…The third paper in this section (Head, Quigua, & Clegg, 2019) offers what might seem at first a strange junction: examining the methodological concerns of psychologists Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) and Timothy Leary (1920–1996). The first was elected president of the American Psychological Association for 1968 and judged the 10th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century (Haggbloom et al, 2002) while the second, once dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by President Nixon (Mansnerus, 1996), spent time in prison for possession of marijuana years after he had been dismissed from the faculty for studying the effects of psychedelic drugs on Harvard undergraduates.…”

“…The first was elected president of the American Psychological Association for 1968 and judged the 10th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century (Haggbloom et al, 2002) while the second, once dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by President Nixon (Mansnerus, 1996), spent time in prison for possession of marijuana years after he had been dismissed from the faculty for studying the effects of psychedelic drugs on Harvard undergraduates. While acknowledging their career endpoints, Head et al (2019) concentrate this analysis on the years prior to those denouements. For, despite their early training in classical experimental methods, both psychologists became strongly resistant to the domination of mainstream psychology by such methods during the 1950s.…”

Coverage and treatment of qualitative inquiry in general research methods textbooks.

“…Wertz (2014), however, noted that although qualitative investigatory practices are generally overlooked in the history of psychology, they played an essential role in the work of foundational psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt, Sigmund Freud, William James, William Stern, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Karen Horney, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan. Explicit advocacy for approaches and practices that can now be described as “qualitative” ramped up in the middle of the 20th century in the work of figures like Gordon Allport and Abraham Maslow (Head et al, 2019). By the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of qualitative research began to take hold and by the 1990s the term “qualitative” was used with regularity (Wertz, 2014).…”