Changing the Rules: Psychology in the Netherlands, 1900-1985 (review)

In this substantial revision of her 1990 thesis Dehue has taken up the challenge of rearticulating the historiographic relevance of methodology studies. In a sensitive move away from the finalist traps of former historiographic approaches to the subject, Dehue draws the reader’s attention to the ways in which scientific methodological changes can be seen to derive from changes in the social identity of a particular scientific community. To support her argument she presents several methodological shifts that occurred in Dutch psychology during the twentieth century.

The leading question is how the profound flexibility in methodological standards that emerged in this field can be best understood. In contrast to rad-ical relativists who urge us to stop worrying about the “scientific character” of social and natural sciences altogether, Dehue retains a strong interest in this issue, but argues that more appropriate social terms should be applied to account for science. Her introduction presents several convincing justifications for readdressing “scientific methodology.” Here she takes on board the common criticism of methodology as being too far removed from practice. Remarks that social sciences in their methodological quests merely attempt to “imitate” natural scientific methodologies, are also addressed in Dehue’s social reappraisal of the functional differences between the methodologies of natural and social science.

In her core chapters Dehue turns to three main controversies that have stirred the Dutch psychological community. Even though their roots lie in the 1920s and 1930s, they all came to full expression in the decades following World War II. The first controversy involves disagreements over various psychodiagnostic approaches to assessment psychology for personnel selection and vocational guidance. The second encompasses several positions taken up with respect to the so-called Utrecht school of phenomenological psychology. The final controversy concerns the problem of “methodological rigor” versus “clinical relevance,” which became an issue once clinical psychology was being developed.

In detailing these cases, Dehue maintains that each of the methodological differences involved can be understood only if the incompatibilities of the social identities underlying these various positions are brought into focus. The first controversy is thus recast as a fundamental confrontation of a “geisteswissenschaftliche” and an empirical-analytical methodological style, to the detriment of the former. This course of events Dehue ascribes to the declining relevance of the social-worker role of the psychodiagnostician, and the concomitant rise of a more “business-like middleman type” more appropriately attuned to the polarized social relations of the post-1960s era.

Similarly, Dehue’s chapter on the Utrecht school emphasizes how its particular methodologies thrived in the immediate postwar years, in which personalistic socialism was a major force, whereas they lost much of their relevance following the tendencies of individualization and heterogenization of the sixties. In line with the above, Dehue concludes that in the very conception of Dutch psychology as a science, social forms and identities express themselves. While empirical-analytical methodologies did gain dominance, it was a culturally specific combination of existential-phenomenological and empirical-analytical elements that fed into their central concepts.

Dehue’s main argument is clear. The supporting chapters, however, are somewhat uneven in the extent to which they specify the social forces at work. Moreover, Dehue’s definition of “the social” appears rather broad: it often includes factors that in someone else’s book might have been referred to as moral or cultural. These few reservations do not detract, however, from Dehue’s general achievement of presenting us with an informative and recommendable study.