Backlash against American psychology An indigenous reconstruction of the history of German critical psychology (2)

BACKLASH AGAINST AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY: An Indigenous Reconstruction of the History of German Critical Psychology1 Thomas Teo York University After suggesting that all psychologies contain

BACKLASH AGAINST AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY: An Indigenous Reconstruction of the History of German Critical Psychology1

Thomas Teo York University

After suggesting that all psychologies contain indigenous qualities and discussing

differences and commonalities between German and North American historiographies

of psychology, an indigenous reconstruction of German critical psychology is applied.

It is argued that German critical psychology can be understood as a backlash against

American psychology, as a response to the Americanization of German psychology

after WWII, on the background of the history of German psychology, the academic

impact of the Cold War, and the trajectory of personal biographies and institutions.

Using an intellectual⫺historical perspective, it is shown how and which indigenous

dimensions played a role in the development of German critical psychology as well as

the limitations to such an historical approach Expanding from German critical

psy-chology, the role of the critique of American psychology in various contexts around the

globe is discussed in order to emphasize the relevance of indigenous historical research.

Keywords: indigenous psychology, critical psychology, culture, Americanization, German

psychology

Issues of indigenization and indigenous

psy-chologieshave been discussed in cross-cultural

and cultural psychology, as well as in the

his-tory of psychology since the early 1980s (Adair,

1999; Kim & Berry, 1993; Pickren, 2009)

De-spite lingering debates, there is little consensus

on how these terms should be defined (see also

Allwood & Berry, 2006) The term

indigeniza-tion might refer to a process whereby

(psycho-logical) ideas, imported from the colonizer or

the West, are adapted in colonized,

non-Western localities The argument that “the need

for indigenization of psychology will be

great-est in Asia and Africa, much less in Latin

Amer-ica, even less in Europe, and probably least in

Canada” (Adair, 2006, p 470) is based on the

belief that American psychology is the cultural

and academic norm Yet, indigenization can

also signify a general process, by which theories

and concepts from outside of a particular

cul-tural setting are accommodated into any local

context Historians of psychology have

demon-strated that the concept of indigenization ap-plies equally to American psychology when, for instance, German psychology (Danziger, 1985; Pickren, 2009) or later Piagetian psychology (Burman, in press) were indigenized in the American academic landscape

The terminological problem applies to

indig-enous psychologies2 as well The term could

refer to psychologies after or before the process

of indigenization For instance, one could argue that only pre-Columbian “psychologies” in

Latin America (psychological ideas before

1492) are indigenous; or one could maintain that indigenous psychology refers to a unique Latin American psychology, which appeared

were indigenized in this geographic locale Danziger (2006), aware of the complexities of the terminology, argued, applying a distinction

1 This article is based on a paper presented at the 2011 APA Annual Convention in Washington, DC The research has been supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Standard Research Grant (410-2011-1196).

2 The term is used in its plural due to the fact that multiplicities of indigenous psychologies exist and that it is impossible to reduce them to a unified or singular approach (this is in opposition to traditions in this line of research that use the singular).

This article was published Online First February 4, 2013.

Correspondence concerning this article should be

ad-dressed to Thomas Teo, York University, Department of

Psy-chology, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J

1P3 E-mail: tteo@yorku.ca

1

between center and periphery, that indigenous

psychologies attempt “to develop variants of

modern professional psychology that are more

attuned to conditions in developing nations than

the psychology taught at Western academic

in-stitutions” (p 215) Using this meaning one

might associate notions of indigenous

psychol-ogies with Chinese psycholpsychol-ogies (Hwang,

2012), Indian psychologies (Sinha, 1986),

Fili-pino psychologies (Enriquez, 1992), and so on

(for an overview see Kim, Yang, & Hwang,

2006) Yet, if indigenous psychologies refer to

the study of the psyche of native humans and

are used for and derived from particular groups

of people (see Kim & Berry, 1993), then

Amer-ican (or German) psychology needs to be

in-cluded as an indigenous psychology

The argument of the more or less

indigenous-ness of all psychologies can be based on the

study of psychological categories that form and

inform theories and empirical research

Histori-ans of psychology, cultural psychologists, and

theoretical psychologists have pointed out that

all psychologies (including mainstream

variet-ies) contain “indigenous” elements (Allwood &

Berry, 2006; Arnett, 2008; Bhatia, 2002;

Pick-ren & Rutherford, 2010; Teo & Febbraro,

2003) For the history of psychology, Danziger

(1997) has demonstrated convincingly that

psy-chological concepts are embedded in cultural

and historical traditions

The difference between Filipino and

Ameri-can psychology Ameri-cannot be found in the

magni-tude of the indigenous character of their

cate-gories, but in the inequality of power For a

critical analysis of indigenous psychologies,

re-searchers need to understand differences in

eco-nomic, military, and cultural dominance and

dependence In addition, an understanding of all

psychologies as indigenous provides

implica-tions for theoretical and historical

psycholo-gists: (a) one’s own psychological work needs

to be decentered and accompanied by

epistemo-logical reflexivity, an idea that is popular in

recent literature (e.g., Finlay & Gough, 2003;

Morawski, 2005; Sundararajan, 2008) and that

specifically challenges “the taken for granted

quality that so many psychological categories

possess” (Danziger, 1997, p 191); and (b) it is

possible to provide indigenous reconstructions

in the history of psychology that may provide

new insights into the development of

psychol-ogy as a discipline and practice

The fact that “one cannot dispute that the 20th century was the century of American dominance

of psychology” (Pickren, 2009, p 87) provides a starting point for indigenous questions regarding the historical consequences of this reality An-swers can be developed and found within the

notion of an indigenous reconstruction With this

term, I refer to a historical analysis of con-texts, intellectual sources, traditions, expres-sions, historical and personal trajectories of local psychologies under the historical reality

of the dominance of American psychology The reconstructions of local psychologies in relation to the power of American psychology need not be limited to nations of the periphery but may include countries that are perceived

as being part of the dominant world

A significant case example is the history of German psychology after WWII, a psychology that had a long and proud tradition that included the claim to be the birthplace of academic psy-chology But after 1945 (beginning in 1933) German psychology moved from the center to the periphery, which represented a unique his-torical and cultural situation for German psy-chology North American psychologists or his-torians of psychology appear not to know much about German psychology after WWII as it is assumed that no worthwhile psychologies have existed in Germany since that period, or it is believed that only those psychologies that con-tribute to mainstream American psychology are

of interest I intend to show that German critical psychology can be reconstructed as a unique indigenous psychology, and more precisely, as

an indigenous German response to the Ameri-canization of German psychology after WWII,

on the background of distinctive historical, so-cial, and cultural developments

As a historian of psychology I am aware of the complexities of historical developments I

am not suggesting that an indigenous recon-struction is the only possible way to write a history of German critical psychology How-ever, I argue that such an indigenous recon-struction allows for an understanding of aspects

of theory dynamics that are traditionally not captured Clearly, critical psychology was debted to a whole set of circumstances that in-clude the post-WWII German experience, the Cold War, the isolation of West Berlin, the endur-ing class system that survived the war, the

“Wirtschaftswunder” (the rapid economic

devel-opment of West Germany after the war), and the

partitioning of Germany and its university system

These historical developments were and indeed

still are embedded in German and European

his-tories, cultures, and politics.3

I suggest that indigenous reconstructions are

able to do justice to such complex issues and

that the foci here on intellectual, biographical,

institutional, and social sources, as well as the

use of the lens of Americanization, allows one

to do justice to some important features of

crit-ical psychology without trivializing its

achieve-ments Critical psychology developed, as did

any other indigenous psychology, through the

enactment of theoretical tools that have had

relevance and have provided meaning to this

local culture and subculture (and beyond)

Personal Experience as a Starting Point

Here, I locate my topic in my own experiences

After I moved from Germany to Canada, I made

two observations relevant to my academic

inter-ests: (a) The history of psychology, including the

history of German psychology—as it was told in

English-speaking North America—was

dif-ferent from the history that I had learned in

Austria and Germany I also noticed that there

was not much interest in the history and

achievements of German psychology after

1945; (b) The form and content of critical

psychology that had emerged after WWII in

Germany was different from what I

encoun-tered in the United States or Canada, and from

what has been written in other English-speaking

countries For example, the role of theory

de-velopment was much more important in

aca-demic German critical psychology than in

North America, whereas in North America the

primacy of practice was frequently emphasized

Many North American self-identified critical

psychologists have backgrounds in community,

clinical, or health psychology, or in other

ap-plied social settings (see Fox & Prilleltensky,

1997).4

These noted differences do not express random

developments Rather, they can be theorized

within a meaningful, indigenous, historical

recon-struction Regarding the history of psychology, it

would be futile to argue that German historians of

psychology got it right, or vice versa, that the

North Americans have provided more accurate

accounts of the history of the discipline or

profes-sion It would be antithetical to the thesis of indigenousness to assume that social objects, including reconstructions of human sciences, can display an unselected objectivity Histories

of psychology are written from particular per-spectives that privilege certain players and out-comes for specific reasons (see also Brock, 2006) Although excellent historiographies have been published on both sides, they present di-verging accounts and trajectories

The argument becomes more complex once one realizes that significant variations within German and North American historiographies

of psychology exist—synchronically and dia-chronically Indeed, it might have been the case that a critical perspective had already influenced

my own knowledge about German histories of psychology, whereas in North America I en-countered widely used textbooks written from traditional points of view (e.g., see the recent editions of Schultz & Schultz, 2008, and Her-genhahn, 2009) In Germany, I had read among other works the critical histories of Jaeger and Steauble (1978), who identified historiography that used Wundt as a temporal anchor as tradi-tional, whereas their own reconstructions fo-cused on the time before Wundt as sources for the discipline of psychology More complexity

is introduced if one makes a distinction between

pre- and postwar psychology: The

Americaniza-tion of German psychologyafter WWII includes

the Americanization of the historiography of

German psychology(see Benetka, 2002).5

From Wilhelm Wundt to Klaus Holzkamp

The historically challenging question remains whether the variation within German or within North American historiography of psychology

is smaller than the variation between these two contexts Wilhelm Wundt (1832⫺1920) may serve as a test case for this problem As Dan-ziger (1979, 1983) has argued, Wundt was made the founding father of psychology in North American historiography by repressing

Wun-3 I thank one of the reviewers for emphasizing this point.

4 Although the group around Holzkamp discussed the theory⫺practice problem and recognized the importance of practice, German Critical psychology, as it was taught and developed at academic institutions, sided strongly with theory.

5 Benetka (2002) pointed out that the Americanization of German historiography was a result of Boring’s influence.

dt’s Völkerpsychologie.6 But Wundt has not

been singled out as the most important figure in

German psychology Yet, due to the

American-ization of historiography, postwar German

his-toriography of psychology is required to discuss

his “foundational” role (e.g., Benetka, 2002)

I am not suggesting that Wundt was

unimport-ant in German psychological historiography But

Wundt was one among many figures who helped

establish the academic field of psychology In my

own education, the focus was on Herbart as a

founder of scientific psychology with his

mathe-matical approach to mental phenomena More

re-cently, Gundlach (2004) listed August 21, 1824,

as the birth date of the discipline of psychology,

when Prussia established psychology as a required

pedagogical course at its universities (an argument

that is totally neglected in North America) Within

the geisteswissenschaftliche tradition, which has

similarly been neglected in postwar mainstream

German psychology since the 1960s, Wilhelm

Dilthey (1833⫺1911) is considered nearly as

im-portant as Wundt The Austrian historian of

chology, Benetka (2002), in his history of

psy-chology in the 19th century dedicated about 10%

of the book to Dilthey’s program (7% less than he

does to Wundt) In German-speaking countries,

despite their ambivalent assessments of this

im-portant figure, Sigmund Freud (1856⫺1939) is

still considered a pioneering psychological figure

In Klemm’s (1911) History of Psychology,

Wundt was one figure in a much larger network of

differing approaches He discussed experimental

psychology as a branch among many other

psy-chological approaches and began the discussion

with Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878), Gustav

Theodor Fechner (1801⫺1887), Johannes Müller

(1801⫺1858), and Hermann Helmholtz

(1821⫺1894), before he discussed Wundt, and

then moved to Karl von Vierordt (1818⫺1884),

Narziß Ach (1871⫺1946), Karl Marbe

(1869⫺1953), and others Wundt is considered

important but not the most important figure in this

tradition That he became such a central figure in

American historiography can be explained by the

role of personal knowledge transfer, when

Amer-ican psychologists who studied and worked in his

lab, brought his ideas and practices, somewhat

distorted, back to the US (not to mention Boring’s

(1929) influence).7

Another factor in the supremacy of Wundt can

be found in an individualistic historiography that

dominated for a long time in psychological

histor-ical writing In identifying pioneers in the estab-lishment of a discipline (Fancher, 1996; Watson & Evans, 1991), American differed from German

historiography where in the latter ideas, concepts,

or problems in psychology (not necessarily social

context) were equally as important— demonstrat-ing the legacy of German philosophy in psychol-ogy Klemm (1911) dedicated large sections of his

book to the development of psychological

catego-riesand psychological theories Pongratz (1984) provided a history of problems in psychology, and organized his material accordingly, specifically challenging Boring’s approach to historical prob-lems (p 18) More importantly, Pongratz consid-ered a history of problems in psychology to be part of basic research in psychology without

en-visioning a historical psychology (see Jüttemann,

Sonntag, & Wulf, 1991; Jüttemann, 2011) Klaus Holzkamp (1927⫺1995) is arguably the most important postwar German psychologist who created collaboratively a unique system of psychology that was influential for more than three decades (see Teo, 1998; Tolman, 1994; Tol-man & Maiers, 1991) In the 1960s he influenced philosophy of science debates in Germany with his constructivist ideas In the 1970s he attracted large numbers of students and psychologists to his critical psychology Braun and Holzkamp (1977) reported that the first congress of critical psychol-ogy in 1977 attracted 3,000 participants, a much higher number of delegates than at the congress of

the German Society of Psychology (DGFP)

Rea-sons for its appeal can be found in the left-leaning Zeitgeist among many intellectuals and students, the reverberating student movement, the promises

of critical psychology that attracted many psycho-logically and politically active people, but also in the indigenous character of this psychology that included a critique of Americanized mainstream psychology, culture, and politics

Beginning in the 1980s, Holzkamp led German discussions to the idea of a genuine science from the standpoint of the subject (Schraube & Os-terkamp, in press; Tolman, 2009) Yet, within current North American historiography or

psy-6 Boring’s (1929) role in this context cannot be underes-timated.

7 I suggest that Danziger’s (1990) impactful deconstruc-tions of Wundt are precisely based on the constructed cen-trality of Wundt; had Danziger accomplished the same for Herbart or Dilthey, or even Freud, his histories would have had less influence.

chology, Holzkamp does not have a standing even

close to Wundt One reason is that postwar

Ger-man psychology is no longer seen as original,

which is to a certain degree justifiable, based on a

shift of innovation from Europe to North America

and on the fact that personal knowledge transfer in

psychology has moved in the opposite direction

(see examples below)

From these preliminary reflections I develop a

historical⫺theoretical thesis within this

indige-nous reconstruction: In order to understand the

history of German critical psychology, one needs

to reconstruct the development of German

psy-chology after WWII, the relevance of the Cold

War, the Americanization of German mainstream

psychology and its critiques, and personal career

trajectories I will argue that critical psychology

can be understood as an indigenized backlash

against American psychology, or more precisely,

as an indigenous response to the

Americaniza-tion of German psychology after the war.8I use

German critical psychology as a case example

for this analysis, and provide sketches for an

indigenous reconstruction of other international

critical psychologies

The Cold War and the Americanization of

West German Psychology

The reference to German psychology during

the Cold War requires one to distinguish between

West German, East German, Austrian, and

Ger-man Swiss psychologies In this argument I focus

on West German critical psychology It should be

mentioned that Austrian critical psychology has

its own trajectory, which has led to the

establish-ment of a recognized professional association with

headquarters in Vienna (see Lobnig, Schuster, &

Trinks, 1988)

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,

American historians of science have attempted

to identify the significance of the Cold War for

the development of the social sciences

(Solovey, 2001; Solovey & Cravens, 2012), as

well the legitimacy of the concept of Cold War

para-digmatic for studying the political, economic,

cultural, and academic divisions of a country

and the differing trajectories that science in

general and psychology in particular took in

these two contexts (there are several studies on

the history of East German psychology; e.g., see

Schönpflug & Lüer, 2011)

A Stalinist example of intellectual diverging paths is Peter G Klemm’s (1953) introduction

to Teplow’s textbook Psychology, translated

from Russian to German, and used in the Ger-man Democratic Republic In his introduction, Klemm criticized the lack of progressive liter-ature in psychology after 1945 and argued that Teplow’s book demonstrated the superiority of

a dialectical-materialist conception of the psyche, insofar as it was based on the doctrines

of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mitschurin, Lysenko, and Pavlov The translator argued that psychology was impacted by the findings of Lysenko, according to whom “the reactionary views” of Mendel were exposed; the research of Pavlov, who led psychology to the development

of a “truly progressive psychology”; and by the

“brilliant works of Stalin,” who revealed new ways of studying thought and language (Kl-emm, 1953, p 5).9 Historians of psychology and science are, of course, aware of the dead-end impacts of these three figures on psychol-ogy

Before the events of the 1960s and 1970s that led to the emergence of critical psychology, West German psychology had a unique trajec-tory of Americanization During the early post-war years American psychology did not have an impact on psychological discussions and West German psychologists continued their estab-lished programs According to Mattes (1985), Gestalt-psychologists (Wolfgang Metzger, Jo-hannes von Allesch, and Edwin Rausch) fo-cused on experimental perception research; Ganzheit-psychologists (Friedrich Sander, Al-bert Wellek) oriented their human-sciences re-search toward the ideas of Eduard Spranger (1882⫺1963), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833⫺1911), and Edmund Husserl (1859⫺1938); and char-acterological psychologists (Albert Wellek, Ernst Kretschmer, Erich Jaensch, Gerhard Pfahler, and Eduard Spranger) studied person-ality from a holistic perspective, where interpre-tation and hermeneutic methods were seen as valid tools of research (for a detailed account, see e.g., Ash, 1995) Ash (2006) called it a

“striking continuity from the Nazi period” (p

8 American psychology itself can be understood as an

outcome of indigenization in that once it reached its

self-consciousness it was exported to the rest of the world.

9 This is my translation as are all German quotes in the rest of the article.

148) when “nearly all those who had held

pro-fessorships in 1943 also did so in 1953” (p

148) Lück, Grünwald, Geuter, Miller, and

Re-chtien (1987) concluded that personal

continu-ity was combined with a continucontinu-ity of content

into the late 1950s (p 146)

Mattes (1985) argued that the diversification

of social needs after 1950 led to a diversification

of psychological approaches, but also that

psy-chology served conservative functions in

Ger-man society In 1953 at the Congress of the

German Psychological Society (DGP) ruptures

between German holistic personality and

Amer-icanized quantitative personality psychologists

appeared for the first time (Mattes, 1985, p

219) They had not yet impacted the nomination

of professors in psychology In 1955, Albert

Wellek (1904⫺1972) confidently argued: “A

further increase of the methodological influence

of the U.S.A cannot be expected” because

“her-meneutic psychology which is perceived as a

historical mission in continental Europe would

exclude this one-sided approach” (quoted from

Mattes, 1985, pp 219 –220)

Yet, the “methodological dispute” in the middle

of the 1950s represents the beginning of the end of

traditional German psychology The debates

be-tween Albert Wellek and Peter Hofstätter

(1913⫺1994) can be considered symptomatic

and stemmed from the psychological problem

of personality Whereas Wellek favored a

ho-listic, phenomenological approach to the

problem, Hofstätter privileged statistical,

fac-tor-analytical models, based on the

operational-ization of measures (see Métraux, 1985, p 237)

Hofstätter published a series of works in the

1950s that introduced and promoted a

quantita-tive Americanized approach to psychology

This Americanization happened on the

back-ground of personal knowledge transfer: The

Austrian Hofstätter, during the war years firmly

embedded in the German fascist mission (as

was Wellek), first as an army psychologist and

then in the ministry of justice, had the

opportu-nity to lecture from 1949 until 1956 in the

United States and so became acquainted with

quantitative models of personality research

When he became chair at the University of

Hamburg in 1959, he fortified the relevance of

Americanized psychology in Germany.10

Métraux (1985) argued that the

Americaniza-tion of German psychology reached its peak

between 1960 and 1965 (p 225) and reflected a

generational change (p 227) Americanization meant adopting American psychology and ac-cepting the leadership of American psycholo-gists It sometimes meant importing ideas and methods that had already reached their zenith in the United States (see below the discussion on behaviorism) However, Ash (2006) argued that

the term Americanization is inadequate in order

to describe what had happened in West Ger-many, and instead advocated for understanding

the phenomenon as a general process of

psy-chologization of society, a process that hap-pened with delay in the German context (see p 150) However, from a historical perspective this argument would need to explain why the psychologization of German society did not happen using German traditions In addition, the psychologization argument also does not explicate the emergence of a powerful counter-psychology in Germany that could have con-tributed to a different psychologization of Ger-man society

Americanization in the postwar German con-text meant that students and faculty could as-similate new knowledge Zimbardo’s (1983) textbook of psychology, which in Germany was not marketed as a textbook but rather as a gen-eral compendium of psychology, with its first German edition in 1974, allowed German read-ers, for instance, to discuss whether they should trust reports that Whites are mistreated more than Blacks in the United States (p 9) Despite the book’s critical approach to this topic, the everyday issues clearly reflected an American life-world and would lead to what later psychol-ogists labeled the need of American psychology

to become less American (Arnett, 2008) But more importantly, a new generation of re-searchers and teachers was able to study and to conduct research in the United States with finan-cial support from American academic or cultural organizations These individuals brought Ameri-can theories, concepts, and methods back to West Germany The issue of personal knowledge trans-fer led to several historically realized options, which explain to a certain degree theoretical and methodological preferences as discussed below

10 Mattes (1985) appears to be agnostic when it comes to the importance of knowledge transfer (p 220) but it is evident that students and scholars who were invited to research fellowships in the United States had an impact on the development of German psychology after the war.

Developmental psychologist Paul B Baltes

(1939⫺2006) was an exchange student at the

Uni-versity of Nebraska in 1963–1964 before

receiv-ing his PhD in Germany at the University of

Saarland in 1967 From 1968 to 1980 he

pro-gressed through the ranks, from assistant professor

at West Virginia University, to full professor at

Pennsylvania State University, before returning to

Germany in 1980 where he became one of the

directors at the Max Planck Institute for Human

Development and Education in Berlin (MPI)

En-dorsing an American model of psychology,

pro-moting citation analyses, publishing in English

and in American journals, and being able to

com-pete with the best American institutions

consti-tuted his vision for the Institute His contributions

to developmental psychology are internationally

acknowledged

A different career path and reception can be

shown for Klaus Riegel (1925⫺1977) (Vollmers,

1995), who moved to the United States and

re-mained there A Fulbright grant allowed Riegel to

study at the University of Minnesota in

Minneap-olis where he received his Masters degree in 1955

He received his PhD from the University of

Ham-burg in 1956 In 1958 he moved to the United

States, and in 1966 he became full professor at the

University of Michigan He remained in the

United States and never returned to his country of

birth for an academic position Because of his

dialectical approach, he was largely ignored in

German mainstream psychology, but interestingly

was also discounted within critical approaches,

although Hegel and Marx, central to German

crit-ical approaches, influenced his writings His

writ-ings could be used to illustrate that German

criti-cal psychology did not appreciate psychology

emerging from the United States

Holzkamp’s academic biography is

signifi-cantly different from those of Baltes and Riegel

He made his career not only within the German

university system, but also within the same

uni-versity, the Free University of Berlin Holzkamp

began his psychological studies in 1949 at the

Free University, where he received his doctoral

degree in 1956 His dissertation focused on a

combination of empathy research and the

experi-mental psychology of expression He became

chair and professor at the same institution and

retired from it as well In his first theoretical

monograph (Holzkamp, 1964/1981), and aware of

the new practice of doing psychological research,

he analyzed the relationship between experiments

and theories and argued that experiments in psy-chology only vaguely represent the theories that they supposedly test He attributed these problems

to an inappropriate empiricist philosophy of sci-ence, and consequently promoted a new

philoso-phy of science known as constructivism

(Holz-kamp, 1968)

After being influenced by the German student movement of the late 1960s, Holzkamp (1972) reflected on critical-theoretical and emancipatory issues in psychology, and personal and institu-tional experiences led him to develop a new psy-chology without compromise with the main-stream Holzkamp experienced the Cold War and anticommunist rhetoric in a personal way His name was “scandalized” on national TV, in news-papers, and in magazines (Autorenkollektiv am Psychologischen Institut der Freien Universität Berlin, 1971) for being responsible for a student research project on disadvantaged schoolchildren from the Kreuzberg district in West Berlin After the termination of what had been labeled

an unsuccessful project, the German mass media started a campaign against Holzkamp, publishing stolen notes showing that children used sexualized language in their accounts The association of children with sexuality, and the alleged political manipulation of pupils by communists, led to headlines that captured the public’s imagination Although Holzkamp survived the media cam-paign and was not removed from the university (as politicians had demanded), the attack had institu-tional,11 personal as well as theoretical implica-tions (Holzkamp, 1972; Teo, 1993)

The ideological endorsement of Marxism posed a unique problem for critical theorists and critical psychologists alike in West Germany, who endorsed some of the same sources as their East German colleagues and faced discrimina-tion exactly for that reason.12In 1980 the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, where Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) worked as director, moved to Munich Although directors at Max Planck Institutes were regularly appointed as honorary professors at adjacent universities, Habermas was refused this position at the

tra-11 The attack led to the establishment of a second “tradi-tional” institute of psychology in the Faculty of Education at the Free University of Berlin.

12 Critical theorists expressed dissatisfaction not only with the American but also Soviet political system, espe-cially after the war (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947/1982).

ditionalist university because of his left leanings

in the student movement of the 1960s (Doch net

den, 1980) Yet, it is known that the radicalized

student movement in Germany condemned

Habermas (1969) for calling their activism

“fas-cism from the left” (p 148).13Habermas was an

example of how Cold War mentality affected

high-profile German intellectuals on the left

Following public exposure and a period of

theoretical self-criticism, Holzkamp entered a

critical-conceptual phase (from 1973 to 1983)

during which he emphasized the principles of

the cultural-historical school (A N Leontiev)

and of classical Marxist literature (Marx,

En-gels) as an alternative to Americanized German

psychology During this time, Holzkamp

con-centrated on a critique and clarification of the

conceptual foundations of psychology In his

reconstruction of perception, Holzkamp (1973)

argued that an understanding of psychological

concepts was only possible by including the

natural history, prehistory, and history of

hu-mans Holzkamp summarized and elaborated

the results of his research group in Foundation

Holzkamp demonstrated the significance of his

analyses by elaborating on a science of the

subject, that is, a psychology from the

stand-point of the subject Psychology in this sense

was understood as conducting research for

peo-ple and not about peopeo-ple In his last monograph,

Holzkamp (1993) elaborated a learning theory

from the standpoint of the subject

In contrast to Americanized German

psycholo-gists, Holzkamp was not concerned with imported

American psychologies, but first with a critique of

existing research practices, later with a critique of

mainstream psychology, and finally with the

de-velopment of his own system On the other hand,

German-speaking mainstream psychologists, who

did not have the opportunity to study or work in

the United States, imported American psychology

from the literature but not from embodied and

materialized practices Some of these “normal”

psychologists imported American knowledge that

was already outdated in the United States

Americanized German psychology became the

target of critique for critical psychologists, who

emerged during the period of Americanization in

the 1960s in Germany This target differs from

earlier prewar versions of critical reflection in

Germany When the critical theorist Max

Hork-heimer (1937/1992) “deconstructed” the concept

of traditional theory, he had mostly European the-ories in mind, from Descartes to Husserl, and from the empiricists to the positivists When Holzkamp critiqued traditional psychology after WWII, he had in mind American theories and methods that had become dominant in German discussions in the 1960s On this background the critique of behaviorism became a prototype for theoretical and methodological critiques.15

Critique of Americanization

Holzkamp represented a generation who expe-rienced prewar as well as postwar German society and psychology The student movement of the 1960s was influential for Holzkamp’s critique of psychology and in developing his own system (Teo, 1993) The German student movement in the 1960s was occupied with national as well as international problems National discussions in-cluded the perceived neglect of West Germany in dealing with its Nazi past and, when it came to academia, students condemned what they per-ceived as outdated hierarchical structures In terms

of international debates, the American war in Vietnam and American imperialism were of spe-cial concern For example, the student association

at the Free University in West Berlin, a leading organization of student movements in Germany, argued that the United States, a democracy,

pro-13 The refusal more than a decade after the student move-ment’s peak happened at a time when Habermas was con-sidered to be the most important postwar German philoso-pher, who had no objections to incorporating American philosophy and sociology into his own theoretical system and was offered a position at Berkeley.

14 The German title “Grundlegung der Psychologie” could also be translated as “Laying the Foundation for Psychology” that emphasizes the active, dialectical nature

of this work.

15 It should be mentioned that the Americanization of psychology followed a different trajectory from that of philosophy, which was less influenced by Americanization German postwar reflections in philosophy still reached an international audience (e.g., Gadamer, Adorno & Hork-heimer, Habermas) Whereas German postwar philosophy books are translated into English, German psychology books are usually not translated into English— unless they are at the margins of the discipline such as Geuter’s (1984/ 1992) history of German psychology’s professionalization during the Nazi era.

duced the same “barbarism and crimes as fascist

Germany” (AStA, 1967, p 7).16

It would be misleading to suggest that

Holz-kamp (1972) targeted American psychology;

rather he criticized mainstream psychology, which

had become an Americanized psychology during

the 1960s in Germany, and which, from his

so-cialist perspective, could also be labeled

bour-geois psychology The critique of behaviorism

be-came an important part of this project because

behavioristic theories influenced the mainstream

in Germany, but more importantly, psychology’s

methodology The critique of behaviorism as an

indigenous psychology of America became a key

concern for critical psychology It should be

men-tioned that German critical psychology was

un-aware of the American critique that understood

the American nature of behaviorism perfectly

well: “The ‘behaviorist revolution,’ as it has so

often been called, marks the point at which the

‘new’ psychology achieved full American

citizen-ship” (Koch, 1985, p 25)

Holzkamp found a common methodological

denominator, characteristic of all of mainstream

psychology and rooted in American behaviorism:

The notion that psychology had become a

psy-chology of variables (Holzkamp, 1985) Even if

mainstream psychology was not behavioristic in

the 1980s or 1990s, from a methodological point

of view, researchers were still required to divide

mental processes into variables in research and in

doing so conceptualized human mental life as

conditioned by (external) stimuli For Holzkamp

(1989) this psychological naturalism, the notion

that the external world provides stimuli to which

humans are exposed, united S-R psychology with

cognitive psychology In doing so the

experimen-tal⫺statistical approach to human mental life

ex-cluded intersubjectivity (of human relations) as

well as subjectivity and agency, from its analyses

(Holzkamp, 1983) Human actions have reasons

and not causes (Holzkamp, 1991), and, thus,

mainstream psychologists were trapped in an S-R

methodology when they conceived of behavior

and experience as a function of stimulus

condi-tions This analysis allowed Holzkamp (1972) to

argue: “Not only American psychology, but

psy-chology in general, can in its important areas be

characterized as functionalist” (p 45).17

Behaviorism became the target in the East as

well In 1979 East German authors published their

work on the critique of behaviorism in a critical

psychology book series (Friedrich, Noack,

Bönisch, & Bisky, 1979) The West German crit-ical psychologist Wolfgang Maiers (1979) argued

in the introduction to the book that an engagement with behaviorism was necessary because of the

“stimulus response scholasticism,” which still haunted psychology (p 8) The East German au-thors saw pragmatism and behaviorism as an out-come of American capitalism and the critique of behaviorism became a critique of American life-style and politics The authors emphasized the hypocrisy they saw in the fact that the proclama-tion of human rights went hand in hand with institutionalized slavery American psychology and American society were also understood as interconnected when it came to the role of racism

in American culture

Klaus Jürgen Bruder (1982), a widely pub-lished professor of psychology at the University

of Hannover, wrote a history of behaviorism in

1982 He called Watson’s position “metaphys-ical behaviorism” (p 173) and argued that the

“propaganda of behaviorism” (p 165) “became

an intrinsic part of the American ideology of conditioning” (p 173) Arguing without using

the term he suggested an indigenous

under-standing of behaviorism, while he concluded that the American public needed Watson as “the hero of American mediocrity” (p 173).18 Bruder was aware of the rapid decline of the behaviorist brand in psychology, but he argued that behaviorism had influenced “our” thinking

and acting with the notion that control was part

of psychology’s mission Whereas Holzkamp emphasized the methodological and mechanis-tic heritage of behaviorism, Bruder, emerging from a different critical-psychological fraction

16 Such statements show the students’ lack of awareness about German history.

17 Winston (2001) has shown that this “functionalist” scheme goes back to the Austrian proto-positivist Ernst Mach.

18 Bruder is a German psychology professor who wrote a monograph about the history of American psychology that was published by a prestigious German publisher (Suhrkamp) This situation reflects again the changes that have taken place since the Americanization of German historiography: While German historians of psychology en-gage with English-speaking literature, there is no need for American historians to deal with German-speaking histories

of American psychology, despite the fact that an outsider view could provide new insights.

(see Teo, 1993), emphasized the social

conse-quences of behaviorism

Bruder arose from the radical student

movement Some students in this movement

believed that psychology should be

aban-doned completely This younger generation of

psychologists and psychology students

dis-tanced themselves from Holzkamp because he

not only critiqued psychology, but attempted

to develop an improved psychology Rexilius

(1987) used the metaphor of the Russian

Rev-olution to suggest that psychology would not

need a new tsar, referring to Holzkamp’s ambitions

for a new psychology Leaders evolving from the

student movement demanded detailed critiques of

the social functions of mainstream psychology

Grubitzsch and Rexilius (1978) were highly

influ-ential German critical psychologists who opposed

Holzkamp’s brand of critical psychology In its

place they developed and edited their own

jour-nal and published a successful book on testing

and measurement from a critical perspective

Again, the authors in the book connected the

theory and practice of testing with capitalism

and American society, and made a historical link

between the “testing movement in the U.S.A.”

and “social Darwinist streams in conjunction

with eugenic and racist considerations”

(Schmid, 1978, p 34)

But while these so-called lower case critical

psychologists challenged, on the background of

a student movement that critiqued mainstream

and American social science, West German

pol-itics, and Americanized psychology, Holzkamp

moved to the development of his own

psycho-logical system that included subjectivity, which

had been a core concern of German reflections

since Hegel Holzkamp’s system was based on a

combination of Marxist, hermeneutic, and

phe-nomenological traditions His psychology from

the standpoint of the subject (Holzkamp, 1983)

was integrated with the idea that the individual

can only be understood contextually The

inclu-sion of German and Marxist traditions, the

fo-cus on a historical⫺empirical methodology

rather than traditional empirical methods,

ex-plains to a certain degree his lack of success in

the United States The fact that the German

concepts that he developed were nearly

impos-sible to translate into English, did not make his

case easier.19

Critical Psychology as an Indigenous

Psychology

As emphasized above, when using the term

“indigenous” psychologies I do not find it use-ful to limit the term to non-Western human sciences Rather, I find it analytically helpful to take the perspective that all psychologies have culture⫺centric dimensions (Teo & Febbraro, 2003), and thus the term applies to American as well as to critical psychologies Holzkamp’s critical psychology is particularly apt for this type of analysis because he developed a new system of psychology rooted in historical Ger-man intellectual contents and tools

Indigenization, according to Allwood and Berry (2006), is motivated by the need to avoid influences and domination by American psy-chology and by the need to develop a psychol-ogy that is relevant to the existing cultural con-text The stages of indigenization that Adair (2006) proposes—importation, implantation, indigenization, autochonization—might apply better, from a historical point of view, to Amer-ican than to German psychology.20Psychology

as an original German discipline was

knowl-edge transfer of American psychologists In

the United States it was implanted in the academic system, indigenized, for example,

by the British-born Edward Titchener, and then rejected and abandoned for a “better psychology.” Thus, functionalism and

behav-iorism became the autochonized new

psychol-ogies of the United States

However, if one takes a historical perspec-tive, any indigenization process is more com-plex than schematic stages suggest For ex-ample, Sinha (1998) argued that the Indian indigenization of social psychology occurred

on the background of the crisis of mainstream social psychology This indigenization pro-cess drew on uniquely Indian sources and provided innovative ideas that were lacking in mainstream social psychology In addition, his-torians of psychology have shown that pro-cesses of indigenization in the United States

19For example, Handlungsfähigkeit (agency) was trans-lated as action potence by Tolman (1994).

20 Adair did not have the United States in mind when he discussed indigenous psychologies.