Kenneth J. Gergen (born 1935) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
psychologistA psychologist is someone who studies the human mind and behavior. Research psychologists study human perception, cognition, attention, emotion, motivation, personality, behavior and interpersonal relationships...
and
professorThe meaning of the word professor varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual...
at
Swarthmore CollegeSwarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
. He obtained his
B.A.Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences or both....
at
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
in 1957 and his
Ph.D.Ph.D. or PHD may stand for:* Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group* Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip* PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* Parisada Hindu Dharma, an Indonesian organization...
at
Duke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892...
in 1962.
The son of John J. Gergen, the Chair of the Mathematics Department at
Duke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892...
, Gergen grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He had three brothers, one of whom is
David GergenDavid Richmond Gergen is an American political consultant and presidential advisor during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He is currently Director of the Center for Public Leadership and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.- Family and education :Gergen was born in...
, the prominent political analyst. After completing public schooling, he attended
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
. Graduating in 1957, he subsequently became an officer in the U.S.
Kenneth J. Gergen (born 1935) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
psychologistA psychologist is someone who studies the human mind and behavior. Research psychologists study human perception, cognition, attention, emotion, motivation, personality, behavior and interpersonal relationships...
and
professorThe meaning of the word professor varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual...
at
Swarthmore CollegeSwarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
. He obtained his
B.A.Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences or both....
at
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
in 1957 and his
Ph.D.Ph.D. or PHD may stand for:* Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group* Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip* PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* Parisada Hindu Dharma, an Indonesian organization...
at
Duke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892...
in 1962.
Biography
The son of John J. Gergen, the Chair of the Mathematics Department at
Duke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892...
, Gergen grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He had three brothers, one of whom is
David GergenDavid Richmond Gergen is an American political consultant and presidential advisor during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He is currently Director of the Center for Public Leadership and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.- Family and education :Gergen was born in...
, the prominent political analyst. After completing public schooling, he attended
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
. Graduating in 1957, he subsequently became an officer in the U.S. 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. JonesEdward Ellsworth Jones , also known as "Ned" Jones, was an influential social psychologist who worked at Duke University for most of his career. He moved to Princeton University's Department of Psychology in 1977. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Harvard University.In the classic text...
. Gergen went on to become an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Relations at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
, 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. During his tenure at Harvard, Gergen served on review panels of the
National Science FoundationThe National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
and the
National Institute of Mental HealthThe National Institute of Mental Health is part of the federal government of the United States and the largest research organization in the world specializing in mental illness. It is one of the 27 component organizations of the National Institutes of Health , which is in turn part of the U.S....
; he also collaborated with Raymond Bauer at the
Harvard Business SchoolHarvard Business School is a graduate business school in Boston, Massachusetts. The school offers a full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, as well as many . The School owns Harvard Business School Publishing, which publishes business books, online management tools for corporate learning, case...
, and served as a consultant with …
In 1967 Gergen took a position as Chair of the Department of Psychology at
Swarthmore CollegeSwarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
, a position he held for ten years. At various intervals he served as visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Marburg, the
SorbonneThe name Sorbonne is commonly used to refer to the historic University of Paris in Paris, France or one of its successor institutions , but this is a recent usage, and "Sorbonne" has actually been used with different meanings over the centuries...
, the University of Rome,
Kyoto University, or is a major national university in Kyoto, Japan. It is the second oldest university in Japan, and formerly one of the Imperial Universities of Japan...
, 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 InstituteThe Taos Institute is a non-profit educational organization, concerned with the social processes essential for the construction of reason, knowledge, and human value...
in 1996. He is currently a Senior Research Professor at Swarthmore, the Chairman of the Board of the Taos Institute, and an adjunct professor at Tilburg University.
Gergen is married to Mary M. Gergen, Professor Emeritus at Penn State University, and a major contributor to feminist psychology and performance inquiry. She is the author of over 50 articles and is the co-author (with Ken Gergen) of "Social Construction." She often collaborates with her husband, and together they publish the Positive Aging Newsletter with a readership of at least 12,000. He has five children, Laura Houston, Stan Gergen, Antonia Gergen, Lisa Bell, and Michael Gebhart.
Major Contributions
After completing graduate school in experimental
social psychologySocial psychology is a type of social science that is concerned with individuals' thoughts, feelings and behavior as they affect or are affected by other individuals...
, Gergen had an impact on the field with his 1973 article, "Social Psychology as History". In the article, he argues that 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. The article proved contentious, receiving both criticism and support from various social psychologists.
Gergen's work is associated with
social constructionismSocial constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena develop in social contexts...
. He has been particularly 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 view "I think, therefore I am". Other major interests in his diverse works include analyzing the effects of technology on social life, examining connections between social construction and theology, and promoting a more optimistic model of aging.
From the earliest point in his academic career, Gergen’s work was characterized by its catalytic potential. As an experimental social psychologist, his earliest studies challenged the presumption of a unified or coherent 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. However, it was his 1973 paper, “Social psychology as history,” that precipitated a major shift in his career. Here he argued that most of the behavior patterns studied by social psychologists were historically perishable. Further, because of the implicit values embedded in psychological theory and description, the dissemination of knowledge had the potential to alter patterns of social activity. To study obedience to authority, for example, might reduce the likelihood of obedience. In effect, social psychology was not fundamentally a cumulative science, but was effectively engaged in the recording and transformation of cultural life. These arguments created broad controversy and the article subsequently won an award for the volume of its citations. 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, theory should not be judged by their accuracy so much 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 empiricist conception of knowledge. From Gergen’s perspective, all human intelligibility (including claims to knowledge) 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 one form or another, this work is concerned with transforming social life. For the most part, the preferred direction of change is toward more collaborative and participatory relationships. Writings in the areas of therapy and counseling, education, organizational change, technology, conflict reduction, civil society, and qualitative inquiry all bear this mark. Dialogues with practitioners have also been facilitated by Gergen’s popular volume for public consumption,
The Saturated Self, and his work with the Taos Institute. Most of these developments are summarized in
Relational Being, Beyond the Individual and Community. However, this volume opens up new territories both theoretically and practically. It attempts to rewrite psychology, in demonstrating 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. A way is also opened for bringing science together with concerns for the sacred.
Notable Concepts
Enlightenment effects. The moral and political effects on cultural behavior of disseminating scientific knowledge. (“Social psychology as history”)
Generative theory: Theory that unsettles common assumptions, and opens up possibilities or new forms of action. (“Toward generative theory”)
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. (
Realities and Relationships)
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. (
Realities and Relationships)
Multiphrenia: The condition, largely attributed to technologies that increase social contact, of being simultaneously drawn in multiple and conflicting directions. (
The Saturated Self)
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. (
The Saturated Self)
Positive aging: As an alternative to the pervasive view of aging as decline (deficit discourse), it is possible to discover and construct myriad ways of crating later life as a period of unparalleled growth and enrichment. (
Positive Aging Newsletter)
First and second order morality: All collaborative relationships will being 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. (
Relational Being)
Transformative dialogue: Forms of dialogic practice that dissolve the barriers of meaning separating otherwise conflicted parties. (
Relational Being)
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. (
Relational Being)
Multi-being. What is commonly viewed as the individual subject is the common intersection of multiple relationships. (
Relational Being)
Critique of Gergen's work
Because of the challenges to tradition posed by much of Gergen’s work, his career has been marked by controversy. The most telling criticism of his early thesis for social psychology as history was that underlying the ephemeral changes in behavior across time, there remained underlying principles of behavior. Gergen’s reply was to question the relationship between the observable changes and the putative laws. Others responded to the early critique by using meta-analytic methods that could reveal generalities across multiple studies.
Gergen’s constructionist writings have also provoked criticism from many quarters. Many scientists found his proposals extreme, bordering on the nihilistic. Gergen’s response was to credit science for its pragmatic or practical contributions to society, while simultaneously arguing that claims to Truth were inimical to human well-being. Others faulted constructionism for its failure to take moral or political stands. Again, Gergen’s response was to credit moral and political activism, but simultaneously to argue against claims to foundations.
Psychologists have been particularly provoked by Gergen’s views, as they seem to undermine the assumption of mental life. In this sense he seems to replicate Skinner’s mistaken advocacy of black-box psychology. Gergen’s response has been to credit psychological discourse for its significant role in social life, but to argue that embracing it as a representation of the real is to sustain a divisive individualism. This response is also related to Gergen’s later attempt to generate a relational conception of mental life.
Selected Awards
Gergen has received research grants from the
National Science FoundationThe National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
, the
Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftThe Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is an important German research funding organization and the largest in Europe. The DFG supports research in science and the humanities through a large variety of grant programmes, prizes and by funding infrastructure...
, and the Barra Foundation. His work has merited awards from the
American Psychological AssociationThe American Psychological Association is a professional organization representing psychologists in the U.S., with around 150,000 members and an annual budget of around $70m...
, the
National Communication Association- Scholarly society :NCA is a scholarly society and as such works to enhance the research, teaching, and service produced by its members. Staff at the NCA National Office follow trends in national research, teaching, and service priorities...
, the Constructivist Psychology Network, the
University of Buenos AiresThe University of Buenos Aires is the largest university in Argentina and the largest university by enrollment in Latin America, surpassing both the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Universidade Estácio de Sá of Brazil...
, and Ibanez University in Santiago. He has received fellowships from the
Guggenheim foundationGuggenheim Foundation can refer to:*The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation funds the Guggenheim Museums.*The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards grants to scientists, scholars and artists....
, the Fulbright foundation, and the Alexander Humboldt foundation. He also holds honorary degrees from Tilburg University, Saybrook Graduate School, and the University of Athens.
Other References
- Gergen, K. (1993). Refiguring Self and Psychology: Kenneth J. Gergen, Hampshire: Dartmouth Publishing.
- Stroebe, W. and Kruglanski, A.W. (1989). Social psychology at epistemological cross-roads: On Gergen’s choice. European Journal of Social Psychology, 19, 485-489.
- Wallach, L. and Wallach, M.A. (1994). Gergen versus the mainstream: Are hypotheses in social psychology subject to empirical test? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 233-242.
Students and Followers of His Work
Gergen's alternative teaching techniques which empowered his students through dialogue led him to have numerous dedicated who students who apply social constructionist thoughts and ideas in a variety of areas. Among these are: Lawrence Tingley (American Philanthropist), Kuo Yu (PhD in Organizational Behavior from UC Berkeley), and
Gabriel FairmanGabriel Fairman is a Brazilian philosopher and entrepreneur who is currently the CEO of Bureau Translations, a translation and localization company....
(Brazilian Philosopher and Entrepreneur).
External links