Psychology: a Discipline in Need of Reflective Foundations

Zagaria, Andó and Zennaro (2020) provide a useful analysis of the current state of affairs in the discipline of psychology. They conclude that psychology is in a messy and unproductive pre-pragmatic state and suggest that evolutionary psychology can provide a needed metatheoretical perspective to enable psychology to move forward as a science. In my commentary I move to another direction and suggest that psychology does not need more solid foundations, but rather foundations characterized by reflective stance towards its phenomena, theories, methods and data production processes. I suggest that this kind of stance would be in accordance with the process ontological perspective that allows focusing on meaningful human experience as central object of study for psychology, together with an idiographic approach to research. I thus suggest that psychology will endure only by turning its reflective gaze towards oneself, by thinking about its past, imagining its future and constructing novelty from the creative assemblage of the two.