Psych Out

Frank Richardson didn't enter the field of psychology bent on being a radical. As a young professor in the 1970s, he practiced and taught behavior therapy, a mainstream form of psychotherapy that relies on visualization and desensitization to help patients work through phobias.

“If a patient had a flying phobia, we’d start by having them relax,” says Richardson, now a professor emeritus of counseling psychology. “Then we’d have them picture themselves packing at home for a trip. If they got nervous we’d go back to having them relax, and then try again, and so forth until they got comfortable. Then they’d think about driving to the airport. And so on.”

Six or seven years into the game, Richardson began doubting himself. At best, he felt he like he was helping a few individuals here and there. When one considered the scale of suffering and alienation in American society, though, the slices of good he was doing felt thin.

Even more troubling were the values he saw embedded in the root and branch of the discipline. They struck him as versions of the core pathologies of modernity. There was an extreme valorization of autonomy, individualism, authenticity, objectivity, and empiricism.

Psychologists, he concluded, were diagnosing and treating the symptoms of our suffering, but they were blind to the causes of it. And in their blindness they seemed part of the problem for which they claimed to be the cure. Psychologists encouraged people to set themselves free from the tyrannies of parents, tradition, religion, and convention. But in setting people free, Richardson began to believe, they cut them loose from the deep structures that for thousands of years had given shape to human life.

In the place of traditional structures they offered a vision of human existence drawn from the natural sciences. It posited humans as input- output machines that could be decoded with sufficient analysis and experimentation.

Richardson was a Presbyterian minister for two years before leaving to seek truth in the science of the human psyche. And gradually, he realized that he could no longer practice psychology when it had come to seem so soulless.

So he stepped back. He kept teaching, but largely stopped publishing papers, and committed himself to learning philosophy and social theory.

“One day someone about my own age showed up in the back of my Heidegger seminar and asked if he could sit in,” recalls Charles Guignon, then a UT philosophy professor. “It was Frank. He came in with a lot of ideas about how things in Heidegger could be connected to psychology. Eventually, I started coming to his seminars, and we became friends, then collaborators.”

After about a decade in the wilderness, Richardson felt ready to adopt a new role in the field. He shuttered his private practice, stopped supervising individual graduate students in their counseling, and went all in as a philosophical psychologist. He’s been inhabiting that role for nearly 25 years now, articulating his vision in academic journals, at conferences, in his landmark book in philosophical psychology (Re-envisioning Psychology), and, most of all, in conversation. He talks to colleagues, students, philosophers, historians, sociologists, psychologists, and whomever else will listen.

“He’s incredibly persuasive in his friendly, Socratic manner,” says John Christopher, a professor at Montana State and a former graduate student of Richardson.

What Richardson says in these conversations is that as researchers, psychologists should move away from their idolatry of numbers and the natural sciences—their “physics envy”—and engage with philosophy, religion, history, and culture. As therapists they should own up to their values and commitments and put them into dialogue with those of their patients. And as human beings they should be wrestling, always, with meaning, ethics, the good life, and the kind of society we should create for ourselves.

What truths might be discovered in such conversations, Richardson doesn’t predict. For him, the conversation is the thing.

“Intellectual life is, or should be, an invitation to dialogue,” says Richardson, “and out of that dialogue, if it’s sincerely pursued, there always crystallize deep ethical, political, or spiritual convictions which we take into the dark with us. That’s what it means to be human, to have inescapable convictions without any kind of finality or certainty.”

The influence of Richardson's conversation has been narrow but deep. Through his leadership of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association, he has helped establish a beachhead of philosophical seriousness within psychology.

By the discipline in general he’s been honored, published in the most prestigious journals, treated with respect even by those colleagues who do the kind of work he finds most corrosive ... and largely ignored. For Richardson, that indifference is frustrating, but no reason to stop talking.

“I hope to participate in conversations that will make a difference in ways that I will never see,” he says. “I participate in them because they seem meaningful, the right thing to do. It’s a search for understanding, and whether or not it will ever lead anywhere, whether a tipping point will come and things will shift, I don’t know. You do your best.”

Frank Richardson. Photo by Matt Valentine.