Persons: Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency

by Jack Martin, Jeff H. Sugarman, Sarah Hickinbottom

At its core, psychology is about persons: their thinking, their problems, the improvement of their lives. The understanding of persons is crucial to the discipline. But according to this provocative new book, between current essentialist theories that rely on biological models, and constructionist approaches based on sociocultural experience, the concept of the person has all but vanished from psychology.

Persons: Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency recasts theories of mind, behavior, and self, synthesizing a range of psychologists and philosophers to restore the centrality of personhood especially the ability to make choices and decisions to the discipline. The authors unique perspective de-emphasizes method and formula in favor of moral agency and life experience, reveals frequently overlooked contributions of psychology to the study of individuals and groups, and traces traditions of selfhood and personhood theory, including: The pre-psychological history of personhood, a developmental theory of situated, agentive personhood, the political disposition of self as a kind of understanding, Human agency as a condition of personhood, Emergentist theories in psychology, the development of the perspectival self.

Persons represents an intriguing new path in the study of the human condition in our globalizing world. Researchers in developmental, social, and clinical psychology as well as social science philosophers will find in these pages profound implications not only for psychology but also for education, politics, and ethics. "

209 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2009

About the author

Jack Martin began as an educational and counselling psychologist, and he spent many years as a researcher of counselling and psychotherapy. By mid-career, he became devoted to the history and theory of psychology and psychiatry. At the end of 2018, he retired from his position as Burnaby Mountain Chair of Psychology at Simon Fraser University. He is a Fellow of the Canadian and American Psychological Associations, former President of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (STPP), lead editor of the Wiley Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, and recipient of the STPP’s Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Much of his later career work has focused on the psychology of personhood and the psycho-biographical study of individual lives.

After publishing scholarly books throughout his career, in his retirement he has turned to writing nonfiction for a general audience. His first book of this kind was Hometown Asylum: A History and Memoir of Institutional Care, in which he tells the story of the large psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of his hometown of Ponoka, Alberta where his father was employed, his grandmother was a patient, and he worked as an institutional attendant while completing his degrees in psychology at the University of Alberta. Peter & Pierre is a dual biography of Peter Lougheed and Pierre Elliott Trudeau that draws on long-standing interests in psychobiography and political history.