Humanities and psychology – why can’t they be academic partners? In favour of a systematic analysis of the humanities’ institutional habitus

Abstract

Notwithstanding abundant lip-service, the humanities are presently neither sufficiently equipped nor truly willing to engage in trans-philological interdisciplinarity. Institutional key notions as »aesthetic autonomy« and »inexplicability of art« or the taboo of analysing fictional characters psychologically forestall any serious multi-methodological collaboration with psychological and empirical research. If at all, psychological concepts are appropriated and turned around so that »the trauma« in a quasi-religious way is held to contain ontological »truth« and therefore »has to remain incurable and inaccessible to the memory«. The anti-enlightenment latencies of this institutional habitus entail certain risks of research ethics. Nonetheless philological referees’ evaluations deem »inner-psychic processes un-researchable« and claim that psychological analyses of literature »violate the artistic character of aesthetic works« and contravene the humanities’ »institutional interpretation monopoly«. Redundant humanities’ debates entertain exotistic flirtations with the methodologically incompatible natural sciences, more progressive philologists stick to isolated interests as »media-culture studies«, »post-colonialism«, »hyper-textuality« – so does the federal ministry for research and education when proclaiming the »Year of the Humanities« in 2007. Meanwhile psychological analysis of literature is almost extinct academically, and the promising research policies of the EU still have but quite feeble effects in the Germany of re-philologization. Therefore, the author proposes to engage in systematic qualitative-empirical (self-)research on how humanities’ institutional and epistemological procedures function.