关键词: 科学心理学, 理论心理学, 中国心理学, 本土心理学, 客观知识

Abstract: Scientific psychology, the dominant psychological paradigm, adopts a method-centered knowledge construction strategy that reveres accurate objective knowledge like the one provided by classic physics, one of the exemplary discipline of natural sciences that are irrelevant to any cultural values, personal feelings, and subjective consciousness. The self-segregation from subjective matters is one of the major costs of pursuing a scientific career for modern psychology that has incurred severe attacks. However, this giant vision of becoming a scientific branch succeeded only partially in the 20th century, since not all psychologists agree that psychology is a scientific discipline, and some psychologists even pose serious attack on shortcomings of scientific psychology and there do exists competing psychological theories that could be classified as scientific psychological theories. Psychology is an alien subject for modern China and the institutionalization of Chinese psychology occurred in a similar way as the one in western world, especially as the one in America, since most of the returned students, who later become the first generation of early Chinese psychologists, received their doctoral or mater degree in the psychological or educational departments in America. The internal tension between scientific psychology and humanistic psychology also exist in the developmental trajectory of modern Chinese psychology. Besides, as most psychologists in less developed academic areas, Chinese psychologists have long been facing the chasing anxiety that fears lagging behind the cutting-edge of modern psychology. Thus, they are not confident enough to speak their own voices and use their own languages to explain indigenous psychological phenomena; western theories are always their final resorts. This leads to an awkward situation that western theories that have little cultural backgrounds play the decisive role in academic studies, while people in everyday life continue to offer their own accounts that may fit their experiences better than the so-called scientific psychological theories. It is true that there is little, if not none, scientific methods for doing psychological studies among traditional Chinese psychological thoughts, but there are solid resources for humanistic psychology. It is not realistic for Chinese psychologists to develop a measureable scientific theory with traditional Chinese thoughts; however, this does not necessarily mean that Chinese could not develop psychological theories of their own. This does mean that Chinese psychologists should not see scientific psychology as the only possible theoretical pattern of psychology, but one of them. Humanistic Chinese psychology, which has deep roots in ancient Chinese philosophical thoughts, could become the breakthrough point that addresses the real psychological and behavioral problems of contemporary transitional China. The vitality and strength lie of a theory in its external validity as well as its cohesive power of social values and opinions, but not in the so called scientific procedure. This is the very power of traditional Chinese thoughts. Chinese psychologists could focus on the construction of comprehensive theoretical framework that encompasses the major issues covered in humanistic psychology and seek to provide an integrated outline that would lead to further fruitful theoretical perspectives.

Key words: scientific psychology, theoretical psychology, Chinese psychology, indigenous psychology, objective knowledge