‘If I were only remembered as the person who made psychology more proactive…’

In 1997, I set out to interview the distinguished psychologist Jerome Bruner (1915-2016); my theme, psychology and anthropology (my own area). I was interested in what links and separates the disciplines, but what emerged over the course of four days was something far broader and more interesting: a wide-ranging conversation that explored the study of human behaviour and meaning while capturing the unique energy, complexity, and charm of Bruner's manner of thinking through dialogue. 

This conversation appears for the first time in At the Crossroads of Psychology and Anthropology, offering readers unprecedented insight into Bruner's thought and influences – and a unique chance to share the pleasure of his company.

Edited into chapters with brief introductions, the book begins with the influences shaping Bruner's career, teaching at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University, and writing Acts of Meaning, The Culture of Education, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds and other seminal books on psychology and education. We cover Bruner's role in the founding of cognitive psychology, his debates with fellow psychologists, his collaborations with his notable students, and his emerging interest in cultural psychology. The talk touches on contrasting methodologies, approaches to language, sense perception, violence, law, the role of categories in thinking, cultural relativism, the search for universals, and the complex interactions of culture and mind. 

In addition to portraying two approaches to the human sciences, At the Crossroads of Psychology and Anthropology is an intimate portrait of Bruner, a major shaper of modern psychology – and a demonstration of the dialectical and dialogical nature of his thought in all its fluidity and depth. 

The shape of a career

BS: I remember asking one of my mentors, Marshall Sahlins, how he conceived of his career. The popular wisdom within anthropology was that Sahlins had virtually dominated what was thought of as materialist approaches to the study of culture when he was at University of Michigan and then went to France and discovered structuralism and did a complete turnaround, reinventing himself as a structuralist. When I characterized his career in this way to him, he looked at me in shock and said vehemently that he doesn't conceive of his career as being disjointed or turning around in any way whatsoever. For him, it was all of a piece, all continuous despite how it might look to others. Is that how you think about your own career?

JB: I've been kidded a lot about this. I may go into what looks from the outside like a different kind of inquiry. I mean I may go from studying undergraduates in a laboratory with a tachistoscope to taking a look at kids and so on. But it's pretty much the same quarry. I remember when I was at a Society for Research in Child Development meeting and a graduate Student came up to me and said, "Oh, we're so sorry that you've left the field of infancy and are now working with older children." And I said to her, "I'm stunned! You study infancy and then you want to find out what happens a little bit later in order to go back and take another look at infancy. I've never felt as if I've jumped into another field. It just doesn't sound right.

BS: So you don't feel as if you leave behind the earlier things you've studied?

JB: No way. Never.

BS: How do you account for your virtually continuous and prolific output over all these years? You appear to take it for granted, but it's clearly a major achievement . . . . I don't think it's ordinary for people to be continuously productive in this way over such a long period of time.

JB: How would I account for that? It's like asking how I breathe, or why I wear a ten-and-a-half shoe. But I suppose there are some curious things that come to mind as I turn your question over in my head. One of them has to do with the fact that there isn't all that much difference between my work and my play. It's all a form of playing. My blurring of work and play is my daughter's great joke. . . . But anyway, play and work are not so different.

My gang, when we used to go racing in the Bermuda Race. . . . We had an absolutely first-class group of intellectuals as crew. We decided that one of the things we would do when we all got rich was to give a special prize for the Bermuda Race for the boat that had the best conversation on board on the way from Newport to Bermuda. And we had wonderful conversation. . . . So that I haven't given up play. Nor did I ever have those kinds of formalized sorts of play that separate play from life. Those kinds of formalized play that are separated from life always risk sharpening the distinction between work and play, whereas it isn't really a distinction. I even gag a little bit at the business of talking about the relationship between work and play because it isn't really a distinction. It is all sort of play-work or work-play.

____________________________

BS: You seem to have a deep attraction to what you like to think of as the "subjunctive mode" of mind, which makes it easier to let go of your ideas and get them into print. I suppose that makes writing a lot easier. I know people who have this book that they're unable to publish because it's not perfect. . . . But when you view the mind as open, as you do, then you're really not afraid to let go of what you're doing because it's really all part of the process of learning and meaning-making, even your mistakes.

JB: I know, it's part of the process, and somebody's going to respond to what you write and tell you you're a damn fool. And you're going to tell him why he's a damn fool. There was a great exchange between George Miller and Phil Johnson-Laird when they were finishing their book on perception and language. They had gone through revision after revision after revision, and finally George said to Phil, "Well, enough. We've got to decide now whether we're going for perfection or Thursday." So they decided it was Thursday, to the great relief of Harvard Press. 

Violence and the dark side of life

BS I was struck when reading your work by an unflagging sense of optimism about the human condition. Your work brims with a sense of hope, an open-mindedness, a view of life as perpetually unfinished business, a stress on human creativity and open minds. This may account for your attraction to studying children, the beginnings of life.

JB: I would have done the same thing, by the way, if I had been an anthropologist. I'd probably have studied bush education.

BS: And it is this same upbeat orientation that has led you away from the study of things like violence that would shed a perhaps darker view of life. 

JB: What do you make of the fact that I end up in my mid-seventies becoming an adjunct professor of law at the New York University Law School ? . . . Well, there you find it in the raw. You find the system trying to deal with the business of keeping the explosive thing under control. Let me tell you Carol's version of my optimism. She said to me, "You have some wonderful contradictions. You're kind of a bomb thrower in a Brooks Brothers' suit. In addition to that, you're a surface-structure optimist and a deep-structure pessimist.  And I think there's something to that. I'll admit she's not altogether wrong.

BS: Tell me about this deep-structure pessimism of yours. . . .

JB: Well, I don't think you'll find it in the work but . . . [in] the can-do aspect of the thing. It can be read in terms of my counterphobic tendencies. My analyst thought I was a counterphobe too. . . . [T]he human sciences are not without a kind of political responsibility. I can write a real gloomy thing about the decline of the West or the decline of American culture and it's a great conversation within our family because Carol feels much more disturbed than I do by the changes in American culture. . . . My feeling is that maybe our last best hope is to try to indicate that a solution is possible. That you, for example, can turn the New Haven schools around.

BS: A constructivist to the end.

JB: Yes, I'm a constructivist to the end.

BS: So your response to what may in fact be rather disturbing declines in life is to model the other possibilities.

JB: That's right. Because those models bring it into being.

Dialogue and dialectic

BS: I think . . . you have an innate antipathy to structuralist views of the mind.

JB: Yes, to thoroughgoing structuralism.

BS: But what bothers you may be what bothered a lot of anthropologists about structuralism in the last few decades, which is the assumption that once you've gotten to the deep structures . . .

JB: . . . there's nothing else to do.

BS: By calling the rest of it surface-structure (or mere performance) you move inevitably away from life. I thought about that when I was reading you work. I like certain things about structuralism, but its antipathy to the particularities of life and contingency has always left me cold.

JB: And it's also behind my battle with Piaget.

BS: Of course. It's the same battle. It has to do with what I . . . learned in Samoa. Which is "the profundity of the superficial." 

JB: Yes, I love that expression.

BS: I was struck when I went to Samoa by the emphasis that Samoans gave to what we would call politeness, to endless rhetorical massaging of relationships. I'd be walking with my towel over my shoulder to a bathing pool with soap in my hand. And every house I passed, people would ask in elaborately formal Samoan, "And where, sir, are you going?" And I would go out of my mind. . . . "It's obvious where I'm going. Cut to the chase." What I came to realize later was that what they were really saying was both superficial and profoundly deep at the same time. They were throwing me a thread of connectedness, saying, in their formal kind of shorthand, "You belong here. You're a member of this community. We don't have anything to talk about at this point. But what we do have is a way to remind you that you're now part of the community. . . ." And I only knew that years later, when I left Samoa and found myself walking down the street in my hometown. Nobody said anything to me, and I felt some profound sense of isolation. 

JB: "Don't they care?"

BS: Yes, "Don't they care?" And I discovered that there was kind of profundity to things that I had thought were superficial. . . .

JB: Which is really an argument that what counts is only universals. The nonsense that if you only understand universals, and don't understand their realization rules and all the contextual stuff, you understand nothing. But it's not one or the other. I would point out that even in your particular Samoan story we can find universals too. Like, there is some way in any society in which one recognizes belonging. It's both something universal and also local and particular.

Language

JB: As you well know, the easy answer to the question of how cultural objects come to be shared is to say that we adopt a language with a set of lexical categories and with particular discourse modes, and so forth. But a moment's reflection forces you to ask, "How come we developed those particular discourse modes or that particular lexicon?" I'm inclined to think that There is a big impact that comes from certain kinds of needs, and that cognition is essentially an expression of various kinds of instrumental needs, needs that grew out of prior transactions between people. I believe that the nature of ongoing cognition has as much of an impact on linguistic distinctions as linguistic distinctions have back on cognition. Maybe even more. Linguistic distinctions are not made by people who are somehow free of culture. For example, it's so interesting to me the extent to which secular Jewish culture has a wonderful set of distinctions about the different ways of being a fool.

BS: Yiddish culture, you mean?

JB: Yes, Yiddish culture. Yiddish culture is full of different forms of being a fool. And you get in Wasp culture somebody who's foolish or stupid or something of the sort, but it's somehow different. I mean, just consider the distinctions between being a schlemiel, being a nar, and being a shlep. I know perfectly well that it is difficult to give those terms a precise definition, but on the other hand, their existence is a way of testifying to our sensitivities to this kind of direct experience that you were talking about. We know that it isn't actually direct experience, but rather the immediacy of phenomenology. . . .But what I want to talk about is the externalization of experience in the form of language.

BS: So what you're saying is that these cultural productions may initially look like they're little cultural atoms, little bits and pieces of things that are externalized by members of a community. But one of the roles of talk is to act as a kind of weaving process. So, in the flow of conversation, we mutually construct coherent worlds out of these objects.

JB: Absolutely. It's a kind of world-making.

BS: World-making and word-making at the same time.

JB: That image of weaving is very interesting to me too. You know my former student and dear friend Patty Greenfield has worked on weaving patterns both literally and metaphorically in your sense. The people she studied are weaving. And they're making a worldview, weaving it into patterns. And the way in which they're changing their view is to change the weaving patterns, in both senses.

BS: Now this is really quite different from [Benjamin] Whorf's view. But it borrows from Whorf . . .

JB: . . . but it also turns Whorf upside down.

BS: Yours is a Whorfian view, in that it acknowledges the centrality of language as an especially important source of meaning-making. But rather than looking at the structure of language as in, say, its grammatical patterns as templates for forms of thought, you're conceiving of language as a loom rather than as a set of fixed forms. It's a more processual and active process of meaning construction.

JB: That is right. And once you do something on that loom, you get trapped in the fact that the rug –assuming you're weaving a rug – you're trapped by the fact that the patterns that you look at have become ordinary, quotidian. 

Legacy

BS: How would you like to be remembered in psychology?

JB: I would want to be remembered as a person who moved psychology to a much more proactive stance with respect to the nature of the human organism. Away from a purely reactive passive stance. That really is absolutely everything. If I were only remembered as the person who made psychology more proactive. And yet it's an interesting kind of thing. I wish there were more attention to my description of strategies in thinking, with my formal descriptions in A Study of Thinking. I think I did have an effect – my hypothesis theory of perception, that you can't see without looking, and you can't hear without listening.

BS: That's where you started out.

JB: That's where I started. Similarly, I have argued that you don't have an opinion about things unless you have a hypothesis. Then you can gather information, but you need that proactive attitude. That was number one. 

BS: So it's really transforming the objects of psychological study into agents. 

JB: It introduces the notion of agency. And I'm delighted to see agency coming back into social science. That certainly is number one. And if you look through all of my work, I think, you'll see that coming up again. Don't make the organism a passive recipient of anything – not even his culture. He's got to enter into interaction to learn a culture. You can't learn a culture as a spectator.

• At the Crossroads of Psychology and Anthropology: In Conversation with Jerome Bruner, edited by Bradd Shore and published by MIT Press, is out now.