DOI
10.1037/qup0000003
Abstract
This article explores the significance of qualitative research in psychology through an historical review of certain aspects and outcomes of William James’s life and work. After showing how reflecting on his own personal experience allowed James to see and to name previously unrecognized or underappreciated aspects of psychological phenomena, it argues that his qualitative descriptions of various phenomena have had a notable, lasting, and positive influence on the discipline of psychology. Generalizing the point, it contends that qualitative research is essential to the advancement of psychology, and going further, it uses the example of James’s overlooked neurological speculations to argue that qualitative psychology is fundamental to neuroscience as well as other cognate fields. In making this argument, it criticizes current assumptions about the primacy of neuroscience as well as unrealistic hopes for neuroscience’s fulfillment and hence elimination of psychology’s role in understanding human experience. In sum, this article defends the thesis that qualitative research is not just one among many kinds of research—not just one of many psychological methods—but rather, as history has shown, it is an essential means of overcoming blindness and opening up important aspects of human experience to the attention they deserve, whether or not that attention then leads to the use of additional methods (possibly including experimental and quantitative methods) in the pursuit of fuller or supplemental forms of knowledge.
Document Type
Restricted Article: Campus only access
Publication Date
2014
Publisher Statement
© 2025 American Psychological Association
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Recommended Citation
Leary, D. E. (2014). Overcoming blindness: Some historical reflections on qualitative psychology. Qualitative Psychology, 1(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000003
Comments
One of the inaugural articles in this new journal of the American Psychological Association.