Schools of Thought

Interestingly, each of these differing schools of thought is grounded in a set of assumptions about the nature of reality, the development of one’s personality, how and why people develop distress in their lives, and what role the counselor or clinician should play in helping to alleviate their discomfort. Yet, while each of these theoretical schools of thought in Eurocentric psychology di- verges on many of these variables, they do converge on a common belief that the individual personality is composed of intellectual (cognitive), affective (emotional), and response (behavioral) dimensions. Admittedly, they do differ on which dimension of one’s personality they believe is the most salient in managing the dynamics of one’s life and lifestyle choices, and which dimension should be targeted for therapeutic intervention.

Fortunately, the complex nature of the human psyche does not easily lend itself to tight or even concise explanations. Therefore, most presentations of personality development present these schools of thought as a broad lens through which to seek understanding of the human condition. Interestingly, our concern in this chapter is less about which school one considers adopting as his/her best explanation of the individual psyche, and more about a specific element of the psyche that to us, appears conspicuous by its absence. In psy- chology’s traditional realms of understanding, analysis of the individual person- ality has been constrained by an assumption that the most salient aspects of the personality are the id, ego, or super ego (e.g., theories of Freud, Jung, Adler), or composed of the cognitive (the way people think, e.g., theories of Ellis), affective (the way people feel, e.g., theories of Rogers), and behavioral domains (the way people respond to their reality, e.g., theories of Skinner, Bandura, or Watson). Thus, when teaching students about the structures of the psyche, or conceptualizing a client’s degree of debilitation who presents themselves for mental health treatment, the analysis is typically limited to these three domains, irrespective of which school of thought plays the most prominent role in a pro- fessor’s or clinician’s thinking. This practice does a tremendous disservice to people of African descent and other members of the human family, because it ignores what is arguably the most important element of a person’s beingness, their spirit. Imagine you are a client of African de- scent who in presenting yourself to a clinician for some counseling and therapy is greeted with clinical eyes that appear to look through you. They look to your left, to your right, and even over your head, seeing aspects of your self but never really connecting with the authentic you. That is illustrative of what hap- pens in many therapeutic encounters when the core of who you are is ignored or not otherwise acknowledged.