Toward Ecologistic Psychology

By analyzing a series of new developments in psychology, this article probes into the transformation of psychology from the physics metaphor to an ecology paradigm. A series of new psychological fields that appeared in the end of the 20th century have embodied the ecological ideology. Some of the examples are the theory of inter-subjectivity, narrative psychology, transpersonal psychology, positive psychology, evolutionary psychology, social constructionist psychology and so forth. The new developments of traditional psychological fields such as personality psychology, social psychology, and cultural psychology have also been incorporating the ecological viewpoints. The author suggests that all these fields be included in the concept of ecologistic psychology. An ecologistic psychology applies systematic, holistic, and historic views to all fields of psychological inquiries and thus leads to a whole transformation of research paradigm. The construction and development of psychology as a discipline should be directed by ecologistic perfective and should synthesize and reconciliate the divergent approaches and methods such as scientific and humanistic methods, quantitative and qualitative approaches, and behavior observational and introspective methods. Therefore, ecologistic psychology implies an ecologistic view on the understanding of the intrapsychic world, the investigation of the correlations between the inner world and the outer environment, and the adoption the methods for psychological inquiries.