Psychology’s Original Split: Explanation Versus Understanding
Psychology has never been unified in the way its institutional structures sometimes suggest. From its earliest moments as a discipline, it has been shaped by a fundamental tension over what psychological knowledge is supposed to do. That tension is most clearly expressed in the distinction between explanation and understanding. While often treated as a historical artifact or a methodological preference, this divide is better understood as an unresolved epistemological fault line that continues to organize psychological inquiry, often beneath the level of explicit debate.
The distinction between explanation (Erklären) and understanding (Verstehen) emerged from nineteenth-century debates in German philosophy and the human sciences, particularly in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey and his contemporaries. Explanation referred to causal accounts modeled on the natural sciences, seeking lawful regularities, prediction, and control. Understanding, by contrast, referred to interpretive engagement with meaning, intention, and subjective coherence. It was concerned not with causal sufficiency, but with intelligibility: whether an action, emotion, or belief could be rendered meaningful within a broader context of lived experience.
When psychology formalized itself as an independent discipline, it did so by aligning primarily with explanation. Experimental method, quantification, and laboratory control offered psychology a pathway to scientific legitimacy at a time when its status was far from secure. Yet this alignment came with conceptual costs. Psychological phenomena were increasingly abstracted from the contexts in which they originally mattered. Intention became response latency, emotion became arousal indices, memory became recall accuracy. These transformations were not merely technical; they reflected implicit decisions about what counted as psychologically real.
At the same time, alternative traditions resisted this abstraction. Introspective psychology, early phenomenological approaches, and later psychodynamic and hermeneutic frameworks treated meaning as constitutive rather than incidental. From this perspective, psychological phenomena could not be fully captured by causal explanation alone because they were structured by personal history, symbolic interpretation, and narrative coherence. A behavior or symptom was not simply caused; it made sense, even if that sense was opaque or conflicted.
Rather than resolving this disagreement, psychology absorbed it institutionally. Explanatory approaches came to define scientific credibility, particularly in research settings, while interpretive approaches were increasingly associated with clinical practice, qualitative inquiry, or marginal subfields. The discipline expanded, but its foundational tension was left largely intact. Psychology learned to operate as if explanation and understanding belonged to separate domains, even when studying the same phenomena.
Behaviorism offers one of the clearest historical expressions of the explanatory pole. Its rejection of introspection and subjective meaning was not only methodological but epistemological. By restricting psychology to observable behavior, behaviorism aimed to eliminate ambiguity and secure causal clarity. The success of this project, particularly in experimental control and learning paradigms, is difficult to deny. Yet the cost was equally clear. Large portions of psychological life were redefined out of existence, not because they were unimportant, but because they resisted the explanatory standards behaviorism imposed.
The cognitive revolution is often presented as a corrective to this narrowing, reintroducing mental processes into scientific psychology. But the shift was less radical than it is sometimes portrayed. Cognitive models largely preserved the explanatory ambitions of behaviorism while substituting internal information-processing constructs for external contingencies. Mental representations, schemas, and algorithms were treated as causal entities, even when their relationship to lived meaning remained underspecified. Understanding was not reclaimed in its interpretive sense; it was reformulated as internal computation.
Psychodynamic theory occupies a more ambiguous position in this landscape, and for that reason remains instructive. On the one hand, psychodynamic frameworks offer causal accounts grounded in developmental history, unconscious processes, and intrapsychic conflict. On the other hand, these accounts are inseparable from narrative reconstruction and symbolic interpretation. Case material is not merely evidence of causal mechanisms; it is the medium through which meaning is articulated. Attempts to evaluate psychodynamic theory solely through explanatory criteria often miss this dual commitment, while purely interpretive readings underestimate its causal ambitions.
The consequences of this unresolved split are not confined to theory. They shape how psychological knowledge is produced, evaluated, and taught. Quantitative research privileges internal validity, replicability, and statistical inference, often at the expense of contextual and phenomenological depth. Interpretive and qualitative research prioritizes coherence, depth, and situated meaning, often at the expense of generalizability. Each tradition critiques the other for failing to meet its epistemic standards, yet neither can dispense with the phenomena the other seeks to preserve.
Case studies make this tension especially visible. In experimental contexts, individual cases are treated as noise, deviations to be controlled or excluded. In clinical and interpretive traditions, cases are treated as epistemically rich, capable of revealing structural features of psychological life that are not reducible to aggregates. The same empirical material can thus be dismissed or elevated depending on the underlying epistemology. This is not a disagreement about method; it is a disagreement about what psychological knowledge is for.
Contemporary efforts to reconcile explanation and understanding often invoke complementarity, suggesting that different methods address different levels of analysis. While this framing is appealing, it risks smoothing over genuine incompatibilities. Explanation and understanding do not merely answer different questions; they presuppose different ontologies of mind. One treats psychological phenomena as mechanisms to be modeled; the other treats them as meanings to be interpreted. Treating this as a simple division of labor can obscure the depth of the conceptual conflict.
For students entering the discipline at an advanced level, this tension is not something to be resolved quickly or neatly. It is something to be recognized, tolerated, and worked within. Psychology’s strength has never been its theoretical unity. Its intellectual vitality comes from its persistent discomfort with its own foundations. The explanation-understanding split is not a failure to be corrected. It is a condition of the discipline itself, one that continues to shape what psychologists notice, measure, explain, and ultimately claim to know.