{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02478952291861553, 'fraction_numerical': 0.025257249766136577, 'mean_word_length': 5.833865814696486, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Psychology and contextualizing personhood

Jack Martin’s memoir of his career as an academic psychologist narrates a changing relationship with psychological science over almost five decades. His academic journey began in the then-promising thinking and methods of behavioral psychology, and culminates in his current interests in psychobiography and studying persons’ lives in context. This is an autobiography of personal and scientific transformation through Martin’s changing engagements with psychology’s ideas and research methodologies. As the opening quotation of this review states, this is an academic’s story of becoming disengaged then reengaged in psychological scholarship. Following a decade when the natural sciences delivered spectacular accomplishments like moon landings, the still-promising social sciences seemed to lag behind in changing the world (Shapin, 2008). Psychological science in the early 1970s almost exclusively used generalizing concepts and methods to arrive at normative understandings that could inform educational, therapeutic, and human relations practice. Initially enchanted by psychology’s potentials, Martin undertook a Skinnerian analysis of undergraduate students’ interactive behaviours in educational and group therapy contexts. In a view he holds to this day, “if something important is going on, it should be made as clear and obvious as possible” (p. 20). What became increasingly evident in examining human interactions was that, while he could identify statistically significant group differences, understanding individuals as personal or moral agents was not possible using the conventional psychological concepts and research methods of the day. I have known and worked with Jack Martin over the last 20 years, having previously reviewed an earlier book of his (Strong, 2000), and having recently contributed a volume to a book series he was editing (Strong, 2017). I also recently retired from academic life, and Martin’s professional academic contexts, as well as his conceptual and 995580 TAP0010.1177/0959354321995580Theory & PsychologyBook Review review-article2021