All You Need is Recalcitrance; A Stengerian Fable for Psychology

David Antolínez

doi:10.17161/aion.v1i1.22304

Authors

David Antolínez independent researcher

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17161/aion.v1i1.22304

Keywords:

epistemic resistance, objection, speculative fabulation, psychotherapy

Abstract

Recalcitrance is a form of resistance particularly relevant to human sciences. This essay explores how Isabelle Stengers outlined this topic from a critical reading of certain experiments in the history of psychology. Since living beings cannot remain indifferent to the proofs and interrogations they are submitted, scientists must remain attentive to avoid the frequent feature of pliability by which the studied subject adapts its behavior to satisfy the experimenter’s expectations. Further developments have proposed this concept as a demarcation criterion for good and bad experiments for psychology. The second half of the essay offers an auto-ethnographic account of my own clinician practice. From a series of empirical vignettes, a speculative fabulation is woven to explore whether Stenger’s thesis on recalcitrance could and/or should be implemented in psychotherapy.

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