Future of Descriptive Psychology

(?) What do you see as the future of Descriptive Psychology?

(?) Descriptive Psychology does not seem to be catching on, in spite of the impacts it could have in many areas. What are your thoughts on this, and any possible solutions?

(?) What are effective ways for Descriptive Psychology applications to problems to continue for the next twenty years?

(?) What are some promising ways to save Descriptive Psychology, to make sure it doesn't disappear along with us?

(?) An endangered species…

Ossorio: We may not have to worry about that. Remember "The evil that men do lives after them." [laughter]

As you can see there is a core area of questions about the future. Roughly speaking, I would start by saying that the key is to spread the competence. That's what is important to survive, the competence to work with the system. And in particular it doesn't do us any good to get a thousand new members who know nothing about Descriptive. That's not the way I would recommend going. The issue is "How can you spread the competence?"

Secondly, part of how you make sure the thing survives, is to find significant problems and solve them. And I'm happy to see that I think I detect a trend in that direction. I agree that nobody out there is interested in another system per se. We've got systems coming out of our ears. So what is going to differentiate DP is that people can use it to solve problems that they can't solve, or solve as easily or efficiently in other ways. The work that Pat mentioned this afternoon is a good example. Those guys are in trouble and they know it. He's got a potential solution, and he's not going to be shy about letting them know that if it works, it came from DP.

So those are the two ingredients that I see as key. One is spreading the competence and the other is going after significant problems and solving them. You are not going to be able to go after significant problems if you don't have a body of competence.

Beyond that, a lot of situational stuff. There's windows of opportunities for this and that, and there's trends this way and trends that way, and difficulties of various sorts. I just don’t have too much to say about those.

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© 1998 Peter G. Ossorio