What Is Descriptive Psychology?
Descriptive Psychology is a practical and intellectual discipline founded by Dr. Peter G. Ossorio, who laid its conceptual foundations in a series of books, papers and seminars beginning in the 1960’s. He taught, trained and mentored a core of practitioners of Descriptive Psychology, who along with Ossorio have extended the discipline into virtually every aspect of persons and their worlds, including organizations.
All that is history. What is Descriptive Psychology, really? Descriptive Psychology is a complex conceptual framework which articulates – makes clear and visible – the competence of persons living as persons, in a world of persons and their ways. Like competence with our native language, we develop this core competence naturally in the course of growing from infant to adult, and we are reliably fluent in its exercise. But because this competence is so pervasive we rarely notice it; like the air we breathe, it tends to be invisible to us. Try going without air for a while, and you notice how crucial air is for life. The same is true of our core competence – we only notice it when it falls short and leaves us struggling to cope.
But why bother to articulate this core competence, if we are all reliably competent in it? The short answer is: we need it to move from reliably competent to highly competent.
Ossorio took as his foundation this undeniable competence of persons, which importantly includes competence in using a set of interrelated concepts: behavior, person, language, and world. Ossorio set out to articulate these concepts and their interconnections in sufficient detail to enable making that invisible competence visible, thus describable and the proper subject of scientific inquiry and practical development. As a result, Descriptive Psychology allows us to see organizations, people and behavior in their full interconnected complexity, within a single conceptual framework and provides a uniquely powerful platform for developing extraordinary competence with organizations.
