Is it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you be both a psychologist and a writer?
When you look at the world as a psychologist, you see it as a set of phenomena that can be subjected to scientific inquiry: identified, tested and either verified or discarded. When you look at the world as a writer, you see it as a set of phenomena to be captured, contemplated, transformed and set down for others to recognize and absorb.
Although it’s often presented as a dichotomy (the apparent subjectivity of the writer versus the seeming objectivity of the psychologist), it need not be. In fact, as I realized when I left the world of psychology behind to become that horror of all horrors (to an academic psychologist) — someone who wrote for a general audience — that neat separation is not just unwarranted; it’s destructive.
“A writer must be as objective as a chemist,” Anton Chekhov wrote in 1887. “He must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape.”
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