Descriptive psychology

For other uses, see Descriptive psychology (Brentano) and Descriptive psychology (Dilthey).

Descriptive psychology is primarily a conceptual framework for the science of psychology. Created in its original form by Peter G. Ossorio at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the mid-1960s,^[1][2] it has subsequently been applied to domains such as psychotherapy,^[3] artificial intelligence,^[4][5] organizational communities,^[6] spirituality,^[7] research methodology,^[8] and theory creation.^[9]

The nature of descriptive psychology

The original impulse for the creation of DP was dissatisfaction with mainstream approaches to the science of psychology,^[1] thinking that psychology had paid insufficient attention to the creation of a foundational conceptual framework such as other sciences possessed. Later authors noted that this lack of a conceptual scaffolding was responsible for the fragmentation of psychology; i.e. for its lack of any unifying, broadly accepted "standard model."^[10]