Against Reductionism

‘I am against reductionism of any kind, because, satisfying as any ‘nothing-but’ explanation may be, it does violence to the complexity of inner life.’

Ellen Siegelman 

In the preface to her book Metaphor & Meaning, published in 1990, she talks of her background in literature, as well as her extensive experience in clinical psychology and child development. She draws similarities between her patients and poets, who she believes share ‘an underlying imaginative process’. I’m just in the Preface, in an attempt to begin reading for an essay, and already struck by Siegelman’s beautiful and complex use of language!