|
The Capacity To Be Changed
We often describe education in terms of change. Students come to us to learn, develop and discover new possibilities. Patients enter psychotherapy hoping something might change. Researchers conduct studies hoping to change what we know. But there is another side of change that receives less attention: our own willingness to be changed by what and whom we encounter.
Expertise can tempt us to imagine influence as moving in one direction: teacher to student, therapist to patient, mentor to mentee, scholar to field. Yet the most meaningful encounters are rarely so simple. Good teachers are changed by their students. Good therapists are affected by their patients. Good researchers revise cherished assumptions when the evidence demands it. And good leaders must remain open to being influenced even while accepting the responsibility to lead. To paraphrase the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, PhD, the most meaningful encounters are open conversations that leave us as not quite what we were.
Perhaps this is one measure of “genuine responsiveness”—not simply adapting our behavior to another person or circumstance but allowing the encounter itself to alter our understanding. This does not mean abandoning conviction or tradition. At a time when so much of our public life seems to reward certainty and the hardening of positions, remaining genuinely open to influence can itself require considerable confidence. It requires enough confidence in what we know to remain curious about what we do not and enough openness to recognize when something new deserves a place alongside, or even changes, what came before.
A university, and perhaps especially a school of psychology, should cultivate this same capacity. At Derner, we inherit traditions worth preserving while continuing to encounter new knowledge, disciplines, technologies, perspectives and ways of serving our communities. Growth need not require abandoning identity. At its best, identity itself develops, differentiates and adapts through encounter.
As we begin another academic year, I hope we remain committed not only to changing the world around us, but also to retaining the capacity to be changed.
|
