Psicologo | Counselor

There is a distinction between the nomothetic and idiographic approach in psychology, leading to different understandings and studies of behavior and emotions. This distinction was introduced by W. Windelband to characterize the method of the natural sciences, which follow general laws, in contrast to the method of the sciences of the spirit, which grasp events in their specificity and uniqueness. 

In the psychological field, in accordance with this distinction, one speaks of a nomothetic approach or an idiographic approach depending on whether the description of behavior, personality, or pathology occurs based on general parameters and psychological laws recognized as generally valid (nomothetic) or follows the particular case, trying to grasp its structure starting from its own world (idiographic). 

According to the nomothetic approach, by considering various cases from a sample, one seeks to identify common elements in order to deduce those general rules that can explain the constants of repetitiveness and reproducibility, typical conditions for the validity of the experimental method (source). The main “nomothetic” instruments adopted are the DSM-V (American Psychiatric Association, 2015) and the ICF (World Health Organization, 2001).

Comprehensive psychology (J. Jaspers, 1959) introduced the idiographic approach as an “alternative” method of reading psychic phenomena, differing from the nomothetic method, which is consolidated in medical research and sometimes even philosophical (I. Kant). For comprehensive psychology, understanding approaches the subject not to translate it into a pre-established framework, but to grasp the structures of meaning that emerge from its perspective, rather than from that of the observer.

A. Adler, a contemporary of Freud and founder of Individual Psychology, also expressed the conviction that psychological processes and their manifestations could only be understood from the individual context and that every psychological insight begins with the individual. The individual is the best explanation of themselves.

The distinction between nomothetic and idiographic relates to the issues connected to understanding, which is always idiographic, in contrast to explanation, which is always nomothetic (U. Galimberti, Dizionario di Psicologia, UTET, 1994). The study of behavior follows the nomothetic method as a normality is established along with a measurable deviation that defines what distinguishes itself from the norm, and to what extent. The study of feeling follows the idiographic method since it seeks something unique, drawing on subjective states that cannot be measured. 

Comprehensive psychology has emancipated psychology from the natural sciences, replacing the tool of reading that is the universal law with that other tool, more properly psychological, which is the meaning expressed by the individual case.