Should We Be Writing Essays Instead of Articles? A Psychotherapist’s Reflection on Montaigne’s Marvelous Invention
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary psychology may be overlooking an important mode of inquiry by insisting that our primary mode of communication should take the form of scientific articles rather than that of literary essays. The essay was first practiced and then refined by Michel de Montaigne in the late Renaissance and constitutes a unique literary form that incorporates both Renaissance humanism and the then-emerging spirit of scientific discovery. The aim of the present essay is to explore the uses psychotherapists might make of Montaigne’s Essays, both as a fruitful model for writing about and for reflecting on the human condition. The essay was born at a time of great intellectual and spiritual upheaval and renewal. It is freewheeling, unorthodox, forever inventive, and at the same time learned, disciplined, and profoundly respectful of the past. The author looks to the humanist essay as developed by Montaigne as a useful literary and disciplinary device that can help in understanding the gap between purely theoretical or academic psychology and the actual practice of therapeutic psychology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it