Should We Be Writing Essays Instead of Articles? A Psychotherapist’s Reflection on Montaigne’s Marvelous Invention
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".