Descriptive psychology

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Descriptive psychology is primarily a conceptual framework for the science of psychology. Created in its original form by Peter G. Ossorio at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the mid-1960s, it has subsequently been applied to domains such as psychotherapy, artificial intelligence, organizational communities, spirituality, research methodology, and theory creation.

The original impulse for the creation of DP was dissatisfaction with mainstream approaches to the science of psychology, thinking that psychology had paid insufficient attention to the creation of a foundational conceptual framework such as other sciences possessed. Later authors noted that this lack of a conceptual scaffolding was responsible for the fragmentation of psychology; i.e. for its lack of any unifying, broadly accepted "standard model."

• Society for Descriptive Psychology
• Dictionary of Psychology (archived)