Structuralism and Me

Structuralism really makes a lot of sense to me, and I want to explain why. All my life, I’ve been very analytical and fancied myself rather scientific. And yet, for some reason I have always been fascinated by the soft science of psychology. This means that I find myself leaning more on the scientific side of psychology. My brother, who is one of the people by whom I am the most influenced, is a science major. He is majoring in math and computer science (and for a while physics). This is important only in that it explains part of why I find science so important. Things have to add up. It always seemed to me that science was the way things should be. It just makes sense. I’m not such a fan of the ‘mushy’ part of psychology, that which cannot be quantified. I remember a time, as a young freshman psychology student, when I tried making it all about the parts of the brain, the biology of it, not taking into account anything that could not be proven by hard science. I really wanted psychology to be able to hold it’s head up and not be scorned by those hard sciences, those that have all kinds of empirical evidence. This is why I could really get behind structuralism and the idea of breaking things down into their elemental parts. However, as I have grown older and, I hope, wiser I have come to realize how foolish it is to try to break down the human experience into little, scientific parts. I understand that it is somewhat helpful, but I also understand that there are some things that need a more Gestaltist approach, looking at the whole.
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about while we discussed the ideas held by the structuralists.