Stafetten - Sophie Reijman

Stafetten er Indputs faste indlæg om fakultetets ansatte, hvor de svarer på vores spørgsmål om sig selv og derpå sender stafetten videre til en ansat efter eget ønske. Denne gang er det Sophie Reijman, der har stafetten. 

Af Sofie Harboe, stud.psych. 
Illustration af Maja Koch Nielsen, stud.psych. 

Hvorfor valgte du at læse psykologi?

It wasn´t a clear calling that led me to it. I started studying almost straight out of secondary school, and felt drawn to a variety of subjects in the Humanities, including English literature and philosophy. Both my parents studied literature and had become teachers, and my older sister was studying philosophy. I suppose I didn´t want to follow in their exact footsteps. At some point my mother told me she thought psychology “suited me”. I think I may have taken it as a compliment and my interest in it grew. It wasn´t just that though – it also provided me with the prospect of doing work that somehow could be of value to children, which was an urge I had always felt. In that way, some undefined sense of calling was there when I chose psychology. During my first year at university, I was still uncertain of my choice, but in my second year I did developmental psychology and was introduced to attachment theory. I also became a research assistant in an attachment-oriented project. As soon as I learned to see the differences between children´s attachment behaviors in relation to their caregiver, things fell into place.

Hvad ville du ellers have læst/lavet?

I do daydream about parallel lives in which I do something completely different. Not out of dissatisfaction, but more out of curiosity, and the strange realization that these choices we make, like the subject we study, can shape so much of our day-to-day life, what we think about, the people we meet… I would likely never have met my husband if I hadn´t studied psychology, and we wouldn´t have had our son. Perhaps the only thing that bugs me about psychology sometimes is that it is by, for, and about humans, and devoting our working life to it seems to imply that we as a species are the most interesting thing going on. While I don´t think that at all. Almost everything is fascinating, from bugs to galaxies. I love reading about completely different areas of research in Science News. For me personally, many potential routes had already been closed in secondary school due to lack of talent. I didn´t fare too well in chemistry or physics, whereas philosophy and the languages came easy to me. So realistically speaking, what I might have done would probably be close to what I actually did, like anthropology or sociology.

Hvordan vil du beskrive fagets udvikling, fra da du læste til nu?

I find that a very difficult question to answer, because I´ve moved countries several times over the last 15 years, so I´m not always sure whether changes I´ve perceived are due to time or place. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Valencia, Spain, then did my masters and PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and went on to do postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, in the UK, before coming here to Copenhagen. Overall, I think it´s fair to say that, as in other areas of psychology, there seems to be an increasing preoccupation with delivering “objective science”. For research in the field, this means more focus on neurobiological markers of psychological processes, rapid developments in statistics (my original training in statistics is nearly outdated), and large international collaborations and aggregated data to ensure substantial samples. As with all developments, there are gains and losses here. Another effect of the so-called replication crisis is of course the movement toward open science.

Hvordan tror du, studiet/faget ser ud om 20 år?

I think the developments I´ve described are relatively recent, and will continue for some time to come. I confess that I´m not entirely optimistic about whether the promises of big data and machine learning algorithms will ultimately be fulfilled – they may do for general tendencies. But human experience is idiosyncratic, and for more accurate predictions of individual developmental pathways I think the “non-shared environment” continues to be a highly relevant subject for study, as described by Robert Plomin. I also very much hope that we move away from our tendency to make the human experience in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations the default norm.

Hvad er de tre bedste ting i din hverdag?

Ah, well! I´m going for the holy trinity of family, work, leisure (culture). Family means being in touch with my sister and parents in the Netherlands, whom I haven´t seen for too long due to the pandemic, which, like for so many other people, is a source of heartache and underlying sense of fragility. It also means family time at home with my husband and son. We live in the Swedish woods, and I´m thrilled spring is here again and we get to run about outside, go to the zoo, all that sort of thing. At the same time, I think it was the actor Helena Bonham Carter who said in an interview that when your children are young, work becomes your holiday. I couldn´t agree more – my working time is mine and I feel free. I value it more than ever, and a workday flies by. Third, a day doesn´t feel complete without spending some time with a good novel, or poetry. At the moment I´m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez – lockdown felt like the right time for that book, but to my surprise so far it´s actually really funny. I´ve also been rereading some wonderful poems by Alice Oswald.

Hvad ville du sige til dig selv som studerende, hvis du kunne vende tilbage til din studietid?

Read, woman, read!

Hvem skal have stafetten af dig?

Hopefully Monika Anna Walczak, my colleague in clinical psychology.