Revolution in Psychology

Alienation to Emancipation

By Ian Parker

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2007 Ian Parker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-2535-4

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi,
Introduction, 1,
1 What Is Psychology? Meet the Family, 9,
2 Psychology as Ideology: Individualism Explained, 33,
3 Psychology at Work: Observation and Regulation of Alienated Activity, 55,
4 Pathologising Dissent: Exploitation Isolated and Ratified, 74,
5 Material Interests: the Manufacture of Distress, 94,
6 Spiritless Conditions: Regulating Therapeutic Alternatives, 112,
7 Professional Empowerment: Good Citizens, 130,
8 Historical, Personal and Political: Psychology and Revolution, 147,
9 Commonsense: Psychological Culture on the Left, 166,
10 Elements of Opposition: Psychological Struggles Now, 184,
11 Transitional Demands: Taking on Psychology, 200,
12 What Next? Reading and Resources, 215,
References, 222,
Index, 258,

CHAPTER 1

What Is Psychology? Meet the Family

There is no one definition of what our human psychology is or how it should be understood, and the discipline of psychology is just as difficult to define. Psychology comprises many incompatible theories and research traditions, some counter-intuitive and some commonsensical, mostly useless and sometimes dangerous. This chapter shows how psychology as a separate discipline came into existence at a specific point in history in a certain part of the world. We will see how the psychologists defined themselves against other approaches to understanding and treating individuals, and how they carved out a particular role for their discipline based on a mistaken view of what people are and what they can be.

Psychologists do not agree with each other about what psychology really is

Sometimes psychology textbooks seem very certain as to what psychology should be about, but this is precisely because there is such sharp disagreement among psychologists. The disagreements are often smoothed over so that a particular position can be argued for all the more forcefully. Because they do not even agree on what the most important disputes are, most introductions to psychology cover this over by pretending to weigh up and judge different vantage points. This feeds the illusion that it all fits together somehow.

Some psychologists argue that the discipline should be 'concerned primarily with establishing cause and effect relationships', or that it should be seen as 'a branch of biological science which studies the phenomenon of conscious life and behaviour'. Others, strict behaviourists, focus on learning at the expense of any attempt to look inside the head, while rival approaches build models of cognitive mechanisms to explain how we remember and why we forget. Each view of what psychological science should be like is partial, but you should not believe any psychologist who claims they can tell you with confidence what they all agree on.

Different areas of study in psychology are competing, not complementary

One way of holding together the ragbag of different models of psychology in the same discipline has been to divide it into separate areas of study, but this only serves to highlight the disagreements between psychologists still further. The different kinds of psychologists do not usually think of their particular domain of work as putting new pieces of knowledge into a bigger picture. Instead, the pictures of the human being that emerge from the different areas of psychology overlap, and their proponents aim to blot out the explanations given by other psychologists.

Cognitive psychologists – who specialise in mental processing of information and memory recall – try to explain why people engage in 'social behaviour', for example, but they reduce the interaction between people to cogs and glitches inside individual heads. Meanwhile social psychologists – who are supposed to account for patterns of behaviour in collections of people – aim to show the reasons for differences in 'individual development', but the only social factors they really take seriously are small-scale ones that can be manipulated and measured. Developmental psychologists – focusing on when and how an infant learns to think like an adult – aim to show how cognition and social action are linked together, and hope to pull the rug from beneath their colleagues so that research on children is given priority. And so it goes, with every bid to be open and inclusive concealing an agenda to define what psychology really is. This is rocky terrain for those who are already inside psychology, and it is bewildering for those coming in on the disputes from the outside with no map to guide them. But how did we get into this mess in the first place?

There Are Certain Interlinked Conditions for 'Psychology' to Become Possible

We should not take for granted the existence of psychology as a separate domain of research. Instead, we will learn far more about the discipline if we examine the historical conditions for this particular way of understanding people to have appeared in the world. There were rich traditions of thought about thought in different cultures before the term 'psychology' was introduced into the English language by the poet Coleridge in the early nineteenth century and then exported into other languages. Psychologists often like to trace back their own history to the ancient Greeks, but this is a little bit of story-telling that serves to make their work seem wiser and older than it actually is.

The quite recent birth of psychology was toward the end of the nineteenth century, and some spectacular changes were occurring in European society that made the study of individual 'psychology' possible, and necessary. Changes in property relations, the family and the state called upon the services of a new discipline that would study and maintain social order at the level of the individual. It was so successful that many people now take for granted that this discipline is the one that unlocks the secrets of the self. We need to look closely at how these elusive secrets came to be seen in there.

Private property entailed the idea that mental processes are 'owned'by each individual

The growth of capitalism in Europe entailed a fundamental change in the way that each person would understand their place in the world. The owners of the new industries had to accumulate sufficient capital to build factories and employ workers, and their competition with each other in the marketplace encouraged them to understand their own activity as being powered by self-enclosed unique creative abilities. This is not at all to say that there was no conception of personal creativity before this point in history, but now, at the very moment when the individual was glorified, it was assumed that it could only flourish inside the new cage of the 'self'. People were, at each moment of their activity, separated and set against their competitors and they became all the more convinced that their plans for growth were their own private property.

Workers, meanwhile, had to compete against each other to sell their labour power in order to make money for themselves and their families to survive. Labour and creativity became something that they came to experience as something possessed by them, until it was sold to someone else. Even if the life of the worker was judged as less than that of the employer, something significant changed...