Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation

270 Pages·2007·2.35 MB·English

by  Ian Parker

REVOLUTION
IN PSYCHOLOGY
Alienation to Emancipation
IAN PARKER
LONDON ANN ARBOR, MI
First published 2007 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road,London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street,Ann Arbor,MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Ian Parker 2007
The right of Ian Parker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback
ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2536 1
ISBN-10 0 7453 2536 X
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ISBN-10 0 7453 2535 1
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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
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible unless there had been
objections to psychology right from the early days of the discipline.
The voices against psychology have been diverse – anti-capitalist,
anti-racist, ecological and feminist – and some of the recent critics
have been willing to discuss the ideas in this book and help me
sharpen the arguments. The arguments in the chapters were
rehearsed as a series of lectures in 2005 in Guadalajara, Mexico
(in the Departamento de Psicología Aplicada, Universidad de
Guadalajara), and I would particularly like to thank Erica Burman,
Bernardo Jiménez-Domínguez, Rosa Margarita López Aguilar, Juan
Alberto Hernández, Raul Medina and Alfredo Salmerón. A seminar
series in 2005–06 in Manchester, UK (in the Discourse Unit,
Manchester Metropolitan University) was then devoted to the
chapters, and thanks again to those who listened and contributed;
Alex Bridger, Jill Bradbury, Geoff Bunn, Khatidja Chantler, Paul
Duckett, Thekla Giekeimi, Jeannine Goh, Romy Graichen, John
Griffiths, Rebecca Lawthom, Ken McLaughlin, Sue Makevit Coupland,
Vera Marten, Ilana Mountian, Teija Nissinen, Christine Paalsrud,
Julia Robinson, Asiya Siddique, Judith Sixsmith and Emma Wilmer.
Introduction
This book is about psychology, the way the discipline of psychology
betrayed its promise to understand and help people, and what we
need to do to make psychologists work for social change rather than
against it. The discipline of psychology as a field of academic study
and professional practice aims to discover how we behave and think
and feel, but the knowledge and technology that psychologists pro-
duce is designed to adapt people to society. Because present-day
society is organised around exploitation and subordination, even
the most well-meaning psychologist contributes to alienation, to
the separation of our selves from others and from our own creative
abilities.
The book is for those who want to change the world, for those
trying to make sense of their own psychology and to make connec-
tions between psychology and radical politics. Activists involved in
anti-capitalist, anti-racist and feminist politics often try to connect
big political change with change at the more intimate level of every-
day relationships. They are quite right to make this connection, and
one of the lessons of failed revolutions and authoritarian ‘socialist’
societies is that this apparently ‘psychological’ level is woven into
political change. Activists need to know about psychology, and what
needs to be done to prevent it from operating only as an instrument
of social control.
We Encounter Psychology Indirectly in Political Debate
Psychology is important not because it is true but because it is so
useful to those in power. Psychological descriptions of individual
action are often enthusiastically taken up by those who have most to
lose from those descriptions; and those who benefit from persuading
people that a problem can be reduced to the way someone thinks
or feels also, quite understandably, really believe in psychology
themselves. Psychology is an increasingly powerful component of
ideology, ruling ideas that endorse exploitation and sabotage struggles
1
2 Revolution in Psychology
against oppression. This psychology circulates way beyond colleges
and clinics, and different versions of psychology as ideology are now
to be found nearly everywhere in capitalist society.
Personality profiles of political leaders are increasingly used to
explain away political issues, for example, and here psychological
ideology seeps into the way we understand the world, making it
seem as if there is nothing we can do to change it. The historical
conditions in which certain figures give orders and other people
follow them then, as far as the psychologist is concerned, simply
serve as the backdrop to how individual motivations and decisions
are played out. The focus on the childhood of political enemies then
psychologises politics, and the activity of those engaged in political
resistance is sidelined, marginalised as something irrelevant and
useless. This reduction of political struggle to what is going on
inside the minds of individual characters then reduces the rest of us
to being mere spectators.
Advice about personal improvement takes the place of social
transformation, and the psychologisation of social life already
encourages people to think that the only possible change they could
ever make would be in the way they dress and present themselves to
others. Confession, reconciliation and ‘makeover’ thus operate as
sites of psychologisation on television; sometimes the expert coun-
sellor is quite explicit about how a person or relationship needs to
change, but often the participants have already absorbed enough
psychological ideology to be able, without much guidance, to burst
into tears, own up to their faults and ask forgiveness. There is always
a message about what healthy psychological functioning is like
here, and how it is the root of everything else.
Ideas about sex and race divide people from each other, and
psychological theories have played an important role in making us
believe that differences between people are essential, necessary
qualities of human beings that can never be changed. Psychology
provides ever more sophisticated and so more effective arguments
for sexism and racism than the old biological theories, and this new
psychology as ideology serves to justify violence and reinforce
stereotypes. Notions from so-called ‘evolutionary psychology’, for
example, supplement the worst old religious arguments about
differences between men and women. The shift of attention from
racial classifications to cultural differences, from biology to psychology,
follows the same logic, and treats underlying mental processes as
responsible for economically structured white privilege.
Introduction 3
Popular arguments about ‘human nature’ make it seem as if social
change is out of the question, and psychological theories undermine
those who believe that another world is possible. Psychological
explanations for war, invasion and mass-murder not only mislead
us, and draw attention away from economic, political and historical
conditions, but they also sap the confidence of those committed to
change. Every theory of human nature that tells us what cannot be
changed at a deep psychological level has insidious economic func-
tions and dangerous political consequences. Taking a distance from
psychology will enable us to refuse to accept the mistaken view that
brutality is wired in to our brains and behaviour.
We Encounter Psychology Directly in Political Activity
Psychological ideas not only float around in day-time television,
providing false explanations for problems in the world and misleading
us as to how we could make this world a better place. Psychology as
ideology is not just the stupid stuff that can be avoided while we are
doing real politics, not merely the froth on the surface of our lives
that can be quickly skimmed off. Psychology has also come to be
structured into the way we have learnt to think about ourselves as
individuals, and so it also enters into the way people think of them-
selves as political agents. It impacts on how we interpret and how
we try to change the world.
We are subject to categories of ability and intelligence in school,
for example, that leave deep scars on what we been made to think of
as our own individual ‘psychology’. The sorting and grading of
people into different kinds of school mark the class position and
identity of every child. An individual path through school is experi-
enced as something ‘psychological’; each child comes to live their
failure as something from which they are alienated, as if it were
something deep within themselves which they could never really
comprehend or escape. Then, as our own children suffer from an
ever-increasing system of assessments and decisions about what
they cannot do, we feel even more helpless.
Most of us are encouraged to change the way we behave and the
way we speak in order to adapt ourselves to this world. Capitalist
society is dependent on those who work for a living, the working
class that is still the mass of the population, but society presents
itself to itself as middle class, as if workers were an unfortunate and
dwindling minority. This contradiction between image and reality,
alie about who we are, means that as we fit ourselves in we also start
4 Revolution in Psychology
to live out certain assumptions about what is wrong with us and what
is right about the strategies we adopted to survive. Individual choices
that cover over structural inequalities feed more psychologisation,
and the ability to chatter about feelings and personal journeys
becomes more evidence to others and our selves that we will not
cause trouble. We are taught to give up on social change, and accept
that the aim of changing the world was itself the product of
psychological motivations like envy and resentment at the success
of others.
Those who refuse, those who remained steadfast in socialist and
feminist politics and those who are now building the new social
movements, are often able to keep psychologisation at bay, keep
psychology in its place, but even then it remains a potent force. We
are sometimes stressed, burnt out or traumatised by our struggles,
and when we collapse in exhaustion and despair it is vital to know
what demands to make on professionals who make it their business
to patch individuals up when they fall apart. Because psychology is
part of the problem – individualising and essentialising social
processes – we need to know how to treat the problems we experience
as social processes instead of handing ourselves over to those who
will turn them into psychology again.
Unbearable misery is treated by psychology as if it were a disorder,
failure or illness. One of the most destructive aspects of alienation is
the separation of people from feelings of misery and anger, either at
their own plight or the plight of others. Our own oppression is then
turned by psychologists into ‘negative thinking’ that we feel bad
about finding within ourselves, and the oppression of others is
turned into fateful misfortune at the hands of maladjusted people.
In capitalist society driven by profit and the imperative to consume,
there is a premium placed on ‘positive psychology’ so that happiness
has come to be viewed as the normal state. Self-activity and
solidarity are replaced by anti-depressants and charity.
The Domain of Psychology is a Political Issue
Psychology as a discipline has come to play a very precise function
under capitalism, and the academic theories and professional prac-
tices that comprise psychology in schools, companies, hospitals and
prisons fit hand-in-glove with power. This in itself should be enough
to put psychology on the agenda for those involved in radical politics.
There is also another more pressing reason for tackling psychology,
however, which is that the domain of individual experience that we
Introduction 5
call ‘psychology’ was itself formed under capitalism, and close analysis
of this psychology will help us understand something deeper about
the functioning of capitalism itself. A close analysis of the develop-
ment of psychology can actually enable us to understand something
about the nature of alienation in capitalist society and the role of
different forms of oppression within it.
The ‘psychologisation’ of everyday life under capitalism is not an
optional extra, nor is it a simple political device used by those in
power to divide and rule us; psychologisation is essential and neces-
sary to capitalism. And this is why the phenomena of racism and
sexism, for example, are interlaced with capitalism. Some aspects of
oppression appear to be more ‘psychological’ precisely because they
complement and underpin what is, to some, more immediately
visible exploitation.
This capitalist society is exploitative and alienating, and for sure it
intensifies individual experience, but it also constitutes that indi-
vidual experience as something ‘psychological’, as something that
operates as if it were inside each person. Whether it is viewed as a
mental or emotional process it operates as something simultane-
ously as the particular property of the individual and as something
that cannot be completely comprehended by them. Alienation is
not merely the separation of our selves from others but a kind of
separation from our selves in which we experience our selves as
inhabited and driven by forces that are mysterious to us. These mys-
terious forces include economic forces that structure our lives as
beings who must sell our labour power to others; however, psychol-
ogisation of the different dimensions of oppression that have made
capitalism possible also condenses ‘race’ and ‘sex’ into highly
charged, sometimes exciting and sometimes frightening, forces out of
our control.
There is an intimate connection between private experience,
personal relationships and the state that calls upon this ‘psychological’
realm and mobilises it so that threats to private property can be
defended against. Psychologisation has become such a deeply
embedded part of life under capitalism that it is now not only the
psychologists who blame individuals and treat them as those who
are being ‘defensive’ when racism and sexism are mobilised.
Attacks on immigrants, for example, accompany rational political
debate so that middle-class folk can show themselves to be
psychologically minded, thoughtful and emotionally literate at
the same time as another ‘psychology’ that is supposed to belong