Refashioning Psychology

I have had a couple of ideas that just keep going round in circles so I am going to try to make sense of them by writing about them.

Some of the impetus for this come from the ideas around decolonising the curriculum and how this might impact on psychology. Some of it comes from the ways that potential therapies became reshaped within societies, from psychoanalysis to mindfulness, the reshaping has often been to promote changing the individual and ignoring social change.

I am imagining that this will be a short series of blog posts rather than one long post. My attention wanes with longer posts, and I imagine the same is true of readers. So the purpose of this post is to sketch out the major things I think I need to cover.

Mainstream psychology is a colonising force

 By mainstream psychololgy I mean the core of academic discipline as taught in psychology degrees in the English speaking world. The strong claim that I am making is that this psychology is a particularly USA psychology (and comes from a particular consituancy within the USA), however it is sold as a univerisal psychology. This has had many and varied impacts and I am going to try to give evidence that is has changed the way we think about ourselves, and was one of the forces that led to late 20th century neoliberalism, or the ways that capitalism represents itself currently.

The psy-complex as an amplifier of this colonisation

The psy-complex refers to all the various professions that try to treat and regulate the human psyche. I first came across the term in the writing of Ian Parker, and he cites Nikolas Rose. I am including the bits of psychology taught as if they were true found in other disciplines that deal with people, from business studies to teaching in the psy-complex.

Popular psychology is also complicit

 The relationship between the academic discipline and popular psychology is, at best, fraught with difficulty. Even if popular psychology does not reflect academic psychology, however, the focus on individual change rather than social action does.

Methodological mutterings

I do not believe that quantification is bad, and qualitative methods are good. There are, however, some questions to answer, for example given that the two main statistical tools, linear regression, and ANOVA were invented by eugenicists to what extent does this infect the whole discipline with a particular world view?

Should we try to be scientists

I am a big fan of science, but is psychology a suitable subject for scientific understanding?

My alternatives

Finally my refashioned psychology.

So that is, at least, six parts, although if any post needs a couple of thousand words I might split the post over two or more posts.