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 Paperback ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2535 4 ISBN-10 0 7453 2535 1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.Logging,pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd,Sidmouth EX10 9QG,England Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd,Chennai,India Printed and bound in the European Union by CPIAntony Rowe Ltd,Chippenham and Eastbourne,England 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