[W]here psychology has to explain human beings, they are already regressive and destroyed. When the help of psychology is sought among human beings, the meager field of their immediate relationships is narrowed still further, and even within it they are made into things. Psychology used to explain others is impertinent, and to explain one’s own motives sentimental.
—Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. 204
The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from bein’ seen
But that’s just because he doesn’t want to turn into some machine
—Bob Dylan, “The Man in Me”
“Psychological” is often quite a troubling term. It designates and demarcates a special area within the individual which lends itself to scientific and objective study. That area must in a way be protected from any dangerous and distorting influences: the contingent and shifting context the person operates in, the moral significance of her actions, the socio-cultural meaning of her behavior, her own subjective stance, all these in a way must be bracketed in order for us to finally do psychology, in order for the psychological researcher to announce her findings: “depression is correlated with anxiety”.
The psychologist, when meeting someone new, wants to urgently apply her (abstract and objective) findings. The person asks: “I experience X, what does X mean?”. The psychologist answers: “X is called depression which is associated with Y and Z”. “But I don’t experience Y and sometimes Z”. “Yes, but on average Y is connected to X…”. There’s nothing wrong of course with an objective framework for understanding experience. In a way, everyone seeks to understand what it means to have X (depression, let’s say). That presupposes, of course, that X somehow exists as a semi-independent object that is situated inside everyone.
The dominant psychological discourse seeks to find or insert these objects into everyone. Nothing of the individual’s behavior or psyche must be free of objective description: “what you’re feeling is X, what you’re doing is Y”. Everything is placed in order, everything is reified, nothing is hidden, the person herself is a token of psychological universals and statistical aggregates, the person herself is an object.
Psychologists are not entirely to blame for this line of thinking. People want to be sure of their actions, they want to identify what they’re feeling or thinking. When they learn there’s a science (“science” being filled with all types of scientistic, objectivist notions) that deals with behavior, they turn to psychology for that reassurance or certainty. Psychology clings on to that type of fantasy: it hopes to provide these objective laws, regularities or mechanisms that people seek in order to regulate their lives, function and decide what to do. The psychologist now faces a challenge: she wants to provide a firm scientific basis of mental life, but that scientific basis must not tell us what we already know about how humans operate. In a more formal way of putting it, scientific psychology must overcome folk psychology. However, that rarely happens. The hypotheses, findings, interpretations of psychological research are embedded in lay notions of what we think people do, what it means or why they do it (see also Smedslund, 2016). We suppose someone is crying because he is sad. The psychologist wants to “prove” this relation by putting it in an objective rhetoric: “we hypothesize that crying is correlated with sadness”. This type of thinking permeates all experience. Every corner of the mind, every aspect of the person must be put under a similar description in order for it to be considered scientific. We divide and name parts of human experience and we think we learned something about them. We construct these objects within the individual (as the old spiritualists did) in the hope of measuring, controlling, isolating something. Then we talk of these procedures like they are happening independently, without the individual’s agency or in an abstract, contextless fashion.
That’s why psychology always struggled with subjectivity and the first-person perspective. Subjectivity is manifested in a personal unity, it is fluid and changing, semi-private, contextual, an assemblage that comes into contingent and dynamic relations with its environment, shaped socio-culturally. How can we pause and study it? We can reduce it into something that has extension or at least is malleable (brain, behavior, computational states, variables) or simply ignore it, pretending it is objectifiable and part of psychological universal kinds that we study (“depression”, “anxiety”, personality traits).
These types of reduction, along with their respective methodological, experimental and statistical techniques are good at making us think that we have learned something objective and new. They are good at looking at our experience and classifying it, chopping it up. They replace our immediate understanding of our inner lives with an “objective” model of it. However, the simulacrum is not the original object that is being simulated, just as the map is not the territory. The model is smooth, causal, simple, isolated; subjectivity is complex, contingent, entangled, embedded in various relations and discourses. A person is crying at time X and not at time T; a person is crying but he’s not sad; a person is crying and he’s sad. Psychology seeks to evade the contingency and contextuality of subjectivity and photograph it, freeze it in an experiment or a questionnaire. It seeks to produce an Image of Thought of what mental life is and for psychology it is meant to be a representational, static, predictable object.
Psychology always feels the need to say something as staying silent would only speak to its banality, its commonsensical nature. In order to say something, it puts methodology before ontology. We must be able to do psychology so we must be able to talk about mental events and behavior in a science-like way. That means that we need to talk about them not in the way they are manifested (dynamically and subjectively), but in a way that is intelligible, comprehensible, representational. We need to adjust mental life to this methodological thinking, in order to be able to do psychology, and not adjust our particular methods to the particularities and peculiarities of the subject matter. Psychology simulates its phenomena to its image, its image being that of objective, scientific methodology (see also Teo, 2020). It is exactly because of this (mis)understanding of what science is that the focus of psychology and psychiatry is on quantitative methods, with little reflection on what these methods actually study. Alternative methods and perspectives, that usually leave room for the subject’s experience, are often marginalized and deemed unscientific: critical psychiatry and psychology, narrative, discursive and phenomenological psychology, etc. The good psychologist (and psychiatrist) must keep a distance from lived experience and study it abstractly.
I am now not a person with ethical problems, a socio-cultural constitution and a subjective perspective, but it is exactly these aspects that are viewed as problems by the objective behavioral scientist. I must be a mechanistic, predictable unit, in order for a psychiatric label (e.g. generalized anxiety disorder) or a psychological variable (e.g. personality trait) to be implemented on me smoothly. This is the fantasy that drives most of psychology and psychiatry forward. It is this objectivist way of thinking that marginalizes other approaches (those mentioned above) as also problematic or downright unscientific. Different voices and different perspectives must be heard and cultivated in order to properly study real-life subjectivity and personhood and these perspectives must resist the scientistic notions of wanting to represent, simulate, predict, reduce or—worse—simplify everything people do in order to fit an abstract model.
So, the mainstream psychologist (and, most often, psychiatrists) seeks to explain mental life by totalizing it and colonizing it. No more the complications of subjectivity, but the simplicity of the model. No more fluid processes but static relations and objects. No more moral and socio-culturally embedded processes but “psychological” ones. The mind is constructed as a discovery (and not discovered as a construction). The psychologist “discovers” objects like variables and personality traits, that are just the constructs of the particular experiment or psychometric scale. The anatomy of the soul continues in such a way and psychological natural kinds emerge. The mind must be taken over by such an objective way of thinking. A person comes to the psychologist and asks of his expertise. “What you’re experiencing is called GAD or such and such…”, “this is named self-fulfilling prophecy or cognitive schema…”. My experience is presented to me as a simulacrum, I see it now as something completely alien in the words of the psychologist, something that is object-like (see also Kontis, 2024, for a similar line of thinking). “It’s a shame”, I think, “for me to be reduced to an object”. Mainstream psychology mostly seeks to study humans just like ethologists study animals. Instead, in order to do justice to subjectivity and avoid totalizing experience, a sort of naïve but brave question should be asked, that is however foundational in our ’doing psychology’:
Does it make sense, in other words, to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me?
—Nagel, 1974, p. 448
Bibliography
Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
Kontis, K. (2024). Epistemological alienation in scientific psychology. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 58(4),1027-1047. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-024-09829-9
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914
Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 50(2), 185-195.
Teo, T. (2020). Theorizing in psychology: From the critique of a hyper-science to conceptualizing subjectivity. Theory & Psychology, 30(6), 759–767. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354320930271
