The subject of psychology: seclusion, contraction, immobilisation, objectification, privatisation, and depoliticization
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The seclusion and contraction of subjects in their individualities makes possible their reduction to objects of power apparatuses—of the State, Patriarchy, Capital, and the so-called objective human sciences, including psychology. Nothing is easier than objectifying an individualised, deactivated, and weakened subject who has been plunged into impotence and immobility. It seems that Christianity and capitalist modernity first neutralised subjects, turning them into harmless, isolated individuals, and later objectified them, transmuting them into objects of political, economic, and ideological- scientific systems with psychological devices. The paradox is that psychology developed to support paralysed and powerless individuals, already objectified and neutralised as subjects, in dealing with their emotional, intellectual, or emotional problems. Although such problems are fundamentally political, cultural, or socioeconomic in origin, it is individuals who must take responsibility for them and alleviate them in apolitical ways in their private individual spheres. This depoliticization and privatisation of depression, stress, and anxiety is correlated with the privatisation of all other aspects of our lives in neoliberal capitalist societies. Finally, the possibility is considered that psychology is transformed so radically that it reverses the psychologising process that engenders it: the process of individualisation, contraction, objectification, and depoliticisation of subjectivity.
Author: Pavón-Cuéllar, David
Institution: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6930525877
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