Psychologization and the Subject of Late Modernity

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137269225
• Argomento: Ciencias sociales
• Categoria: Teoría social

Jan De Vos's second book on psychologization argues that psychology IS psychologization, a phenomenon traced back from Late-Modernity to the Enlightenment. Engaging with seminal thinkers such La Mettrie, Husserl, Lasch and Agamben, the book teases out the limits of psychoanalysis as a critical tool.

1

Psychology, a Post-Cartesian Discipline: La Mettrie and the Perverse Core of the Psy-sciences

The birth of the discipline of psychology is commonly situated in the Enlightenment and connected to René Descartes’ basic move of dividing the soul from the body, reason from unreason and normality from madness (Parker, 1995, p. 12).¹ This modern subject and his modern mind could not but give rise to the discipline of psychology that was to emancipate itself from the broader terrain of philosophy. From a critical point of view, one can argue that the modern psychological subject is foremost a construction. The Cartesian demarche can furthermore be said to have led to the opposition individual/social becoming primordial; the point of departure for the psy-complex, the dispersed network of institutions, to individualize all sorts of problems (Parker, 1995, p. 61).

In this chapter I will argue that if Descartes’ cogito has constituted the base for our psychological outlook on ourselves, others and the world, then we have to understand this within the subsequent elaborations of Cartesianism with so-called 18th-century materialism. It is only there that the psy-categories of subjectivity and reflexive identity reach their full growth. There the structural impossibility of Descartes’ cogito, and its reliance on God, becomes fully blown into the paradox of the material-psychological human being of the new-born psy-sciences. Here, having done away with God, the psy-sciences ground their scientific status by firmly disavowing the paradoxes which the Cartesian cogito imposed on modern subjectivity.

In the following sections I will engage with Julien Offray La Mettrie’s book The Man Machine which, it will be argued, is not only a key text for 18th-century materialism but also for the birth of the discipline of psychology. La Mettrie’s answer to Cartesian dualism, unifying body and soul, has provided psychology with a basic paradigm which is still respected today and which is the ultimate ground of today’s neurological turn. It is further argued that the paradoxes of his endeavour are what prompted La Mettrie to put forward his voluptuous subject, one of the first double figures of homo psychologicus. However, a close reading shows that the Lamettrian solution can be said to contain the germs of the Marquis de Sade’s appropriation of the Enlightenment project. Hence this chapter explores the extent to which The Man Machine can be said to have led to a still visible perverse disposition in the modern psy-sciences, the dark mirror-image of the psy-sciences.

Modernity’s extra subject

Expert power

Eighteenth-century materialism has had decisive bearings on today’s human sciences, albeit if only in Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s idea of ascribing societal authority to scientists. For La Mettrie it was, for example, preferable if only the top physicians were eligible to become judges. For, as La Mettrie points out, only they can understand how crimes can be committed out of a necessity and out of hereditary nature (La Mettrie, 1996[1747], p. 21). As Kathleen Wellman puts it, for La Mettrie the physician must assume a role as a crucial agent of social reform (Wellman, 1992, p. 200). So it is up to science to set the policies of society, if not also to do the policing and the adjudication of society. Does this not mean that doing away with God boils down to also doing away with politics? Modern politics as democracy seems yet another stillborn child of the Enlightenment, as the rule of the people by the people gets short-circuited by the dictatorship of Academia. From the materialism of the Enlightenment, the rule of the experts logically follows. If, for Hobbes, society is a machine, and, for La Mettrie, the human being itself is a machine, then it perhaps seems self-evident that the technicians should be in charge. Moreover, as the Cartesian move made the individual the central agent in the modern experience, it is clear that it is the psy-sciences which should take a prominent place among these experts.

We can see a recent example of the idea that the psy-sciences should bypass the law and politics in an official APA-article entitled “Wanted: politics-free, science-based education” (Murray, 2002). Murray advances the idea that politically motivated, fad-of-the-month educational practices should be replaced by educational techniques grounded in solid scientific evidence. It is a plea to keep the politicians out of what should be understood as the proper domain of the psy-experts. The assumption here is that psy-experts have some sort of privileged knowledge concerning how we should be educated, an assumption which effectively suggests that, like Plato’s philosopher kings, the psy-experts know what the good life would be and how to attain it. Following this Platonic reasoning, it is easy to imagine a state wherein each science would claim jurisdiction over its specific terrain, leaving no proper place for the political as such. Such a movement is then effectively the replacement of democracy with an oligarchy of supposed experts, especially the psy-experts, posing as the stand-ins and the doubles of the politicians.

In the meantime, in these post-political times, politicians themselves become more and more integrated in the psy-complex. Post-politics are, for example, concerned with mobbing legislation, diversity and gender issues, in short, psycho(social) matters which are not to be decided along political lines but on the basis of what the experts put forward. Just consider the fact that, in its death throes, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, democratic socialism often embraced a de-politicized psycho-social Socialism-lite. It is especially in these kinds of social planning and psycho-social policies of the psy-governmental complex that a peculiar characteristic emerges: the importance of the scenarios. The experts devise scripts and assign roles, they provide prompts and give stage directions, supervising the whole production from the side of the stage. It is only since the Enlightenment, the advent of the modern sciences and expert culture that the world truly became a stage.

Scenarios and understudies

To further our understanding on the function of the scenario involved in the psy-experts’ knowledge of the good life, let us start with how these scenarios are deployed in the everyday psy-praxis. Consider for example this psy-advice to parents:

Feed your child the types of food that promote strong bodies and mental growth ( . . . ) Responding to your child’s needs consistently with care and affection builds your child’s trust and helps your child learn to create positive relationships ( . . . ) Have Fun! Play with your child to help build muscle coordination, thinking skills, and the ability to interact with others.²

The crux of the matter, however, is that you have to know the scenario, you have to be told by the expert which role you have to fulfil. At the very least this means that you are redoubled into the one who lives his life and the one contemplating it, the one having fun and the one knowing that having fun is good for your child’s education. In the case of psychic suffering a similar scheme is set in place. You are redoubled into the one with a disorder and, on the other hand, the one who contemplates the disorder, and thus in some way manages to transcend, or remain uncontaminated by, the disorder:

Having ADHD is not simple. Not for yourself, not for your environment. It can seriously derange your daily life, give your self-confidence a blow, curtail your chances of development and drive your family, teachers and friends to despair. However, no-one is doomed to this scenario! You yourself can choose to get to know yourself and your ADHD better, to control your behaviour, to (re)discover your repressed qualities.

(De Backer, 2005, blurb, my translation)

The very scenario this therapist puts forward as the remedy is the redoubling of the homo psychologicus and the homo theoreticus.

It can easily be argued that we owe these redoublings to the materialism of the Enlightenment. Just consider how La Mettrie promotes his materialist perspective:

Whosoever thinks in this way will be wise, just, untroubled about his fate and consequently happy. He will look forward to death without fearing it and without desiring it, cherishing life and scarcely comprehending how disgust can corrupt the heart in this delightful place; his respect for nature, thankfulness, attachment and tenderness will be in proportion to the feelings and the kindness he has received from her; he will be happy to experience her and to attend the enchanting spectacle of the universe, and will certainly never destroy her in himself or in others.

(1996[1747], pp. 38–39)

So if, for La Mettrie, the human being wants to live in accordance with nature, paradoxically he has to be told by the scientists that this is his destiny. It is not about being in a certain way, but about thinking in this way, as La Mettrie puts it. Again, this turns the human into the spectator of the scenario outlined by the expert. As La Mettrie’s himself puts it, the human attends to the spectacle of the universe. Is this not always the case with scenarios? They inevitably place the participant outside of the actual scene. Consider, for example, the make-believe games of children.

I was the mother and you were the father and then I went to the shop with our son and you had to stay home with the baby. And then I came back and the baby was sick.

Why is it that in these make-believe games children invariably adopt the past tense? If according to the mainstream psychology of play children rehearse the future, why are their stories then situated in the past? In some other languages, instead of the past tense, children use the conditional verb form in their pretend games: I would go to the shop. Children never seem to use the future tense in these games. Does this not mean that the issue at stake for children is the scenario as such? Children above all talk and plan the game, whether in the past or in the conditional tense. What matters is not the actual acting out, but above all the setting up of the scene and the storyline, the elaboration of the scenario qua scenario. As such the main role in pretend games is not that of the father, the mother, or the baby, the most central role is that of the storyteller, the one giving stage directions.

Are we not back with the expert position which mainstream psychological practice gives to the subject itself? “With a little experimentation”, Kathleen McGowan writes in Psychology Today, “the ornery and bleak can reshape their temperaments and inject pluck and passion into their lives” (K. McGowan, 2008). The layman is thus prompted to take the position of the experimental psychologist and to assume the objective and neutral position from which things can be assessed and manipulated: I was a passionate woman with much self-confidence and I said to everybody . . . It seems perhaps the self in self-help actually means me and my psychological understudies.

But is this not just pop-psychology having nothing to do with genuine, academic psychology? Are psychologization and the unfortunate popularization of psychology not the mere false doubles of psychology proper? But then we need to remember George Millers’ plea “to give psychology away” (G. A. Miller, 1969) prompting everybody to become his own expert. Today the promotion of this external vantage point has become even more central as psychology increasingly assumes the task of translating and implementing knowledge from the hard sciences concerning our neuro-biochemical determinations; you had this brain disorder but “with education, support, and a little creativity, you can learn to manage the symptoms”.³

In this way one should ask if the phenomenon of psychologization does not point to something fundamental and structural, not only in psychology but in the whole domain of the sciences. The question thus is, what kind of subjectivity does our thoroughly scientified world imply? Is the adoption of the psychological gaze, which transcends one’s presupposed embedded position, not the very mark of Western modernity as a whole? We seem to owe this position to Descartes’ taking a step back from the world, “trying to be more a spectator than an actor in all the comedies that are played out there” (1996[1637], p. 16). This modern position creates the scene, and this is where the scenarios kick in, starting perhaps from Descartes’ provisory moral. While searching for truth and suspending all certainties, he adopts a provisory code of morals in order to be able to position himself in the world. It is here that, as William Egginton (2003) contends, “theatricality” becomes the true marker of modern subjectivity. From modernity on, life becomes above all virtual, something provisional and preliminary, a rehearsal for something better, the real life to come.

The extra subject and its perverse tricks

The advent of modernity brought not only a new subject, but, above all, an extra subject, a redoubled subject. The Cartesian subject sits in the plush theatre chair, looking at is doubles on the stage. With La Mettrie that extra subject contemplating its double is fleshed out in a specific way. He, for example, writes in his Discours sur le Bonheur (1748) that to lead one’s life one should follow “the compass of one’s sentiments”, “to sail to the haven of liberty, independence and pleasure” (cited in: Falvey, 1975, p. 133). Not only is a new figure called into life, namely the skipper having the knowledge and skills to steer its double, but also, this new surplus subject is depicted as primarily dealing with pleasure and jouissance. This, I claim, is not just due to La Mettrie’s peculiarities but something structural connected to the advent of modernity. Take for example G. K. Chesterton who defined the trick of Christianity in this way: “you want to enjoy the pagan dream of pleasurable life without paying the price of melancholic sadness for it? Choose Christianity!” (cited in: Žižek, 2003, p. 48). This is clearly a modern meta-discourse on Christianity. Considering it a trick to regain the pagan pleasurable life, Chesteron actually closes down the path of a natural, direct belief and sketches a pragmatic and calculated, perpetually self-aware, modern belief. Does this perverse trick, as Žižek calls it, not return today in the call to choose science, choose psychology!? In today’s psychologized culture, the assumption is that science can provide knowledge of the good and pleasurable life: psychology depicts the pre-modern psychological man that you are (driven by selfish genes, tribal-like attachments and learned cognitive patterns) so that you, as a modern, scientifically informed, meta-psychological man, can deal with that other part of you, optimize it, bargain with it, profit from it.

The fundamental problem, however, is that this academic meta-gaze cannot simply be switched off while we re-enter life itself. Furthermore, the claim to have knowledge of the good life – knowledge of jouissance, in Lacanian terms – is close to the stance of the pervert. You were the nurse and I the doctor, and I knew what you really liked. The pervert is he who knows how to enjoy and, reducing himself to an instrument of that knowledge, claims to be in the position to let others access that special enjoyment. As such, psychology’s stance of assuming it can open up the path to happiness disavows a kind of ethical zero level which comes to light with Chesteron. For the modern subject, paganism and a non-reflexive Christianity are both historical, closed-down paths, wherein the subject finds itself in some kind of no-man’s-land. Modernity concerns a point beyond the pagan melancholic sadness and beyond any naïve and direct Christian bargaining with it. It leads to a kind of zero level of subjectivity, the de-subjectivization of man, looking upon himself, trying to assume this knowledge which reveals him as he really is. And that knowledge in the end always threatens to become uncanny and horrifying, as it, to paraphrase Žižek, dispossesses the subject and reduces her or him to a puppet-like level beyond dignity and freedom (Žižek, 1997, p. 8).

Isn’t this exactly the deadlock pop-psychology tries to bypass by choosing the Chestertonian solution? The psy-expert⁴ knows how things work and, therefore, knows the tricks necessary to attain a pleasurable life. Think, for example, about the idea of using positive reinforcement to enhance a child’s self-image. You praise positive behaviour and ignore negative behaviour, believing that that will do the trick. Some versions of psychoanalysis have fallen into the same trap. Commenting on today’s loss of paternal authority, I once heard an (atheist) psychoanalyst argue that we should educate our children in a Christian framework in order to re-introduce a Supreme Father Being into the psychic imagery. Both stances amount to the suggestion that you can use tricks, that you can lure yourself and others. Or, in Lacanian terms, that you can fool and dupe the Big Other.

If, in Lacanian theory, this attempt to fool the Other distinguishes the position of the pervert, then the question becomes whether or not this perverse position runs through the history of the sciences and, in particular, the psy-sciences? In this chapter I will attempt to trace this back to La Mettrie. His L’homme machine (Man Machine) of 1747 can be said to carry the germs of the perverse disposition of the modern psy-sciences. In short, La Mettrie solved the problem of Cartesian dualism by denying the res cogitans any substance as such. For La Mettrie, all aspects of the soul have to be considered as aspects of the res extensa. Man is a machine; thinking, willing and feeling are but bodily reactions and functions. What we call the soul is actually material and thus observable in the nerves and brain. La Mettrie thus provided science with a basic paradigm which is still respected today (De Kesel, 2005b). He grounded his argument in an appeal to future research. He considered it but a matter of time before our knowledge and technical abilities would be refined enough to prove scientifically that the soul is but a function of the body. A very modern academic stance indeed, one we might compare to the history of a construct like ADHD. Where the cluster of phenomena now described as ADHD was originally seen as being caused by Minimal Brain Damage, it was then located as Minimal Brain Dysfunction because no lesions were found and then, finally, it was located as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a firmly behavioural description but one which still promises the location of an organic aetiology.

La Mettrie provided a decisive redefinition of modern subjectivity and his notion of the Man Machine still haunts us today. Psychology confronts us with a strange automaton, a homunculus which we are both supposed to be and with whom we are supposed to deal and bargain. In this chapter I will show that the psy-sciences, while denying the paradoxes inherent in this imagery, are always, structurally, at risk of sliding into the discourse of the pervert.

La Mettrie’s natural scientific hedonism and its deadlocks

La Mettrie’s solution to Cartesian dualism

It is perhaps useful to start with a question. Who are we that we need so much psychology? Jacques Claes (1982, p. 31) argues that psychology emerged because there was a need to reconnect man with a receding world. Before the Enlightenment, man lived in a world where God was present in every thing, whether living or not. This emanation, God as the common denominator, mediated man’s presence, his being in the world. When, in the Renaissance, the word psychology was coined – traditionally attributed to Rudolf Goclenius (1547–1628) – something must have changed. As Claes (1982) puts it, through a gradual process of secularization man became more and more disentangled from the world, and it is there that psychology emerged as the mediator, the means to position man once again in a meaningful relation with the world. Can we not understand Descartes’ cogito in the same way, as an attempt to redefine man against the background of a progressive objectification of both man and his world by the emerging sciences? But while ...