Refusing psychology: Maps and territories

Ian Parker, ομιλία στο Eteron, 04/11/2023

The conceptual and practical work of decolonising psychology has to include the task of refusing psychology as such. That means inhabiting psychology in such a way as to understand and corrode it from within, a form of deconstruction that ‘maps’ the nature of the discipline and attends to the key oppositions that structure it. These oppositions, described in this paper, are the universal and the local, pattern and experience and method and data. It is the map as such that is the problem, and so this critical mapping of psychology has the aim of escaping the discipline in order to draw up a map that shows us a way out, not a map that leads us deeper into the discipline and the globalised psychologisation that it is now warranting and reinforcing.

Introduction

I should start by saying that I have never engaged in the discipline of psychology as a source of knowledge about human beings. I took an undergraduate degree in psychology to find out how the discipline worked, to find out what it did to people, and that meant keeping it, psychology, at a distance, being careful never to take any of the so-called facts it reported on good coin. This helped me find my way through the first degree and PhD and then many years of teaching about and against psychology.

I took seriously the claims made during the emergence of qualitative research in the discipline that psychologists were not so much scientists discovering things but journalists tracking transformations in the way that people spoke about themselves (Gergen, 1973). But the key question was to track what the psychologists said about people, and that meant being suspicious about the theories. I can honestly say that I never believed a word of it.

That is why we became so interested in discourse in Manchester and set up the Discourse Unit (Parker, 2015). Some researchers were interested in discourse because it was a way of conducting research on people outside the discipline, that is, on the usual targets, objects of psychological research. Our interest in discourse, however, was mainly, most of the time, focused on psychological discourse as a set of stories about human beings that have a peculiar power because of the professional status that psychology has.

The stories that psychologists tell about human beings are not completely out of synch with reality, and psychology as a discipline could not function if the stories did not make sense. But, when a particular study chimes with our experience, we need to ask how it functions as a powerful anecdote, and what happens when that anecdote is treated as fact, what happens when a discipline like psychology has the power to make people conform to that image of themselves and how the discipline pathologises people who do not conform.

The problem with psychology is not that it does not work. The problem is precisely that it does work, and critical research on psychology has the task of showing not only that these are strange stories that the psychologists are spinning about us but also why these stories, these discourses correspond to the way we live our lives. We do that so we can resist the normative stories, and so we can find other ways of living our lives. To do that, we must refuse psychology.

A difficulty we have is that with the globalisation of psychology as a discipline and the globalisation of psychological discourse, the anecdotes that we sometimes find impressive in the research in journals and popular journalistic accounts of psychological studies have impressed themselves on us. This double-work of impression, of being intrigued by what the psychologists are telling us and of being pressed into shaped by psychological discourse, is the work of psychologisation (De Vos, 2012).

That psychologisation of everyday life that makes the claims made by the discipline of psychology seem ‘true’ to so many people is accompanied by power, sometimes by brute force. That does not mean that there is some kind of weird conspiracy to sell people psychological stories about their lives, but that psychological discourses are organised into the reality of our lives.

These discourses are organised by the nature of a globalised society in which we have to sell our labour power to survive, capitalism, by the marking out and inclusion of women in the labour market, sexism, and by the colonial nature of power through which knowledge and techniques of management travel from the so-called ‘centre’ to the so-called ‘periphery’, racism.

I have tried for many years to shake off psychology, to rid myself of it, but even when I try to let it go, it will not let go of me. I have some responsibility for that, and engaging again in discussions like this keeps me glued to it (Parker, 2020). I do so much want to tell you what the problem is, urge you to avoid getting drawn into psychology. But the nature of psychologisation is such that we have to keep getting to grips with it, learning about the new forms it takes if we are to avoid being seduced by it, drawn into it.

We need to map this discipline of psychology that is becoming a global force, that is becoming one of the ideological drivers of globalisation, and I want to set out some compass points for mapping it here now. There is a danger, of course, which is that every form of mapping is carried out from specific standpoints, and you may well decide that my compass points are not yours. Good; that is the basis for a proliferation of critical standpoints, and there is work to be done organising these standpoints as a form of counter-knowledge to the organised knowledge of the discipline of psychology (Dafermos et al. 2006, 2013).

I want to map out three key oppositions, what I see as three key oppositions that structure globalised psychological discourse, that set out the parameters of contemporary psychologisation, of what you must say to be taken seriously when you are speaking inside the discipline of psychology as a complex contradictory meshwork of ideas and institutions, that is, rules of discourse you need to adhere to inside the ‘psy complex’ (Ingleby, 1985).

The three key oppositions are, first, between what is universal and what is local, second between experience and pattern, and third between method and data. You will see as we go on that these are approximate labels which are filled out in different ways in different places, but I hope they make sense to you well enough.

The globalisation of psychology, psychologisation, has as its centre the psy complex, with its institutions including psychology departments and journals and academic conferences and examinations and forms of assessment in which you prove that you are obedient and know the rules.

Some people – that is, the kind of people who attend a psychology conference – seek employment and validation inside the psy complex, while most people are treated as objects of the psy complex, with their behaviour and thinking monitored and categorised. Some of these outsiders are treated like guests with lower status, but guests nonetheless when they configure themselves as psychological subjects, not mere objects, when they speak in ways that the psychologists expect them to.

How must they speak, according to what rules? What must we know to speak like them, to be a psychological subject, perhaps even to be considered by them to be a psychologist? We need to notice along the way that psychologists are themselves often, when they are not completely cynical about what they do, when they are most well-meaning and concerned with our well-being, also psychological subjects. They believe in what they say at a depth which sometimes makes what critical researchers say about the psy complex completely incomprehensible to them.

Universal and local

The first opposition is between what is universal and what is local. Different terms will fill that opposition with different content, but among the concepts and practices that cluster around that opposition, an opposition that is worried away at, sometimes agonised over by psychologists, are the following.

Psychologists seem torn between wanting to acknowledge what is specific about their objects of study, people in different circumstances on the one hand, and wanting to make statements that are applicable to all human beings. They resolve this tension in different, sometimes bizarre ways, according to their own categories which are, of course, usually assumed themselves to be universal.

For example, the obsession with ‘sex differences’ in mainstream research relies on a categorisation into male and female that can then at one and the same time, the psychologist seems to assume, acknowledge that people in different positions in society operate according to quite different psychological principles and that there are general overall statements that can be made. The named ‘local’ categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ as if they are marking biological categories have been unravelled time and time again by historians, philosophers, queer theorists and feminist activists, among others, but keep being reinstated, repeated, reiterated.

In this case, the ‘universal’ aspect reappears in the search for psychological functions that are common to men and women, and in the claims that this or that finding applies to all men or to all women (Burman, 1998). The ‘local’ aspect appears sometimes in the attempt to mark out ‘women’s psychology’ as something specific, and sometimes in the botched attempt to learn from intersectional theory, in which case other local differences are added into the description of women according to what category of woman they are supposed to be.

The local aspect also reappears in the attempt to seize back the specific descriptions that are made, often for good political reasons in feminist research, and for men to turn the tables on feminists, insisting that what they once claimed to be universal is now actually something specific and valuable about male psychology. Notice that there are general lessons here about the way those with power are able to work their way through psychological discourse in such a way as to restore privilege and power that they feel has been slipping away from them (Burman, 1990).

It is that tension between what is universal and what is local that is what is at stake in the aim to ‘decolonise’ psychology. Here we face longstanding traditions of research in psychology ranging from intelligence testing to assessment of child-rearing in which psychological claims have often been obviously and brutally ideological, racist. Here is an instance of where the map of the world and the people in it is drawn from the centres of colonial power, and often in practice to make colonial subjects manageable (Teo, 2005).

We see the tension running through the usually reactionary and sometimes well-meaning attempts to carry out ‘cross-cultural’ research in psychology. Here the sorting of populations into categories is supposed to resolve the problem by identifying people to whom different kinds of psychological description apply. These, historically, were sorted into more advanced and less civilized populations, and you can guess easily which populations were assumed to be advanced. It took a while for cross-cultural psychology to attempt to disentangle itself from such assumptions – assumptions that were part and parcel of the conceptions of ‘progress’ that psychologists themselves imagined they were an expression of – but it never fully succeeded.

The problems were clear in the practice of cross-cultural psychology, where levels of intelligence were mapped onto racial difference, and even in well-meaning ‘transcultural’ psychology and psychiatry where patients who were allocated to their different ‘races’, in the old-style terminology, or ‘communities’ in the newer liberal terminology, still suffered from this.

Psychology and psychiatry was still racist as an institution, and patients from ‘minority’ groups – a minority in the host countries where Western psychology ruled the roost – were liable to be doubly-pathologised; either they showed the pathology that was expected of them because they were a member of the group that had been categorised and described in the psychiatric literature, or they were seen as pathological because they did not conform to the kinds of pathology that were expected of them. Colonisation was not a mere metaphor, but a practice (Tuck and Yang, 2012)

But, and this is where we come to what we can do with the opposition, how we might intervene in it, the decolonising of psychology is part of a broader movement concerned with the decolonisation of academic knowledge and institutions. Furthermore, and it is in this sense that decolonisation is not a metaphor, it is part of an insistence on the local, of the so-called ‘periphery’, that speaks of the local in such a way as to speak of what is universal about our condition of being human.

We need to hold onto that if we are not ourselves to be trapped in exactly the kind of opposition that psychology organises itself around, and we need to link that opposition in our own way to an intervention into other aspects of psychological knowledge and psychologisation.

This brings me to the second opposition.

Experience and pattern

The second opposition is a tension between experience and pattern. Many people come into psychology as a discipline because of their own particular experience of a psychological phenomenon. Or, at least, they interpret what may have happened to them before they even start their studies as being a psychological phenomenon. We know well from studies of the globalisation of psychology, of the pervasive ‘psychologisation’ of everyday life around the world, that a host of things in how we come to be human – what psychologists call ‘development’ – and how we differ from each other – what psychologists call ‘personality’ – are now reframed as they are named within a psychological vocabulary, within a psychological discourse (Burman, 2021).

This naming and reframing is often at the heart of the ‘experience’ that people bring to psychology and attempt to find meaning in. But there is a rude awakening to what psychology is in most departments and degree courses, when students are told to be sceptical about what they think and feel and remember and to replace those ‘experiences’ with the more important general rules or ‘patterns’ that the research has, they are told ‘discovered’. At the very same moment that they are invited to accept the descriptions of people given by psychologists as ‘discoveries’, the student thereby has also to learn to cover over their own experience, to replace it.

Psychological descriptions are not, of course, ‘discoveries’ at all, but powerful constructions, constructions made on the basis of studies based on small samples based on specific groups that tap into and re-circulate the popular knowledge that psychologists have taken up and filtered into their own hypotheses and theories. Psychologists, and that includes most teachers of psychology, come to experience the world according to the psychological categories they use to describe other people, and their own subjectivity becomes thereby remade as they journey deeper into the discipline. This is an institutionally-structured ‘looping effect’ in research, one that becomes all the more powerful in a discipline like psychology because it takes great pains to educate the world about the ‘discoveries’ it claims to have made (Hacking, 1995).

A looping effect can be witnessed in the way that remembering is reconfigured as ‘recall’, and the psychologist actually comes to think they are experiencing the difference between long-term and short-term memory, or when activity is reconfigured as ‘behaviour’, and the psychologist reflects on what they like and dislike in terms of patterns of reinforcement. Cognitive and behavioural description and various forms of humanistic description of basic needs and self-actualisation work on patterns that the psychologist reads about, perhaps even thinks they have ‘discovered’ for themselves, and so experience itself is reconstructed and felt through those patterns.

Now here is a trap, and this trap confirms rather than shakes us from the opposition between experience and pattern. The trap is that ‘pattern’ as such is sometimes experienced as a limiting or even as a betrayal of experience. It is very understandable that many students and young research psychologists come to see the stupid laboratory-experimental studies that they read about in the textbooks not only as stupid but as mechanistic and alienating. They ask what those accounts of behaviour and cognition have to do with them, and they experience the formulation and testing of limited hypotheses as overlooking, perhaps excluding context, excluding or shutting out what it is to be human.

Because of the opposition between experience and pattern, the conclusion that is often drawn by those who rebel against mainstream Western positivist research is not only that positivist research is stupid but that the very search for pattern might be a mistake. It is in this mistaken conclusion that we see attempts to build alternatives to ‘scientific’ psychology which are built on the assumption that the problem is not that psychology pretends to be a science, when it is not, but that scientific explanation as such might be the problem because science is concerned with discovering regularities or laws of action.

Then there is a flipping over from one side of the opposition, from a search for pattern, to a valuing of experience, and only experience. You can see the trap here if you take seriously how ‘experience’ has already been ideologically-framed, how ‘common sense’ that we take for granted carries with it a host of assumptions about the world that mesh us all the more tightly into the world as it is now rather than leading us to an alternative, to something different. Then we see an embrace of experience as if it was some direct unmediated true connection with the world, and, too often, an attempt to flee from mainstream positivist psychology which ends up in one of the pop-psychology accounts of the world that make up the globalised psychologised understanding of the world outside the discipline.

What is crucial to notice here is that it is not the fixation on one part of the opposition that is problem. It is not that ‘pattern’ is bad and ‘experience’ is good as such, or even that some ‘pattern’ in our lives is worth prioritising against mistaken ‘experience’. In the same way, to speak about what is ‘universal’ is not as such problematic, and an emphasis on what is local will not always be progressive. Rather it is the opposition as such that is so potent, and the way it clusters with the other key oppositions. That is what we need to tackle. Let us turn to the third opposition, between ‘method’ and ‘data’.

Method and data

This third opposition, between ‘method’ and ‘data’ is perhaps an easier one to challenge because each aspect is more obviously problematic, more problematic than apparently nice experience and comfortable local things when compared with apparently alienating patterns of described behaviour or universal claims about what human beings are.

And, in each aspect of the opposition, we need some clarification of what it means; what it would really mean to follow a method or to take data seriously. Psychologists, more obviously perhaps than colleagues in other supposedly scientific disciplines, rely on deep misunderstandings of what method and data are.

The ‘method’ side of the opposition is one that actually governs what most psychologists are up to most of the time, and while they are more than happy to talk to the general public about their so-called ‘findings’, things they think they have discovered about human beings, psychologists take great pains to teach their students about the importance of method, usually quantitative method as the benchmark of a scientific approach (Rose, 1985). In fact, a quick glance at a psychology textbook, and at the bewildering contradictory theories and accounts of what we do, will show is that there is little to hold this ragbag of approaches together.

It is ‘method’ that holds the discipline of psychology together, and that is why there has been such hostility over recent years to the emergence of qualitative research that challenges mainstream method, and especially to participatory-action approaches. These radical approaches seem to turn method upside down, seem to accord power to people to set their own questions rather than wait for the psychologist to formulate research questions based on their own hypotheses (Parker, 2005).

Method here is boiled down to a set of rules or procedures that you are supposed to follow if you are to be thought scientific, and psychology trades on the illusion that it is really scientific because it is following the same rules and procedures that apply in the natural sciences. It does not. It does not actually base itself on what actually happens in the natural sciences, in which there is careful modelling of the object of study and detailed case study (Harré and Secord, 1972).

The problem with method in psychology is that it is a case of ‘garbage in garbage out’, so that the ‘data’ the method works on is already produced in a certain form easy for the psychologist trained in fake-positivist science to digest, to absorb, to make sense of. The ‘data’ side of the opposition, then, is just as suspect, just as misleading, and a common misconception, which is evident in the use of the term ‘findings’ in psychology research projects, is that that the ‘data’ is the actual behaviour that has been observed or, a worse assumption, the actual thinking going on inside the head of the subject of the research.

Psychologists often unwittingly show us how confused they are about the ‘data’ they process in different kinds of analysis when they refer to it is as ‘empirical data’. Then it is really as if what they are dealing with is the brute real stuff. They are not. What they put through the analysis is the ‘data’ as something that has already been produced in a form that is useful to the psychologist. This applies to the tabulation of responses to a stimulus in which that tabulation is the ‘data’, or the ticks in a questionnaire in which it is the collection of ticks that is the ‘data’, or the bits of the brain lighting up in a functional magnetic resonance image scan in which it is the already filtered sequence of lights on the display screen that is the ‘data’.

Method and data thus go hand in hand, a particular kind of method giving rise to a particular kind of data. So, it is not at all a solution to this opposition to either turn from the data to method, or to turn from method to data. Each of these attempts at a solution merely drives us further into the problem.

So, psychologists who spend their time trying to find better research methods are really wasting their time unless they rethinking what ‘method’ is as such. Method on its own will not produce better ‘data’, still less will method enable us to get away from the inevitable framing and reconstruction of reality that we engage in whenever we do empirical research. There is no escape from method because every form of ‘data’ is the product of a particular way of approaching the world and describing it.

What is preventing them from breaking out of this mistaken opposition between method and data is, at least in part, the way that the opposition is locked in place in relation to the other two oppositions I have described. The opposition between method and data works in tandem with the opposition between pattern and experience and with the opposition between the universal and the local.

Alternatives

Each time psychological discourse attempts to resolve one of the oppositions it does so by pinning itself to one of the others, and so, in different toxic ways, we end up with permutations of the possible combinations which we could, at some point, map onto different forms of psychology.

Different contexts map those oppositions in different ways. For example, in Western empirical psychology, undergraduate students are first of all taught to disregard their own intuition or their own experience of ‘psychology’ – to exclude their own subjectivity from the process they are being inducted into – and so they are taught first of all to map empirical ‘data’ onto supposedly ‘universal’ truths, looking for ‘patterns’ or regularities of connection between cause and effect that apply to everyone.

Their teachers, on the other hand, those who have one through some training in research, perhaps carried out research for themselves, flip these oppositions, to be concerned with ‘method’ as such, and to be more nuanced in their claims about which ‘local’ populations the psychological research describes and then, partly because they have lived with psychological discourses for so long, come to ‘experience’ psychological description as something true to them too in a version of the ubiquitous looping effects in popular research; people come to see themselves described in the research and configure their own subjectivity in line with what they read and hear.

The supposedly more progressive forms of psychology usually simply operate by way of other permutations of the same oppositions. For example, much qualitative research is very canny with ‘method’, with psychologists either claiming to use ‘mixed methods’ or carrying out qualitative research according to the same assumptions as the positivists. When they do opt fully for qualitative approaches, and try to disconnect themselves from positivism, they often come to think that all they should do is carefully describe very ‘local’ contexts, and avoid any claims about broader patterns, not, we are told, extrapolate from their data.

There are, in short, many false alternatives on offer inside psychology, many apparent ways out that simply end up being more alluring ways back into the discipline again, and the twists and turns that lead a psychologist through the maze of these permutations often lead people to switch perspective, and to do that in such a way that leads them to adhere all the more strongly to one they now think is the right one. The process of puzzling leads them to be all the more convinced by the path they are taking because they think they have succeeded in getting off the wrong path. The problem is that psychology is a maze of wrong paths, so what are we to do? What is to be done?

If we are to get anywhere we need to tackle these oppositions, to as it were ‘de-construct’ them, and that means being careful to conceptually and politically rework the terms of the opposition in ways that are useful to us.

We need some notion of ‘method’, but a method that is grounded in theory, crucially in a theory of what psychology as a discipline is. Careful description and analysis of psychology is the kind of approach that we see in accounts of contemporary psychologisation and histories of the formation of the discipline as something that reflected European and then transatlantic US-centred colonial concerns with the understanding and management of populations and the rendering of these populations into well-behaved citizens and obedient workers.

Our ‘data’ here is readily present to us in the psychology textbooks and journal articles. This ‘data’ is not a direct reflection of the world, but is constructed according to the agendas of funding bodies and psychology departments and, in some cases, of state organisations. This attention to the ‘data’ as something constructed – psychological data as the stuff that is produced by psychologists to make the world conform to a psychological vision of the world – enables us to step back from psychology and to methodically deconstruct psychology as a discipline.

We need a notion of ‘pattern’ of some kind that is attentive to ‘experience’, and we need to develop concepts that block the way the opposition works inside psychology, to disrupt the opposition. There are already concepts outside psychology, at the edges of psychology that we can borrow in order to do this. For example, the notion of ‘standpoint’ from feminist and Marxist theory takes seriously the experience of the oppressed, of those who are subject to the operations of power (Henwood et al., 1997).

Women see operations of power because they live them, experience them and can come to notice them, speak about them from the standpoint of being a woman. And the working class, those who have to sell their labour power to live, live in power, experience what exploitation is and can come to notice that and speak about it from the standpoint of the working class. Against psychology, which usually speaks from the standpoint of power, we look to those who are not represented and who, from their standpoint, notice things about the world, and about the place of psychology in the world, that we psychologists, if we are psychologists, cannot see. This is what drives the decolonisation of Western disciplines so effectively, including the decolonisation of psychology.

We need a notion of ‘universality’, but one that is very different from the supposedly ‘universal’ picture of the world that simply corresponds to contemporary globalisation, and corresponds to the globalisation of psychology as such. Universality is not a combination of the different local experiences of the world that psychologists think they are gathering and simply re-presenting in their different supposedly empirical projects. Rather, ‘universality’ is something that emerges in the activity of deconstruction and decolonisation, a different form of knowledge from the standpoint of the oppressed.

Conclusions

Psychology claims to map the world, but, as with every colonial project, it maps it in a particular kind of way that is designed, either deliberately and explicitly or unwittingly and covertly, to confirm that the map is a correct representation, that it corresponds to the territory itself. It does not. The map is not the territory. We need to oppose any attempt to pin down what we are as human beings with fake-scientific specifications of what we can and cannot do, and instead develop a method that looks for patterns of resistance and opens to what is universal in our experience (Parker, 2022).

We need to refuse these maps, refuse psychology, go into uncharted territory, and to do something very different from simply producing more of the same kind of old colonial knowledge. So, the networks that we create, and the links between different forms of local knowledge, and the methods we adopt have to enable us to work together in this more deeply universal critical project.

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Ian Parker is co-founder and co-director (with Erica Burman) of the Discourse Unit and Managing Editor of Annual Review of Critical Psychology. He is an anti-psychologist, practising psychoanalyst, and revolutionary Marxist.