From milgram to zimbardo: the double birth of postwar psychology/psychologization

Milgram’s series of obedience experiments and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment are probably the two best-known psychological studies. As such, they can be understood as central to the broad process of psychologization in the postwar era. This article will consider the extent to which this process of psychologization can be understood as a simple overflow from the discipline of psychology to wider society or whether, in fact, this process is actually inextricably connected to the science of psychology as such. In so doing, the article will argue that Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s studies are best usefully understood as twin experiments. Milgram’s paradigm of a psychology which explicitly draws its subject into the frame of its own discourse can be said to be the precondition of Zimbardo’s claim that his experiment offers a window onto the crucible of human behaviour. This will be analysed by drawing on the Lacanian concepts of acting out and passage à l’acte. The question then posed is: if both Milgram and Zimbardo claim that their work has emancipatory dimensions — a claim maintained within mainstream psychology — does a close reading of the studies not then reveal that psychology is, rather, the royal road to occurrences such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? The drama of a psychology which is fundamentally based on a process of psychologization is that it turns its subjects into homo sacer of psychological discourse

Psychologization or the discontents of psychoanalysis

This article explores the possibility of a debate between psychoanalysis and the human sciences and, in particular, between psychoanalysis and psychology. Psychoanalysis's particular view on subjectivity values fiction (truth having the structure of fiction) as a constitutive dimension of personal and social reality. In contrast, the mainstream psy-sciences threaten to remain caught in the attempt to unmask things as they really are (eg, hard neurobiological reality), thus risking losing the subjective dimension as such. Drawing on examples of phenomena of psychologization (in Reality TV and in contemporary discourses of parent and child education), the author spells out the different, but eventually and necessarily intertwined, responses of psychoanalysis and psychology to modernity and modern subjectivity

Somatization vs. Psychologization of Emotional Distress: A Paradigmatic Example for Cultural Psychopathology

This paper describes the developing area of cultural psychopathology, an interdisciplinary field of study focusing on the ways in which cultural factors contribute to the experience and expression of psychological distress. We begin by outlining two approaches, often competing, in order to provide a background to some of the issues that complicate the field. The main section of the paper is devoted to a discussion of depression in Chinese culture as an example of the types of questions that can be studied. Here, we start with a review of the epidemiological literature, suggesting low rates of depression in China, and move to the most commonly cited explanation, namely that Chinese individuals with depression present this distress in a physical way. Different explanations of this phenomenon, known as somatization, are explored and reconceptualized according to an increasingly important model for cross-cultural psychologists: the cultural constitution of the self. We close by discussing some of the contributions, both theoretical and methodological, that can be made by cross-cultural psychologists to researchers in cultural psychopathology

Double trouble: psychology and psychologization under the spotlight

[BOOK REVIEW]De Vos, Jan (2013) Psychologization and the subject of late modernity. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-30846-6 hbk. Pages xi + 189. Jan de Vos’ starting point in the Psychologization and the subject of late modernity is the gap between being and knowledge. In other words, between how people are as psychological subjects and how they could be as psychologized subjects. He argues, as he has elsewhere, that psychologization is not simply a spillover of psychology into society but that psychology is psychologization. Psychologization is psychology’s paradigm

Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance

[Excerpt] Since the mid-1990s, as China has downsized and privatized its state-owned enterprises, severe unemployment has created a new class of urban poor and widespread social and psychological disorders. In Unknotting the Heart, Jie Yang examines this understudied group of workers and their experiences of being laid off, counseled, and then reoriented to the market economy. Using fieldwork from reemployment programs, community psychosocial work, and psychotherapy training sessions in Beijing between 2002 and 2013, Yang highlights the role of psychology in state-led interventions to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment. She pays particular attention to those programs that train laid-off workers in basic psychology and then reemploy them as informal “counselors” in their capacity as housemaids and taxi drivers. These laid-off workers are filling a niche market created by both economic restructuring and the shortage of professional counselors in China, helping the government to defuse intensified class tension and present itself as a nurturing and kindly power. In reality, Yang argues, this process creates both new political complicity and new conflicts, often along gender lines. Women are forced to use the moral virtues and work ethics valued under the former socialist system, as well as their experiences of overcoming depression and suffering, as resources for their new psychological care work. Yang focuses on how the emotions, potentials, and “hearts” of these women have become sites of regulation, market expansion, and political imagination

Hauntology or the return of the real man: edging the Žižek-Laclau controversy on populism

Looking at today’s academization of everyday life – academic knowledge having become central in mediating the presence of the human being with himself, the others and the world – it seems that academia has become the home-base of post-modern man. Academia is however no viable habitat, the (post)modern subject is pushed to the search to rejoin real life and be a real human being. In this paper it is argued that this is centrally related to the topic of ideology. The dispute between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek on populism is re-read in this light as it ultimately boils down to a dispute on what real man is. Laclau’s theory, missing the dimension of the uncanny and the truth shall thus be contrasted with Žižek’s recourse to the idea of hauntology as the latter is the basis for Žižek’s reasserting of what we could call the rock of class struggle. Class struggle furthermore turns out to be also the issue at stake in that other debate of Žižek with Yannis Stavrakakis. In the concluding part the viability of Žižekian hauntology is questioned given the impossible politization of psychoanalysis and its skandalons

The Psychiatrization of Poverty: Rethinking the Mental Health-Poverty Nexus

The positive association between ‘mental illness’ and poverty is one of the most well established in psychiatric epidemiology. Yet, there is little conclusive evidence about the nature of this relationship. Generally, explanations revolve around the idea of a vicious cycle, where poverty may cause mental ill health, and mental ill health may lead to poverty. Problematically, much of the literature overlooks the historical, social, political, and cultural trajectories of constructions of both poverty and ‘mental illness’. Laudable attempts to explore the social determinants of mental health sometimes take recourse to using and reifying psychiatric diagnostic categories that individualize distress and work to psychiatrically reconfigure ‘symptoms’ of oppression, poverty, and inequality as ‘symptoms’ of ‘mental illness’. This raises the paradoxical issue that the very tools that are used to research the relationship between poverty and mental health may prevent recognition of the complexity of that relationship. Looking at the mental health–poverty nexus through a lens of psychiatrization (intersecting with medicalization, pathologization, and psychologization), this paper recognizes the need for radically different tools to trace the messiness of the multiple relationships between poverty and distress. It also implies radically different interventions into mental health and poverty that recognize the landscapes in which lived realities of poverty are embedded, the political economy of psychiatric diagnostic and prescribing practices, and ultimately to address the systemic causes of poverty and inequality