Speaker
Bo Wang, Nanjing University
Title
How to Analyse Psychology from the Perspective of Political Economy
Abstract
I am trying to analyse psychology in the context of political economy at three levels: 1) At the ontological level what is psyche, how is its concrete content embedded in given social and historical process; 2) At the epistemological and methodological level - how to understand psychology in the horizon of historical epistemology generated from political economy; 3) At the ethical level to clarify how subjectivity is possible and from which point should our critique of psychology begin. Characterized by the dualism of subjective metaphysics, psychological studies have been dominated by the object dimension which emphasizes objective knowledge based on experience and positive verification and the subject dimension which centers on human values and concerns. Without the medium of political economy, both dimensions have developed psychology abstractly and one-sidedly, resulting in veiling the fundamental issues that what is psyche and to what degree can psyche and psychology appear to us, claiming authentic knowledge can be attained by sensuous intuition and changing psychology into an ideology which helps maintain the status quo or an idealism which promotes the abstract subjectivity without history. Psychology is always psychology in given modes of production, it depends on to what degree given production can bring the psychological objects into our image of world. This kind of psychological image decided by given modes of production is neither completely computable cognition, feeling and will identified by scientific psychology, nor the potential or value of subjectivity flaunted by humanistic psychology. To be exact, it is the "objective relations of intentional activities" mediated by given historical and real material production. To sum up, psychology in the context of political economy began to reflect on how the traditional psychology which is always boasting its quality of strict science regards the mind and behaviour as "naturalnessoid" and studies them from the outside and produce general principles which are entrusted to "describe, forecast and control" human beings themselves. This reflexivity is precisely the necessary basis and starting point of all future possible psychologies in the more and more hyperreal and psychologized world.