Abstract

This is a book about a kind of bitterness, one which shares a number of philosophical reflexes with the drive that made the old biologists search for the inexplicable spark of life, to paraphrase Collingwood, “at vanishing-point” (1992, 227). Much as the riddle of life haunted the philosophically inclined biologist, the mystery of mind became the make-or-break bet of the psychologist. To a certain extent, this was a bet that human minds were indeed mysterious, and that therefore adequate explanation was long overdue. The emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline and its obsessive quest to emulate the successful natural sciences is, at least in part, the story of frustrated attempts to study the mind, as it were, “anatomically.” If biology has for long been in the position of putting aside worries about the evasiveness of life, psychology, even in its recent history, has been more prone to hesitations about its subject matter and method. As a first determination, what is explored here is this endemic fragility. Why is it so with psychology? Perhaps mind is more mysterious or resistant to scientific investigation. Or maybe its slipperiness is persistent for other reasons—reasons that tend to be ignored or downplayed once the investigative machinery of the psychologist is set in motion. The central notion explored here is that of “margins of psychology”. The paradigmatic human subject in psychology is the typical human being: mature, in possession of at least one language, reasonably competent in the social and cultural matters characteristic of her position in the world, more or less normal relative to the standards of the community to which she belongs. Admittedly a loose description in an endlessly problematic language, but this is a claim not about, say, the statistical fact of the matter in psychology (e.g., number of publications on such topics) or even the factual history of the field (something like Kuhnian paradigmatic problem). It is an observation about the central position occupied in psychology, as landmark and measure of things, by the concept of a normal person. It is not, to be clear, that psychologists work on anything like the “problem of the normal person,” but that they work in a field organized by this concept, with explicit or implicit expectations about what people do or would do, what they think or would think—and so on. This central anchor determines a series of peripheries or margins. The marginal is not simply different or distant from the paradigm of the normal person. What isolates individuals we can consider marginal in the intended sense, what makes them special, is precisely their isolation from the surrounding culture and its affordances of meaning-making. The nonverbal infant and the (psychotic) madman, though in vastly different predicaments, are almost outside language, community, and culture; these human beings come in and out of view at the horizon of (psychological) intelligibility. The first is not yet at home in it, the second no longer. This confronts us with a problem of understanding, which is not a new problem, but which has renewed relevance given the attempts of psychology to say something illuminating about such subjects. At the root of this problem is the tension between (psychological) intelligibility, which depends on public and culturally embedded practices and concepts, and the limitations of the infant and the madman, who cannot act as parts of the open and structured world which makes understanding possible, even if they are not completely foreign or detached from this world. This tension destabilizes explanatory discourse, to the extent that it is rooted in our common interpretive practices.