This essential book critically examines the various ways in which Eastern spiritual traditions have been typically stripped of their spiritual roots, content and context, to be more readily assimilated into secular Western frames of Psychology. Beginning with the colonial histories of Empire, the author draws from the 1960s Counterculture and the subsequent romanticising and idealising of the East. Cohen explores how Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist traditions have been gradually transformed into forms of Psychology, Psychotherapy and Self-Help, undergoing processes of 'modernisation' (...) and secularisation until their respective cosmologies had been successfully reinterpreted and reimagined. An important component of this psychologisation is the accompanying commodification of Eastern spiritual practices, including the mass-marketing of mindfulness and meditation as part of the burgeoning well-being industry. Also presenting emerging voices of resistance from within Eastern spiritual traditions, the book ends with a chapter on Transpersonal Psychology, showing a path for how to gradually move away from colonisation and towards collaboration. Engaging with the 'mindfulness movement' and other practices assimilated by Western culture, this is fascinating reading for students and academics in psychology, philosophy and religious studies, as well as mindfulness practitioners. (shrink)

This paper puts the famous story of Jekyll and Hyde to work for a specific analytic purpose. The question of responsibility for crime, complicated by the divided subjectivity implicit in Mr. Hyde’s appearance, and illuminated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grasp of contemporary psychiatric, evolutionary and medical thought as promising new technologies for effecting a distinction between criminality and innocence, is key to the interest of the story. I argue that Jekyll and Hyde serves as a powerful metaphor both for specifically (...) late Victorian perplexities about criminality and criminal responsibility, and for more persistently troubling questions about the legitimacy of and practical basis for criminalization. A close reading of the story illustrates the complex mix of elements bearing on criminal responsibility-attribution, and—incidentally—helps to explain what is wrong with the influential argument that, by the end of the nineteenth Century, attributions of responsibility in English criminal law already rested primarily and unambiguously on factual findings about the defendant’s state of mind. Far from representing the triumph of a practice of responsibility-attribution grounded in the assessment of whether the defendant’s capacities were fully engaged, I argue that the terrain of mental derangement defences in late nineteenth Century England helps us to understand that longer-standing patterns of moral evaluation of character remained central to the criminal process. And precisely because ‘character’ remained key to the institutional effort to distinguish criminality and innocence, the ‘terror’ of Stevenson’s story resides in its questioning of whether either scientific knowledge or moral evaluation of character can provide a stable basis for attributions of responsibility. In conclusion, I will also suggest that Stevenson’s tale can help us to make sense of the resurgence of overtly ‘character-based’ practices of responsibility attribution in contemporary Britain and the United States, which themselves reflect a renewed crisis of confidence in our ability to effect a ‘dissociation’ between criminality and innocence. (shrink)

The long standing reign of psychology as the privileged partner of education has, arguably, now been superseded by the neurosciences. Given that this helped to drive the emergent field of neuroeducation, it is crucial to ask what changes in education, if anything does in fact change, when the hitherto hegemonic psychologising discourse is substituted for a neurological one. The primary contention of this paper is that with the neuro-turn a process of “neurologisation” has also been initiated, which can be analysed (...) by taking into account its genealogical predecessor, psychologisation. In doing so, I argue, one ultimately discerns a primordial incompatibility between education and neuroscience, one that can be traced back to the fundamental and problematic reflexivity of modern subjectivity itself, which the discipline of psychology was never able to wholly resolve. From here, I proceed with the argument that while the eagerness of the psy-sciences to embrace neuroscience testifies to how much psychology needs neurology, the neurosciences are structurally incapable of disconnecting from the paradigms of the psy-sciences. Following on from this proposition, other strong/weak factors are brought into the equation: strong/weak nature, strong/weak culture, strong/weak subjectivity and, most pertinently, strong/weak education. Finally, the critical question becomes: if education in itself needs to take recourse to both the psy-sciences and the neurosciences, then how can we begin to account for the fact that these sciences invariably end up becoming captured within educational discourses themselves; that is, the fact that teachers, parents, and pupils themselves are taught the key insights of neuropsychology. (shrink)

Conversation analytic research has advanced understanding of the psychotherapeutic process by understanding how psychotherapy is organised over time in and through interaction between clients and therapists. This study progresses knowledge in this area by examining how psychological accounts of experience are progressively developed across a range of helping relationships. Data include: approximately 30 h of psychotherapy sessions involving trainee therapists; approximately 15 h of psychotherapy demonstration sessions involving expert therapists; and approximately 30 h of everyday conversations involving close friends or (...) family members. This article reports an analysis of techniques that are used to bring together two experiences that were discussed separately, to proffer a candidate connection between them. This proffering of candidate connections was recurrently used in psychotherapy. If confirmed by a client, a proffered connection could be used to develop a psychological account of a client’s experiences, which could then warrant some psychological intervention. In contrast, the proffering of connections was observed in only one of the everyday conversations included in the current study, where it was used to develop psychological accounts of experience. This shows that although proffering candidate connections is an everyday interactional practice, it appears to be used with greater frequency in psychotherapy, to advance its specific institutional aims. (shrink)

Nowadays there is a renewed interest in philosophy as art-of-living. Several prominent authors have pointed out the return of the notion of the good life in philosophy, particularly understood as a form of normative ethics. Questions such as: how should I live have been taken up as a resistance against the dominances of a neo-liberal discourse in all areas of life. This paper is concerned with this renewed interest in philosophy as art-of-living and the form of education that supports this. (...) The main idea is that the commitment from which we live is a subject of change. This way, art-of-living comprises the possibility and the effort to lead on’s life in a reflective way, and not to let it simply go by. Historically this has been connected to the process of becoming educated. In this paper I will take a closer look at this renewed interest in philosophy as the art-of-living by contrasting two different readings of philosophy as the art-of-living. One that is inspired by Oscar Brenifier and one that is inspired by the late Foucault. (shrink)

A rapidly emerging hegemonic neuro-culture and a booming neural subjectivity signal the entry point for an inquiry into the status of the signifier neuro as a universal passe-partout. The wager of this paper is that the various appropriations of the neurosciences in the media and in academia itself point to something essential, if not structural, in connection with both the discipline of the neurosciences and the current socio-cultural and ideological climate. Starting from the case of neuroeducation, the genealogy of the (...) neurological turn is linked to the history of psychology and its inextricable bond with processes of psychologisation. If the neurological turn risks not merely neglecting the dimension of critique, but also obviating its possibility, then revivifying a psy-critique might be necessary in order to understand today’s neural subjectivity and its place within current biopolitics. (shrink)

In our everyday psychologising, emotions figure large. When we are trying to explain and predict what a person says and does, that person’s emotions are very much among the objects of our thoughts. Despite this, emotions do not figure large in our philosophical reconstruction of everyday psychological practice—in philosophical accounts of the rational production and control of behaviour. Barry Smith has noted this point: We frequently mention people’s emotional sates when assessing how they behave, when trying to understand why they (...) say and do the things they say and do, and when deciding how to deal with them. A large part of our awareness of others and our ability to make sense of them depends on their emotional make-up and our appreciation of how this affects their thoughts and actions. All of this is missing from the standard accounts of folk psychology, and the key question is why? (2002, 111-2). Before beginning to answer to Smith’s question, I want to say more to characterise the approach in philosophical psychology which he is questioning. There are many detailed philosophical accounts of the rational production and control of behaviour. My aim here isn’t to examine these details, but to characterise a certain species of philosophical psychology—one which holds that one can explain the rational production and control of behaviour in terms of a narrow set of mental state types: belief, desire (and perhaps a few others: perception or intention). Hence my label for this species: ‘Humean psychology’. The orthodox Humean view is that rational agency can be explained adequately by appeal to the agent’s beliefs and desires. So, to borrow an example from Davidson (1978), we can explain a person’s adding salt to the stew by citing her desire that the will stew taste better and her belief that if.. (shrink)

If faraway peoples have different ideas from our own, is this because they have different mentalities? Did our remote ancestors lack logic? The notion of distinct mentalities has been used extensively by historians to describe and explain cultural diversity. Professor Lloyd rejects this psychologising talk of mentalities and proposes an alternative approach, which takes as its starting point the social contexts of communication. Discussing apparently irrational beliefs and behaviour, he shows how different forms of thought coexist in a single culture (...) but within conventionally defined contexts. (shrink)

The present paper theorises white discomfort as not an individual psychologised emotion, but rather as a social and political affect that is part of the production and maintenance of white colonial structures and practices. Therefore, it is suggested that white discomfort cannot be critically addressed merely in pedagogic terms and conditions within schools and universities. By foregrounding white discomfort in broader terms, the aim of the paper is to provide a more holistic and dynamic account which opens up a realm (...) that situates the pedagogisation of white discomfort within the broader decolonising project of disrupting white colonial structures and practices. The paper calls for both a decolonising and a critical affective approach to pedagogies of discomfort that would focus on examining and addressing strategically how white discomfort comes to be experienced and dismantled within broader affective, material and discursive assemblages of race, racism and whiteness. (shrink)

The category of sympathy marks a number of basic divisions in early modern approaches to action explanations, whether for human agency or for change in the wider natural world. Some authors were critical of using sympathy to explain change. They call such principles “unintelligible” or assume they involve “mysterious” action at a distance. Others, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, appeal to sympathy to capture natural phenomena, or to supply a backbone to their metaphysics. Here I discuss (...) how concerns about sympathetic actions form at least a partial background for differing seventeenth-century conceptions of what it is to explain action. I argue that critics of sympathy generally insist on an “atomistic” approach to action explanation, which makes primitively relational phenomena come out as problematic. Proponents of sympathy, by contrast, allow for a more holistic approach to action explanation, which allows for such basic connections. Hence, divergent attitudes toward sympathetic action in part explain differences in approaches to explanation. I conclude by showing how some of these core concerns fade into the background when in the eighteenth-century sympathy gets psychologised and individualised. (shrink)

Taking a new look at the language of ‘religious experience’, the authors in this contribution take into review this aspect in the current theological discussion, and in the church pew, asking the question: Does George Lindbeck’s criticism of the experiential-expressive model of religion still have something to say to us? Firstly, Lindbeck is reviewed and recouped. Then, religious experience and its commodification are discussed, at the hand also of the heritage from Schleiermacher onwards on experience. Taking a position within the (...) post-modern, relativist, critical realist and pragmatist possibilities, a community-embedded sense of truth is concluded to without sacrificing the possibility of universalising claims. Is it possible, though, within the cultural reflex towards psychologised faith to retain a historically oriented depth? (shrink)

This article takes an evolutionary “reverse engineering” standpoint on Homo discens, learning man, to track down the mechanisms that played a pivotal role in the natural selection of human being. The approach is “evolutionary sociological”—as opposed to gene-centred or psychologising—and utilises notions of co-evolutionary organism–environment transactions and niche construction. These are compatible with a Deweyan theory of action, which entails that in action one cannot but learn and one can only learn in action. Special attention is paid to apprentice-like learning-by-doing (...) peculiar to human socio-cultural niches since the Pleistocene, which has permitted each subsequent generation to learn the many habits and skills needed in utilising the affordances of action that constitute their ecological niche. Affordances and actions have changed over the history of human–environment transactions, but the core mechanisms of human learning have not changed much. It is increasingly important to appreciate these mechanisms now in the global age “knowledge society,” which is in a way similar to the Pleistocene era: characterised by uncertainty and life-determining problem-situations without any ready-made solutions, it calls for capacities to adapt to changing circumstances, and thus apprentice-like learning in action supported by savvy epistemological engineering of learning environments. (shrink)

This article analyses the relations that teachers and school leaders establish with themselves and with others—especially those who would seek to govern them—through the professional and personal–professional activities that increasingly accompany pedagogical and administrative practice today. Specifically, the article seeks to analyse the conditions under which such ‘ethical-governmental’ relations have become possible and to clarify the lines of power, truth and ethics that are in play within them. In this way, it is argued, their intelligibility may be recovered; their contingencies (...) disclosed. The article first posits a non-psychologised, ‘enfolded’ notion of the self on which analysis rests before turning to an analytics of government of the conditions themselves. An important element within this entanglement of diverse events, discourses, practices and foldings is the ensemble of policies and practices developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. The article argues that the programmes of this national agency are a salient and widespread force for acting upon teachers’ and school leaders’ self-constitution as a subject of their own actions—a subject which, in consequence, is enjoined to be more agile, self-reliant, engaged and entrepreneurial than its ‘routine-bound’ predecessors; a subject we describe as the ‘adaptive professional’. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell's 1903 masterpiece "The Principles of Mathematics" places great emphasis on the need to separate propositions from psychological items such as thoughts. In 1919 Russell explicitly retracts this view, however, and defines propositions as "psychological occurrences". These psychological occurrences are held by Russell to be mental images. In this paper, I seek to explain this radical change of heart. I argue that Russell's re-psychologising of the proposition in 1919 can only be understood against the background of his struggle with (...) the problem of the unity of the proposition in earlier work. Once this is recognized, and the solution to the problem offered by the 1919 theory is appreciated, new light is also shed on Russell's naturalism. I go on to compare Russell's psychological "picture theory" with the vehemently anti-psychological picture theory of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" and suggest that, once the background of the dispute is brought into clearer focus, Russell's position can be seen to have many advantages over its more celebrated rival. (shrink)

Digital media seem to be marked by process. The digital image itself is produced by software processes and the constant flux of code. Further this, interaction with digital systems involves a constant process by which a so-called 'user' comes into contact with various machinic occasions. It seems that in light of these processes it is impossible to maintain an aesthetic or media theory that pictures a self-contained and psychologised subject interacting with a static and inert object. How then can we (...) begin to think about digital aesthetics through a process philosophy rather than the traditional and reductive subject/object distinction found in so much aesthetic theory? This paper seeks to address this problem by enacting Alfred Whitehead's process philosophy, informed by Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers and Steve Shaviro and work it through several examples of recent manifestations of interactive media art, including work by Martin Wattenberg, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. I work Whitehead's process philosophy through these artworks to illustrate the performative nature of software processes and the manner in which these processes affect the aesthetics of interaction. I also use these works to illustrate a concept of interaction that privileges process and events rather than a concept that focuses upon an individual human user. In this paper I propose to view the 'user' as a set of occasions – as a particular condition that is produced by various user-initiated actions – rather than an enduring subject that is able to distance herself from the object of aesthetic contemplation. By doing this I move toward a theory in which user-occasions, machine-occasions and their interpenetration actualise the aesthetics of media art. Whitehead allows me to think outside of the binary oppositions that divide the world into knower/known or subject/object relationships. Throughout the argument I unpack Whiteheadian concepts such as actual entities, the unison of immediate becoming and, in general, the primacy of the event, bringing these concepts to bear on individual case studies of interactive media art. Whitehead's general thesis is that materiality and permanence are created by a continual process. Viewing the digital encounter through this theoretical framework I position the aesthetic experience of interaction as that which emerges from the fluctuations of process. The event of interaction is a necessarily hybrid process in which human occasions become supplemented by technology and the aesthetic event becomes innately coupled to the processes of the machine. In this paper I am not interested in any notion of consciousness or a psychologised human 'user', rather I am interested in a particular condition that takes place as user-initiated processes work with machine-initiated processes. This is because, for Whitehead, process comes before consciousness; it is the process of actual entities that prompt the consciousness into being. In this paper I thus propose interaction with digital systems as the commingling of contemporary actual occasions, shifting emphasis from a conscious human user and instead focusing on the process of the encounter that precedes this conscious experience. (shrink)

Le nouvel et dernier ouvrage de Jean-Pierre Cléro consacre à la philosophie de Jeremy Bentham est intéressant à plus d’un titre. Tout d’abord, il unifie et bénéficie de l’ensemble des textes et réflexions que Jean-Pierre Cléro a pu élaborer depuis de nombreuses années sur les différents aspects de la philosophie benthamienne. Ensuite, il débute habilement par une relecture particulièrement vive et intéressante de la vie de Bentham. Loin de se contenter de la classique biographie, Jean-Pierre Cléro propose une relecture des (...) différents évènements qui, selon lui, ont structuré la vie de Bentham tout en délivrant des clés qui permettront de mieux comprendre l’évolution de sa pensée. Sans sombrer dans la facilité d’une « psychologisation biographique », il s’agit bien plutôt de comprendre l’auteur à travers des éléments marquants de sa vie. A ce titre, les phrases d’ouverture et de clôture de cette partie biographique sont particulièrement éclairantes et intéressantes quant aux possibili... (shrink)

The main aspects of interdisciplinary ICT technology of educational process based on the concept of functional asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres, which reflect space-time asymmetry of the Universe and constitute a certain psychophysiological focus of human organism, are presented in the article. Its urgency stems from the tendencies of contemporary world, evolving towards the information society and influencing the development of modern education, becoming increasingly multimedia-rich and psychologised. The authors consider the major peculiarities of cognitive strategies of brain’s hemispheres, which (...) should be taken into account in modern educational systems that apply versatile multimedia means in teaching different academic disciplines. It is shown that training information offered to the students can be differentiated by the right and left video sequences, which corresponds to hemispheric information processing strategies and promotes the synergetic state of synchronization of the hemispheres functions. And the encephalographic studies show that such functional synchronization, revealing the medication state of human brain, presupposes the integration of two information processing strategies, leading to harmonization of the processes of the first and second signalling systems. The algorithms of the most effective influence of multimedia presentations of teaching materials on a student based on the concept of functional asymmetry of human brain are substantiated. These algorithms presuppose combining the "left" and "right" information in such a way that the volumes of two types of information would form a harmonious proportion. (shrink)

This article discusses three different conceptions of ethics within contemporary feminist theory and how they depict the connection between ethics and politics. The first position, represented by Wendy Brown, mainly describes ethics as a sort of anti-political moralism and apolitical individualism, and hence as a turn away from politics. The second position, represented by Saba Mahmood, discusses ethics as a precondition for politics, while the third position, represented by Vikki Bell, depicts it as the ‘external consciousness’ of the political, and (...) as destabilising political discourse by confronting it with singularity and ‘radical’ difference. Though they represent distinct positions, the article argues, all three suffer from a tendency to reify ethics by failing to give a contextualised account of it. The article then introduces the ethical perspective of Judith Butler, arguing that she – while offering both a transhistorical and a contextualised dimension – tends to psychologise and individualise ethics and politics. The last part of the article introduces Terry Eagleton and what, in a Marxist vein, could be called a ‘materialist ethics’ or an ‘ethics of socialism’, and argues that this way of framing the relationship between ethics and politics provides a solution to the trap of reification identified in the three described positions. This part also discusses how Eagleton’s theory relates to – but also differs from – arguments made by Butler. One advantage of Eagleton’s work, the article argues, is that it does not psychologise and individualise ethics and politics as Butler’s work does. (shrink)

« Notre science nous vient de l’ineffable qui vit en nous et qui nous donne la parole juste au sujet de l’Homme et de Dieu. Ce livre nous invite à le reconnaître en dessinant des noces heureuses et créatrices entre l’inconscient tel que les hommes le pensent et cet inconscient de l’inconscient qu’est le feu divin. » Bertrand Vergely Les chrétiens se retrouvent tiraillés entre les arguments scientistes ou psychologisants du monde matérialiste dans lequel ils vivent et l’intuition profonde qui (...) les attache à leur foi. Les arguments de la psychanalyse ne peuvent être balayés d’un trait. Si la foi traverse le miroir de l’inconscient telle l Alice de Lewis Carroll, elle va découvrir bien des aspects qui l obligeront à se dépouiller de ses traces psychiques infantiles ou névrotiques. Deux conceptions du monde et deux vécus s interpellent. Leur rencontre, loin d’annuler l’une au profit de l’autre, peut conduire le lecteur à un approfondissement vivant qui modifiera ses représentations de la foi et de la psychanalyse et plus encore leur vécu. La foi décapée par la psychanalyse se vit alors comme écoute du vivant merveilleux, retrouvant ses antiques racines comme la modernité de certaines des thèses du philosophe Bertrand Vergely, qui a écrit la préface de cet ouvrage. (shrink)

The scheme of concepts we employ in daily life to explain intentional behaviour form a belief-desire model, in which motivating states are sorted into two suitably broad categories. The BD model embeds a philosophy of action, i.e. a set of assumptions about the ontology of motivation with subsequent restrictions on psychologising and norms of practical reason. A comprehensive critique of those assumptions and implications is offered in this work, and various criticisms of the model are met. The model’s predictive and (...) explanatory value exploits realistic notions of beliefs and desires as inner states underlying behavioural patterns. It is argued that the popular explication that beliefs and desires differ in their “direction of fit” is insufficient and inescapably normative. Essential to the model is the causal role given to desires. ‘Desire’ is therefore focussed. A dispositional and functional characterisation of desires is compatible with an eliminative view of dispositions. These views taken together do not exclude regarding desires as causes. Desires have propositional content. Content is a feature of desire’s dispositionality, and thereby causally relevant. This functional characterisation of content allows for non-linguistic content. The phenomenal conception of desire is criticised and diagnosed. A theme defended in various ways throughout the work is that desires mostly are unknown to agents and that the agent is in a less privileged position when it comes to analysis of his own motivational states, than e.g. people close to him. There are formal and empirical reasons to be pessimistic about agents’ abilities to make reliable predictions about their own intentional behaviour. The BD model’s concept of ‘intention’ is discussed and compared with non-reductive views of intentions. Criticisms of the common view that David Hume defends a BD model are presented, but it is argued that the BD interpretation of Hume is plausible, although this reading requires important qualifications in order to preserve internal consistency. The BD model leaves room for focussing attention, making foregrounded practical judgements, higher order desiring and other activities affecting one’s decision process. However, these various forms of deliberation in many cases are overrated. Three suggested norms of internal structural rationality are criticised in favour of simple Humean instrumentalism about practical reason. That position implies that criticism of other people’s ultimate ends is not a matter of internal rationality, but an inevitably social practice; it is dependent upon our concern for others, our view of their social roles and our own intrinsic desires. (shrink)

Non-factive representing is what makes room for truth and falsehood. In the ontologically central aspect of the verb it comes in two forms: allorepresenting (saying-that), and autorepresenting (taking-that). Each form relates thinkers to thinkables in its proprietary way. Autorepresenting invites a certain sort of misunderstanding. It may seem to call for enabling in a particular determinate way. Just here psychologism despite oneself may strike. Allorepresenting rests on capacities of a different sort. It relates itself, and thereby its author, to a (...) thinkable in what seems at first sight a manifestly different way than does autrorepresenting, one perhaps less likely to invite psychologism. In doing this it throws light on autorepresenting which, if rightly understood, I suggest, may undo the compulsion to psychologise this last. Armed with this tool I suggest a better picture of what autorepresenting is. (shrink)

Never like today concerns about masculinities and the implications of being-a-man had been so present in diverse public life scenarios. We witness the multiplication and propagation of social agendas, programs and pedagogies around masculinity. Psychological practices and discourses, as well as their means for cultural propagation, have an important presence in current understandings of masculinity and articulate a language for its intervention. In this text we explore this scenario through the notions of psychologization and therapeutic culture. We trace certain inflections (...) in the development of masculinity as an object in the field of psychological dispositives for knowledge production and individual management. We focus our analysis on two fields: a) the development of the dominant or canonical psychological science; and b) the expansion and popularization of psi knowledge in self-help culture. (shrink)

El artículo asume que el complejo proceso privatizador y descentralizador que vivió el sistema educativo chileno desde el año 1981 ha tenido consecuencias en el sujeto que se educa, a través de problemáticas que se concentran en los actores educativos –específicamente los estudiantes–. Estas problemáticas se han definido como la “psicologización” de los problemas del sistema educativo, la supuesta “clientelización” de los alumnos y el lugar que le cabe a La Familia como figura preponderante en el proceso privatizador. Las consecuencias (...) de esto dicen relación con la consolidación del sistema privatizado en la forma de enfrentar las subjetividades y, muy especialmente, en el quiebre del rol público que le cabe a la escuela y a la educación. (shrink)