Utopia and Psychological Theory

Abstract

The following essay argues that the influence of a utopian ideology renders aspects of some psychologies inappropriate for the study of human beings. Utopianism in psychology functions as a totalizing discourse, a manner of speaking about society and human beings that tends towards homogeneity and totalitarian thought and decontextualizes human beings by seeking universal laws which attempt to reduce either behavior or cognition to totally explainable processes. Decontextualization is in some measure a function of the utopian legacy in natural science that began as a philosophy of pansophia, characterized in its goal of absolute knowledge and reflected in the goal of prediction and control of the environment. Theories that underwrite behaviorism and cognitivism are arguably utopian discourses. The legacy of utopian thinking in psychology defines the human being as a finite set of malleable structures which can be changed according to a prior definition of the `good', the `efficient' or fully `rational' person. This essay suggests that decontextualization, reductionistic description, essentialism and a quest for homogeneity are the result of the utopian legacy, and concludes that recontextualization of the subject should be sought by psychological research and therapeutic practice. This amounts to the rediscovery of human beings in the context of the lived world, as well as in the context of history and specific culture, in contrast to ideal places (utopias), ideal times (euchronias) or ideal ways of thinking (eupsychias).

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