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Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural-Performatory Approach to Understanding Human Life

by Fred Newman and Lois Holzman

Chapter 5: Psychology and the Individual

The notion that psychology's object of investigation is the individual has been both the basis for its legitimacy as a field of inquiry and a locus of much of the criticism leveled against it. Psychology is typically described (for example, in introductory texts, dictionaries and encyclopedias) as being concerned with individuals or groups of individuals--how they behave, how they develop and, in particular, how they differ from each other. Responding to psychology's seeming obsession with the ahistorical, asocial, isolated individual, many postmodern critics (as well as some of their modernist precursors) have questioned whether there even is such a particular/thing....

Psychology's obsession with and glorification of the individual--a construct derived directly from the logic of the particular--is a hoax. The contradiction is this: while it has been successful in infusing us with a sense of "identity" and the experience of ourselves as individuated things separate from "the other," Psychology itself has never been particularly concerned with individuals as individuals. Its concern has been methodological--the individual is a useful construct in making knowledge claims about groups or formulating general laws of behavior. Psychology's intense and extensive study of the individual has not been done in the name of, nor has it empirically supported, human diversity and uniqueness. Its object of investigation has not been the individual, nor has it really discovered anything about the actual and potential ways in which people differ from one another. Far from contributing to a culture that supports individual differences and fosters individual expression, psychology has been instrumental in contributing to a culture of conformity.

Read more chapters as a Microsoft Word document:
Chapter 6: Psychology's Bestseller: Mental Illness and Mental Health;
Chapter 7: Psychology and Human Development: The Ideal(ist) Marriage .

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