(If you use psychology, you trust its functioning, you feel sick, etc … probably this presentation of ideas may not be for you)
Psychology (as a social device) abstracts all the concrete conditions that make us up in an abstract and unreal way, in this sense it mocks reality and denies it.
Its purpose as “science” is to create a series of abstractions and generalities that describe the “human being”, regardless of any characterization that makes it concrete. All scientific or knowledge methodology tends to seek the most general concepts of its “field of knowledge”, this choice is always a critical moment, a selection, an elimination of other possibilities.
But this choice becomes meaningful the moment it is made, discarding all other possible options.
“Scientific” psychology masks concretions in favor of political generalizations. Policies because they ignore the powers operating in each individual, policies because the selection of generalities is congruent with a way of operating in society, consistent with their powers.
All those characters adapted to the market and production are enhanced, which become virtues. On the other hand, it is found in deficiencies, negativities, absences, unadapted characters. Those from whom labor, capital or submission cannot be extracted.
They are political generalizations precisely because of their ability to mask differences and all the aspects that individualize each circumstance.
It equates and identifies all the factors, simplifying a model so that only individuals and circumstances exist. The funny thing is that such individuals and such circumstances are never equal to each other, and their differences would really be the key to understanding the problems.
On the other hand, a medical-administrative division by genders, races, ages, classes would only have a statistical purpose and would not go out of the scheme in any sense. In a way it would only sarcastically deepen the masking.
“Scientific” psychology acts as a biological and medicalizing closure of the explosive energy of each individual. It institutionalizes and is institutionalized, elaborates and establishes normalities and abnormalities.
If all this were not enough, medicalization and pharmacologization generate “patients” as any other industry generates its products.
It locates suffering, or what it considers an absence or lack, in an isolated conceptual place, and denies the possibility of linking that place with a discourse that links different general and concrete aspects of human life; to extract relations of power and injustice in that network where discomfort appears.
It uses universal teleological postulates, which define a priori everything that has not yet been covered by humanity.
To illustrate what I mean, I will give an example. To specific individuals who feel bad in a group or when interacting, a generality such as: “human beings are social” is blurted out, which acts as a deductive and casuistic theorem or etiology (science of causes).
It serves both to discover the abnormal and to prescribe a solution. In addition to serving as a moral and behavioral rule.
We do not know if such a statement is intended to be an ethical imperative or if it rather refers to a biological configuration as a species. If it is the first case, free choice should preside over that imperative, if it is the second we find ourselves in the murky waters of natural species and their characteristics of normality and abnormality.
Only if we could place ourselves outside the world, outside the real, outside of time could we verify this postulate about the sociability of human beings, their meaning, their need or their intensity.
In our real world, we are beings shaped by circumstances, classes, races, sexes, economic power, hierarchical relationships … and anchored to a history and a never resolved future.
How can we know in advance the content of those universals that direct the inner life of human beings?
***
An anarchist or libertarian psychology should not define human principles and capacities a priori, it should, on the contrary, denounce every micro power and subordination that generates frustration. It should point out every painful element in every vital circumstance. Show alternatives to the cultural, political and social structures that generate frustrations.
The universal index to which their universals would be directed would be a vector direction, and each atom of individual concretion would be “moments” of that nebula of directions. The universal postulates would no longer be defined but with the passage of time they would fill with meaning.
We still do not know what the human being has to be, we cannot define it according to the needs of a historically specific society. Not much less according to the structures and interests of the concrete domination system. This will never be knowledge.
***
Excursus
Depression is a warning, and a wake-up call to our circumstances, an opportunity for introspection.
Since medicalization stole our “states of the soul” we can no longer enjoy the deep feeling of introspection of our sadness.
They have been socialized in a particular and laboratoryized way. We have stopped possessing our insides, we may never have had it, certainly not now. They have stolen the states of the soul and the enjoyment of chatting with them, contemplating their tones, colors, scales and landscapes.
If I were crazy, medicalized and sick, I could “understand” what is happening to me. There would be a socially validated reason for my feelings. My interior would become part of the common and institutional discourse and thus, I, like my surroundings, could find consolation.
My ravings would have a translation in a network of normality and pharmacology would be my silent social bed. The entire network of signs of medicine, psychiatry and psychology would cradle me to rejoin reality, even from its far edge.
Not being able to translate experiences into a discursive normality is living on a different plane, at the antipodes of the human sense, in an unwanted but unavoidable exile.
If he were mad, he could be exterminated in a gas chamber or lulled by a chemical cage of pharmacology according to the oscillations of power.
If I were crazy, I should relax my passions and exaltation, so as not to force the web of reality, it would be my main obligation. Returning as soon as possible from the trip out of the meaning and accepted symbols.
If I were crazy, I would accept that my ideas have no meaning in an outside, that there is no outside in my madness, that everything happens inside me. Interiority is the place of madness, without exteriority, nor relationship with the rest of human reality.
Madness as a social construction is an immense wall against immigrants who come from the chaos within us.