Attentive readers will have noticed that I've been playing catch-up again. Every now and then I get waylaid by something I can't resolve within the timetable of this blog. I've been looking for another longer-term project, with psychology or category theory as candidates. What? I'm a philosopher - I contain multi-disciplinary multitudes. Let's talk about psychology.
There is a perfectly reputable, if unexciting, study of the way the brain / mind works; how perception works and can occasionally mislead; and related subjects. Degrees in that subject tend to be B.Sc's and the studies don't make for best-selling pop-psych.
The psychology we are looking for is sometimes called
moral psychology, the study of emotions, feelings, behaviour towards ourselves and others, thought-processes and other such stuff that can be discussed sensibly without knowing the difference between a ganglion and a neurone. Degrees in that subject tend to be B.A's.
Moral psychology used to be a stock-in-trade for any reputable Enlightenment philosopher, who would use it to make often mordant and worldly observations about their fellow man, society and economy, disguised as descriptions of emotions and personality traits. Sometimes this was to show that the vast array of human behaviour and emotion could be reduced to two or three basic traits, emotions or principles. David Hume did this in his
Treatise of Human Nature;, as did Adam Smith in his
Theory of the Moral Sentiments.
Moral psychology is for the philosophically-inclined. The way people ordinarily understand each other's behaviour and characters is called
folk-psychology. It starts with identifying kinds of behaviours (counting the expression of emotions and thoughts as 'behaviour'), continues by grouping those behaviours into a "personal quality", and if those actions, emotions and thoughts are observed to be "done-once, done-often", ascribes a dispositional "personality trait", "character trait" or "quality" to the person. Folk-psychology is sometimes subtle, always contextual and culture-bound, and of course, independent of any theory of the container of those traits and qualities, be it mind, soul, spirit or something else.
Folk-psychology is always directed at action. Its aim is not "understanding all to forgive all", nor is it to understand motives or reasons. It is a grab-bag of concepts to describe us, and of tricks to influence, persuade, re-educate, convert, and indoctrinate us. The aim is to make us act, think or feel in a manner useful to someone else. It is also to identify people who might turn out to be odd, disruptive or obstructive, to the point that we would not choose them as colleagues, neighbours or friends - so we can avoid them before they become a nuisance. Folk-psychology is what we need to choose and develop alliances, friendships, social networks, sports teams, military units, political parties and so on, and it is what we need to avoid users, losers and abusers, wastrels, hopeless cases, traitors, freeloaders and so on.
Hegel was the last of the great systematisers of moral psychology, linking it with politics and law at one end, psychiatry in the middle, and folk-psychology at the other. After that, the philosophers stopped doing moral psychology, and instead specialised in sociology, economics, psychiatry, or "philosophy of mind". As a result, folk-psychology took over as the theoretical foundation of all psychology.
Today, the vast majority of what passes for "psychology" on the shelves of bookshops, in hospitals and therapy rooms, in novels, films and plays, and even in psychiatry and the DSM / ICD classifications, is variations on and justifications of folk-psychology, peppered with pseudo-technical terminology, salted with politics, seasoned with religion, law and morality, and poured like gravy over people and behaviour. The aims of academic psychology are now those of folk-psychology: producing conceptual tools for influencing the people we need to-do with, and identifying the people to avoid.
That is what the books are about; that is what the tests are used for; that is how it used by Governments, militaries, schools, and businesses. The "normies" use conventional psychiatry and psychotherapy to make an industry out of "treating" the fringe people; and recently in response, the fringe people have created mental health activism. Some even use it against themselves via a third-party when they go to psychotherapy.
In practice, psychiatrists have been suborned by the pharmaceutical industry, the insurers and State health services, and are pill-pushers: the patient gets fifteen minutes for free if the taxpayer is paying, or an hour or more for £800 or so for a private consultation. The result is still a pill. In the same way, psychotherapists "deliver" a short course of CBT-based treatment if the taxpayer is paying, while psychodynamic therapists will settle in for three days a week for forty-four weeks over three or four years at £150 or so an hour, with variations in between. These are features, not bugs.
A theory that gains a wide reception in the profession usually meets a number of conditions. It fits the prevailing mores of the largely white, middle-class, feminist-y, liberal-ish, and majority female, members of the profession. It can be used by businesses to gee-up their employees when times get hard and HR is cutting heads. It can be used to give the appearance that a vast military organisation cares about the morale of its troops, as it sends them into yet another asymmetric war where the enemy might be a twelve year-old boy with a bomb. It might describe a new symptom, disorder or condition that expands the market for psychotherapeutic services. It can be used by Governments to scare their populations into compliance with unjustified and disastrous public health policies.
These abuses are not failures of professional ethics, but actual professional success-stories.
This line of thought could be, and probably has been, expanded into a paperback polemic. Those can be fun to read, but writing them has always struck me as being like mud-wrestling with a pig: you both get muddy, and the pig enjoys it. I don't enjoy mud-wrestling.
So I'm going to have some fun discussing category theory (or something else) instead.
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