The Productive Power of Psychology

Exploring the role of psychology in shaping individuals — from CBT-workers to post-modern narcissists

Sally McKay audited a course in brain-scan technology at York University in 2010, as students designed experiments for MRI scanners and became subjects for each other’s projects. This is Sally’s brain scanned during one of those experiments. Source: Canadian Art

Psychology could only emerge in its current form in conjunction with the neoliberal social order. While it often claims to be an objective science, searching for eternal truths that have always been there, just waiting for a careful, scientific, empirical psychologist to unearth them, psychology is instead a deeply historical and socially constructed phenomenon. What is often unsaid about psychology is that it has entrenched ideological presuppositions and functions, which will be explored here.

In his exploration of the emergence of psychology as a discipline, Nikolas Rose claimed that psychology could be understood as the ‘science of the individual.’ When considered in this way, it is unsurprising that the discipline emerged in the mid-19th century during the height of industrial Europe, just as the economy required psychologically sound individuals able to work, produce, and compete with one another.

Here, psychology can be seen not necessarily as some repressive power that controls and manipulates individuals (although it certainly does do this), but as a form of what Michel Foucault would call ‘productive power.’ Individuals that the economy required were produced by psychology and continue to be produced in this way today.

To demonstrate this, it is worth taking two concrete examples. In Britain, if you get signed off work for a stress-related illness, you have been prescribed 4-5 sessions of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) with a counsellor. CBT is the archetypal capitalist cure—reframe your thoughts until they fit in with the existing system. You do not like working 16-hour days? Why not change your thought patterns? Why not reframe the image you have of your underpaid and overworked job to be seen as an opportunity?

Here we see the creation of the CBT-worker. In previous epochs, poor working conditions would be met with unionisation and collective bargaining. The CBT-worker however, bargains with herself about the promise of better thoughts, making for a better life.

A second example is perhaps more pervasive. In his 2019 book, McMindfulness, Ronald Purser argues that the Buddhist practice of mindfulness has been co-opted by capitalism. The result was the creation of workers who understood their lives’ problems as being in their heads and their thoughts. If they can again just reframe these thoughts and ‘let them go’ — to use the language of meditation — they can understand themselves and their lives under capitalism and maybe stop complaining to their bosses.

What we see in both of these examples is the productive power of psychology. Psychology produces individuals, both subjectively and objectively. If you are having a hard time at work, you should know that it is you, as an individual, that is the problem. On an objective level, your boss can look at you and agree that you are a problem.

For example, as a secondary educator in the UK, if my students' results are consistently poor, I know I am the problem, and so does my boss. Any discussion of the structural conditions of my job, the widespread poverty that my students experience because of austerity measures, or educational policy is completely foreclosed. The individual is the problem, and the individual can be fixed or face the consequences.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy, however, is that the science of the individual has produced what I will term here the ‘post-modern narcissist’. The ideology of individualism has actually produced individuals who get enjoyment out of seeing themselves as isolated individuals, even if, dialectically, this is the very thing that is causing their problems. Todd McGowan states this bluntly in his fantastic book, Capitalism and Desire (2023). McGowan claims that capitalism perpetuates itself by allowing individuals to ‘immerse themselves in the promise of the future.’

This promise can be taken even further by the psychological commodities available in neoliberal capitalism. It could be claimed that neoliberalism not only causes problems for individuals but also sells the solution back to them. Here we see McGowan’s ‘promise’ in action. Costly therapies, mindfulness retreats, gratitude journals, colouring books for adults,' stress-releasing' bath bombs—you name it. There is no doubt that psychology is a big business these days.

The post-modern narcissist, produced to think of oneself as an individual project, to borrow from Byung Chul-Han, will happily partake in these commodities in the hope that they will be the ‘lost object’ (the object of our needs and aspirations, fueling our desires, and that arises in its absence) in McGowan’s terms.

Silvia Federici famously claimed that the female body was the second object that had to be ‘enclosed’ for capitalism to emerge successfully, after the enclosure of the commons. It is not a stretch to argue that psychology has been on a long siege in an attempt to enclose the mind, allowing individuals a very limited view of themselves and the world around them.

Of course, just like the enclosure of the Commons, there are small pockets of resistance—anti-psychiatry movements and collective resistance(s) such as the strikes in the UK at the moment.

Ultimately, we need to think more critically about psychology as a discipline and engage with some of the thinkers in critical psychology and anti-psychiatry.

There is hope, though. If the individual can be produced in one way, he can surely be produced in another as well. To quote the popular formulation of the untimely deceased David Graeber,

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily be made differently.”

References

1. Federici, S. (2004) Caliban and the Witch, London, Penguin.
2. Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, London, Penguin Classics.
3. McGowan, T. (2023) Capitalism and Desire, New York, Columbia University Press.
4. Purser, R. (2019) McMindfulness, London, Repeater Books.
5. Rose, N. (1985) The Psychological Complex, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.