Psychology is a Cuckoo - The Great Authenticity Myth, part 6

About 100 years ago, the fledgling discipline of psychology was overrun by amateur zoologists. This was the beginning of behavioural psychology. Today, psychology remains in the grip of statisticians, pretending to be a medical science.

Psychology, as it was originally intended, is like a baby that was swapped in the hospital. What grew and ranged about the earth had the same name but wasn’t what was born. The Cuckoo that is psychology today pushed philosophy, psychodynamics, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic, and others, taking all the space and food for itself. This is perhaps not surprizing. Behavioural psychology and the statistics-ridden, pseudo-scientific thing that is psychology today took root between the 1920s and 1950s when totalitarianism caused (at the last estimate) around 45 million deaths across the world.

Totalitarianism and its various manifestations are all about order and control. Everything must be measured, judged according to some ideal (normality), and corrected or disposed of. Design is key, even of humans. Individuality and creativity are beaten out of every level of existence and replaced with prescriptive behaviour and compliance. The function of every individual will be numerically assessed, and the results compared with what is desirable. What is desirable is productive work units who no matter what they are engaged in, will produce monetary profits. These profits will be exchanged for goods and services that other work units have produced. This is how psychologists measure “happiness” and quality of life: the ability to spend, after having been productive, which is called ‘leisure’, and ‘work/ life balance’.

When the nest of psychology was thusly ravaged all those years ago, perhaps the major achievement of that Cuckoo was pushing philosophy to the margins of what became psychology. I was in a lecture not that long ago with a professor of psychology (a statistician) literally hammering his fists on the table and yelling, “If you can’t measure it, it is not science”. Back then, I strongly felt that I disagreed. Now, I agree that psychology is not science, and I have an MSc in psychology.

Psychology has long since abandoned the search for meaning and to understand what it is to Be. Being for its own sake. Being. Not existing like a thing in-the-world. What is the meaning of Being? What is the meaning of Being for each being. We are (OK, as far as we know) the only being (thing) that can ask the question, what is the meaning of Being. Thus, we humans are in a unique situation; we are concerned about the meaning of Being because we know we are going to die.

This is a thought that doesn’t need correcting or regulating, but it does need to be reckoned with. Within the constraints of our individual situations, we have a choice. We all have the same choice, but not the same options. We can fall into step with ‘what’s done”, what ‘they’ do, what’s normal, the way it is, and stop thinking or reckoning with our own meaning, or we can choose our being in-the-world to be directed more so by our own cares, curiosities, proclivities, impulses, etc., as they occur to us. We are all thrown into the world. We do not choose the time or situation of our birth. Having been thrown into the world, we are in it whether we like it or not. What it’s easy to forget, or never grasp, is that this throwing into the world becomes increasingly directable by ourselves. Our history (our own past), and our historicity (the societal norms we were thrown into) are our thrownness and project us to a constant place of temporal now. Our throwness into our futures is ours to direct.

The meaning of the Being that we have, which is different from our factual existence, is in a constant state of choice between unthinkingly falling into step or developing the ability to author our own experience of being alive. This is an uneasy feeling, and it happens in a constantly changing, groundless, present moment, being thrown out into future possibilities, which nonetheless happens within an extremely complex set of social norms. There is nothing stopping us from doing many things, but we are constrained by the roles we play. In every moment, we can choose.

Fear of heights, that awful feeling I have of being near a ledge, is not fully about safety, but more about the realisation that there is nothing stopping us from jumping and we can go from alive to dead in seconds. Our knowledge of death comes extremely close to us. An addict in recovery feeling extreme anxiety at being tempted to test whether this time it would be OK is experiencing the realisation that actually what’s stopping them, is nothing. Nothing is what’s actually between our present situation and the next, and this causes anxiety of a special kind, which is bound up in guilt and responsibility to ourselves for our own Being.

Someone ‘trapped’ in a job and acting out the role of appearing to behave in a way that seems to be required so that they then have the “freedom” to spend the money they get from that acting job on consumption has chosen to fall into step with ‘them’. That is not to say that what they’re doing isn’t necessary to have the ability to have choices in the situation of their thrownness, at that moment. It is to say that they do not have to do the thing that is making them feel trapped, and they can move toward a situation where they are less trapped. Our way out of having to make such a choice is conspicuous and rather pointlessly extravagant consumption, to demonstrate just how “free” we are. Those who participate in this falsehood are the most trapped since they have more choices and choose not to take them.

There is no measure to be placed upon such contemplation. There is no normal to demand. There is no scientific, or evidence-based, manualised set of corrections and behavioural change play-acting that can help. We are going to die. Psychology is engineered to push us into normality, to fall into step, to be compliant, to function well, and in a productive, expected, and predictable way. This is a totalitarian approach to the reality of the meaningfulness of our Being. Falling into step is not a solution to the anxiety of being the Being that can (has the capacity to) inquire after Being. Religion is another.

Psychology has forgotten that it, and everything else, is a branch of philosophy. The love of knowledge. The wondering and pondering after what it is to Be. Sciences are ways of accessing measurements of things-in-the-world according to certain paradigms. Physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, etc., all measure and discover information about things, entities, and even the same things, regarded in different ways according to the discipline employed. None of this helps us with the question of the meaning of Being, nor can it. What science can do is make putting up with dealing with the requirement to fall into step somewhat less anxiety-ridden by persuading us to comply with normality… this is what psychology does, wearing its lab coat.

The meaning of having our futures constantly presented to us and the knowledge that, actually, nothing is stopping us from following our curiosity and care is uniquely human. By nothing, I mean nothing; I don’t mean without consequences. Consequences are where responsibility comes in, and wisdom and knowledge are required. Applying all this to our ever-present future, against the horizon of death, is Being, authentically.