Critical Review
Frosh, S. “Psychosocial
Theory”.
Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. NY:
Springer Reference, 2013.
University of London
Luciano Fiscina
Doctoral student in Social Psychology at the
Psychology Institute at USP
Social and Environmental Psychology Laboratory and Intervention (LAPSI)
In the text
“Psychosocial theory”, the author seems to part from perspective that all human
subjects have in some dimension the power
and agency on their lives[1]
in steady of asking how can all human been and human groups have some agency or control over their own lives on the conjuncture of the contemporary
world.
In our research laboratory[2],
we work from perspective of postcolonial critical theory based on the presupposition
that the imaginary is the locus of political domination in the contemporary
world so that it is doubtful to think that all human groups or human subjects really
have access to the orders of power, decision and control over their lives and
destinies within the established social order, first due to the external forces
of ideological control and second because of the external forces of economic
control which limits the space for the action of the ordinary human subject on the
own life.
At the same time, it is doubtful to think that
the term power (does not understood
in the sense of energy) can be
considered the essence of human subjectivity as the text makes mention. In the
modern society, it is hard to think the word “ power” without associate it with
the strategies of domination applied to personal, utilities and coercive interests
although it is possible to associate with words like “can” and “energy” with
which, depending on context, the word “power” can also relate to. But, in the purest sense of an external control, the word “power” does not complete the great human quest neither fill the human subjectivity.
The author seeks to articulate
elements which are taken separately in the analyses of the integral
constitutive process of human subject. The researcher seems departing from
perspective of an internalist model for solving the problem of the separation
between what is regarded as analytical dimensions of the human development - social, individual and biological - which
underlie the analysis of the integral constitutive process of the human subjects
in according to innate formative orders.
The text seeks to develop an analysis on the
separation of the formative and constitutive
orders of human subjects, as such
biological, psychological and social, through an intellectual exercise
that approximates itself of the quest for solving the great epistemological
problem of human sciences and the paradox that underlies the structure of
capitalism in according to Hobsbawm (2010) and which the author makes a weak
reference.
On the contrary from the way the author
understands the social psychology, we don´t work from a theoretical perspective
not deconstructive of the individual
subject[3],
but we considering the social psychology field as a reference for the
formulation of analytical methods which would allow the seizure of components
(subjective) of the discursive contents, leading to their causal explanations
(motivational) and semantic interpretations of its political provisions from a
historical and critical perspective. Thus according to Professor Fernandes
(1972), "social psychology is a hybrid field, located at a point of
confluence of the psychology, sociology and anthropology; this hybrid would be necessarily
marginal and interdisciplinary”[4].
Thereby the social psychology has much to say
about “the nature of the social itself” and the field for which unfortunately
has been reduced[5]
does not define as a whole its explanatory power on the social processes, but
it is a result of historical conditions that
have privileged strategic knowledge applied to the world, the nature and the
things, making confused the great
role of social psychology and human sciences in this techno-scientific world.
The main epistemological issue looks to be how
the psychologist´s activity came back itself strictly to the applied techno-scientific
knowledge. It was not by chance that John Watson lost the investments to work
with animals and from there he started on to research human behavior in a
totally strategic psychological perspective.
From this perspective, the Psychology would not
have focused exclusively on the individual subject as an ideological and
political investment[8]
face some kind of separation supposedly perceived as already given. Authors
such as Solomon Asch, for example, understood and demonstrated the role of the human
groups on the psychological interaction
and in the subjectivity constitution. Thereby the viability of scientific
research in psychology does not depend on the epistemological separation from sociology.
From a different position, the process of individual-social separation could become
ideological itself justly in the transposition of processes that separate, cut and edit the reality
and determine the interpretation models of the world from some conveniences,
interests and ideologies.
In this sense, the critical psychology is not an internalist formulation of Psychology field on the own individualization of its objects so that the goal is not holding together seemingly opposite entities, as the text clearly makes mention, but to develop analytics models on imperialist forces, such as epistemological, ideological, political and economic, seeking from this to search on the clarification of consciousness, the development of participatory means and collective action.
Thereby the author makes a timid allusion to this perspective which is qualified as an internal relevance of psychosocial theory, weaving a role for the psychosocial theory as a consideration to the scholars of how the knowledge-imperialism has become a social experience and existential truths.
According to the author, the preservation of
the hyphen would distinguish "psycho" and "social"
categories and would indicate the clarity analytical on the different
components of a whole immanent once that the critical would require the use of
distinctions.
However on the perspective of socio and
environment psychology, the critical thinking is worried to understand how the
nature was expelled out from the human survival sphere, being commonly
understood as a thing that is out
there - usually in the forest. Thereby its epistemological commitment is to
understand how the environment began to be studied also as something outside of
man.
On the "public" and
"private" spheres, they are not directly comparable with the "subject"
and "social" categories, as the author alludes. From the political
perspective, the distinction is analytically necessary, but by the
psychological point of view, it is arbitrary. The political separation between
"public" and "private" establishes the human rights and the
civic duties as well as its political subordinations, considering the
historical process responsible for the privatization of State and of the public
sphere such as Hannah Arendt argues. But the separation between the “psycho” or
“subject” (psychological subject) and
the “social”, on the contrary, can reduce the power of the epistemological
analyses on the formative processes of integral human development.
The exercise of the author seeks to think how
the constitutive dimensions of the human subject have been established, moving
on toward a deconstruction and analytical separation of these categories as the
signal of a criticism that starts to act on its own process once that, in
according to the author, to think purely from indistinction between the
"subject" and the "social" would require to talk about
their intrinsic relations which couldn´t be questioned about how they really
were built.
On the
question of the role of reflexivity in psychosocial studies, providing a
critical attitude to the production of their own knowledge, we recall Hegel´s
attention on the mediation process of the self, remembering the danger of
establishing truths by opposition, such as the author also states, "'in
here" and "out there"; "subject" and
"object"; "psychic" and "social". From the
Hegelian heritage and dialectically Socratic, we assume the understanding of
the critical thinking as an activity of border, in the foucaultian sense.
On the perspective of social psychology, in
according to Tassara and Ardans (2007)[9],
it establishes “the defense of human diversity as an ethical prerequisite of
scientific understanding on the human”, what makes the object of social psychology
and its method ontologically interdisciplinary.
As Roland Barthes speaks (1988), the interdisciplinarity
involves the creating of a new object that does not belong to anyone. Thereby the
interdisciplinary nature of social psychology would not occur due to a
theoretical location and internal, but mainly because to produce knowledge in
social psychology should be assumed unknown dimensions on the object so that makes
possible to consider it as an new object seen from a border thinking and
vanguard.
[1] “How the human subject is both formed as an entity through the social order and yet has agency within it? (…) This paradox, that one can be both ‘subject to’ the workings of society and yet also be a ‘subject’ in the sense of being an agent with power to act on the world, is a core issue for psychosocial theorists, as it is for many in the broader field of social theory”.
[2] LAPSI IP USP - Social and Environmental
Psychology Laboratory and Intervention.
[3] “The
individualising tendency of psychology can thus be seen as a particular kind of
intervention in social science, paralleling the separation of ‘private’ from
‘public’ and ‘personal’ from ‘political”.
[4] Florestan Fernandes, Comunidade e Sociedade no
Brasil. Leituras Básicas de introdução ao estudo macro-sociológico do Brasil,
p. XI.
[5] “(…) investigations of cognitions
in social settings (attitudes, prejudice, social judgements, etc) and of
people’s behaviour in groups and other social situations”.
[6] Robert M. Farr. The roots of modern social psychology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
[8] “(…) In fact these
(´person´ and ´social´) are not distinct entities, but simply ways of carving
up the research field to make it manageable, with the effect of reproducing
ideological assumptions about the nature of the social world”.
[9] Eda Tassara & Omar Ardans. “A Relação Entre
Ideologia e Crítica nas Políticas Públicas: Reflexões A Partir da Psicologia
Social”. Revista de Psicologia Política, 7
(14, 2007).
