Psychoanalysis (Follow up)

Posted on December 27, 2007 | 427 views
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(This is a comment that I recieved from my dearest friend Gisele regarding my post on Psychoanalysis)

Dear Farrukh,As you have written about the area of knowledge that I study, I wrote a text to contribute to your blog and talk a little more about my choices. I like to study the epistemologists from the Psychologies (plural because this science has many schools that can even deny each other). The personality has been a controversial subject throughout the history of Psychology. Psychology as a science had its origin in 19th century answering to a demand of that historical moment: the consolidation of the Capitalism and a demand from an Empiricist, Mechanist and Rationalism science. The origin of psychology was necessary to control on “free human being” (I mention the freedom while one of the myths that the bourgeoisie of 18th century dictated as truth. The others were the fraternity and the equality). Thus, since its origin as a science, Psychology faced a problem: to be situated as a natural science following the mold of the Positivism or to be situated as a Human Science and because this not be considered a truth. In these molds, the problem started existing: the great Psychological Schools of Thought were never able to overcome the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. Then, following a determination of a scientific methodology of Liberalism, that meet the interests of the capitalism, Psychology understood the psychological phenomena as a “natural form” and because of that, it also understood the phenomena as a law that we cannot modified, just learn it. I understand that in such a historical moment in which psychology has its origin, it has been necessary. However, it is about time to criticize this reductionistic vision, by overcoming it.
Speaking now about the Psychoanalysis, I criticize it because the connotation that Freud gives in his theory that the Psychosexual stages of development (the Oedipal complex) are a mechanistic, naturalistic conception of the mind, being natural and universal. His theory certainly was very useful for his historical moment (Europe in the beginning of the 20th century) and even nowadays for people who can dedicate themselves to both an expensive and extensive analysis. I cannot agree that we generalize these concepts for other cultures, in other times. I think that overcoming the subjectivity/objectivity dichotomy (dichotomy that exists not only in the Psychoanalysis but also in other great Psychological Schools of Thought) is a sine qua non condition, because in this way we can be able to make progress in the speech.
I think that the proposal of the Sociohistorical Psychology, that thinks the overcoming of the dichotomy between the intra and the interpsychological by using the dialectic, is pertinent. Therefore, subjectivity is simultaneously social and individual. We become human beings when we interact socially and when we appropriate the culture it. So, when a person is born s/he is only one candidate to the humanity and becomes a human being converting the external world into intern, developing his/her personality sui generis: if the human being constructs him/herself, s/he constructs the reality. So, my choice for this school of psychology happens because I think that I must assume a position that does not understand the psychological health as an adaptation in the world. I believe in the possibility of transformation and confrontation of the reality that imposes itself.
Well dear, it is what I think.
Yours,

Gisele Schwede

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