Our Psychological Selves?

Psychological Sciences as:

“techniques for the disciplining of human difference: individualizing humans through classifying then calibrating their capacities and conducts, inscribing and recording their attributes and deficiencies, managing and utilizing their individuality and variability.”

Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves (1998) p. 105

Vein Abnormality May Impact Alzheimer’s

New Research Finds Memories Are ‘Geotagged’

Teens with Deployed Family Member Face Greater Risk of Depression

Trust Your Gut About Walking Down The Aisle

Cost is Only One Factor in How Much We Spend

ADHD Risk May Be Higher Among Disadvantaged Kids

From: PSYCHCENTRAL

January 17, 2005

Psychology’s Moral Project?

“This project has been, first in philosophical terms, then increasingly in ‘scientific’ psychological terms, to supply a cultural authoritative foundation for conventional morality in a society which is constitutionally pluralistic in terms of religion and ideology.”

Graham Richards, 1995

200 protest psychologists' interrogation role

By Sharon Jayson, USA Today, 8/16/2008

BOSTON — About 200 demonstrators rallied Saturday outside the convention hall where some 14,000 are attending the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association to protest the role of psychologists in military interrogations.

Psychology’s Selves• The Reflective Self• The Phrenological Self • The Animal and Emotional Self• The Perceiving Self• The Psychic Self • The Hysterical Self • The Feebleminded Self • The Laboring Self • The Engineered, Behaviorist Self • The Expressive Self • The Therapeutic Self • The Cognitive and Computational Self • The Social Self• The Moral Self

THEMES in the History of Psychology

1) representations of mind 2) places where science is enacted or practiced3) methods, tools, technologies and techniques4) popular, literary, and visual understandings 5) practical domains of application

6) moral values and ideas of normality

Psychology as a Profession• Membership of APA (American

Psychological Association)– 1892 at its founding with G. Stanley Hall 13

members– 1929, 1000 members at 300 institutions– 1964, 11,000 members– 1993, 76,000 members

British Psychological Society Membership- 1945, 1164 members

- 1975, 5500 members

- 1994, over 18,000

Therapeutic Psychological Techniques for:

• Attending to oneself (self-inspection, examination

• Engaging with self (describing, interpreting, finding causes of behavior)

• Seeing diverse aspects of self (e.g. desire, behavior, authenticity)

• Evaluating self – according to norms

• Disclosing the self - how to speak to various others, in social settings, social media

• Curing the self (e.g. catharsis, restraining thoughts and emotions, self- esteem (Rose, p. 244)

“this is a psy-shaped space, a space that lies between the biological materiality of the body with its nerves and fluids and the moral complexity of human conduct with its dilemmas of right and wrong, good and evil. And from now on, all our recipes for styles of life, our ethical systems, our recipes for assuaging misery and for improving ourselves and our conduct, our judgments of others will have to take account of the influences of, and impacts upon, this psy shaped space.”

Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul (1999)