‘We will not have psychology in the future’

In two packed auditoriums in Athens, psychoanalyst and emeritus professor of the University of Leicester Ian Parker recently presented his new book, co-authored with David Pavon-Cuellar, and now translated into Greek, titled “Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements.” Following the psychological trend of “anti-psychology” often found in the works of Kant and Bolzano, Professor Parker spent several hours in conversation with his enthusiastic audience.

Kathimerini met him in Psyrri, central Athens, for an interview that delved into the world of revolution against the mainstream psychological stereotypes. “I am anti-psychologist,” he declares, adding, “despite working for 30 years as a psychoanalyst,” putting forward the fact that psychology is commercialized, kills creativity, and creates barriers.

“Every ‘brand’ of psychology sells solutions to problems instead of actually helping people,” he stressed in his first talk, which met with a thunderous applause from the audience, while in our conversation before his second lecture, titled “Denying Psychology: Maps and Territories,” he pointed out that modern society is saturated with incomprehensible conceptualizations and interpretations of our problems and habits, including sex, creating more problems than solutions.

Professor Parker, why do all psychoanalysts tend to have sex at the center of their psychoanalysis?

That is because, for Freud, sex was at the center of the development of psychoanalysis. It was a time when sex was something difficult to speak about, and people were ashamed of it. And so, sex became the center of their lives, the center of neurosis, and the central point where there was repression, where people desired to speak about such things, but at the same time felt a prohibition against speaking about it. Therefore, it became a conflict point. That is why sex is so important, and it still is today, as people strive to construct relationships and have anxieties about the pleasure that they think they should be feeling, and also their anxiety that they are not feeling as much pleasure or having as much sex as they should do. This is a society that is saturated with sex and talks about sex and elicits sex and ideas about sex as the crux of happiness. And so, it is not surprising that people should feel hang-ups about that as a core part of themselves.

In your first talk in Athens, you mentioned that every psychology brand sells solutions for grief. Do you think that psychology and psychoanalysis are becoming commercialized?

Definitely, yes. Most psychology and certainly most psychoanalysis today is a private contract in which the psychologist is selling something. They are selling happiness or they are selling some solution for problems. And that is why I referred to the initiatives to break that private contract and to give support to people without payment. So that would start to dissolve the barrier between the professional psychologist and the people that they want to help.

On the other hand, do you think that also people seek pretensions and commercialized knowledge that caters to their emotions?

‘Always there is a search for an individual cause of problems. And that is, I think, an expression of today’s condition of psychologization’

I think people are drawn into that kind of way of thinking about themselves, and they are drawn into it not only in the psychology departments but of course in television and advice columns, in magazines, and all of the things that are said about psychological reasons for things. So, people start to think about the psychological causes of the problems in the world. And you can see this kind of psychologization of politics very clearly in the emergence of conspiracy theories of society, where people assume that if there is a social problem, it must be because there is some individual somewhere behind the scenes who is responsible for our distress. So always there is a search for an individual cause of problems. And that is, I think, an expression of today’s condition of psychologization.

In your book, “Psychoanalysis and Revolution,” you state that “that ideology is a dead body and it turns creativity into something dull.” Could you elaborate more on this interpretation?

Well, I think it is an aspect of alienation in contemporary society and the commodification of ideas, where instead of us thinking collectively about the best way forward, we come to trust professionals who have been given certificates and degrees. And those certificates and degrees turn our everyday understanding of our experience into professionalized, bureaucratized knowledge. So, in that sense, the knowledge that we produce is turned into something dead. Therefore, it is an aspect of alienation of our experience. And that sometimes is described in political theory as “de-skilling,” meaning how workmen in production have expertise and knowledge about how to produce things. So, what factory production does is take that knowledge and reformat it into a production line so that everyone is given a little task. Therefore, our own expertise is taken from us and then sold back to us as an alienated form of knowledge that we have no control over. The same thing happens with psychology, they take those theories, turn them into kind of rigid schemas, and then sell that knowledge back to us as if the psychologists have discovered it.

Are ideologies needed in modern times?

Absolutely! You need lots of ideology to encourage people to believe things that are designed to adapt them to this kind of political, economic system. Ideologies are absolutely vital. I mean, people do not do things because they are forced to under threat of gunpoint most of the time. But people do things because they genuinely believe them. Therefore, we have a crucial problem when we are talking about psychology because a lot of people buy these psychological ideas and they use them, in their everyday life. So, it becomes part of them and functional in their lives. That is a real problem.

Why do you believe that modern psychology is undergoing an extensive and substantial crisis nowadays? And why does psychology become part of the problem instead of solving it?

Well, I think part of the problem is that psychology is becoming more and more powerful as a form of knowledge in people’s lives, and people are coming to think more and more that there are psychological explanations for their problems and psychological solutions for their problems, rather than looking at the organization of society. And so, psychology becomes a kind of ideological tool that divides people from each other and encourages people to think deeply within themselves rather than think about social structures. And so, part of the crisis of psychology is that people go into psychology to try and cure social problems. Still, they are told all the time that they should focus on the individual, and they feel torn between these two impulses to actually really make a difference, or to simply bandage the patient and make them feel a little bit better.

You often refer to the fact that psychology functions as a “depoliticization mechanism,” how psychology is opposed to human nature.

Indeed, it does work as a tool of depoliticization because it encourages people to think that their problems are inside themselves and that they must work on those problems if they want to become happier. It also works as a tool of ideology in that it encourages people to think that the stories that psychologists talk about to us are true and unchanging, that there is nothing that can be done about human nature because psychologists have discovered it inside our heads, and that it will always be like this. There is nothing that can be changed.

I have to mention that we will not have psychology in the future. We got on for many thousands of years as human beings without psychology. So, we have to find different ways of understanding ourselves and one of the points that I made at the end of my talk was that although I am very enthusiastic about psychoanalysis and I work as a psychoanalyst, it is not the only form of critical reflection on the world. I have been talking about psychoanalysis, but there are other forms of critical reflection on who we are that people engage in which can be very useful as well.