Contending with the Unthought: Notes on the institution of psychology’s condition of possibility

Abstract

This paper interrogates the assumptive logics of the discourse related to reforming the institution of psychology and argues how an emphasis on improving the moral fiber of its performance obscures, rather than clarifies, a more devastating reality and precludes, rather than engages, an assessment of the ethicality of the field of psychology’s existence. By refusing to provide a strategy for recourse for “what psychology needs to do” to improve itself, this paper interrogates such redemptive assumptions such as “how psychology and psychologists can lead efforts of reconciliation, repair, and healing” that fundamentally obfuscate an ability to think of enslavement comprehensively (i.e., as an irreconcilable antagonism that has no strategy for recourse), and instead engages the reader with the reality that a set of new and difficult questions may emerge at the site of an ethical assessment of the existence of the institution of psychology that exceed any possibility for reform, reconcilability, and/or redemption in the face of the Slave.