Psychologists Need Integrated Education in Political-Social and Psychological Theory

Abstract

Clinical training in the vast majority of graduate programs in psychology fails to educate future therapists into perspectives that integrate personality theory with political and social theory. Instead, the emphases are on imparting highly specialized knowledge of personality dynamics and on techniques of psychological assessment and therapy. This narrowness of training means that, as a rule, clinicians rarely examine the historical, cultural, and political factors and dynamics that influence decisively people's identities and experiences of the social world around them. These factors and dynamics may create systemic illnesses that appear in the psyches of people; indeed, these same factors and dynamics may lead clinicians into holding unexamined assumptions about the nature and goals of therapy. In short, there are global, macroscopic events and processes that constitute the world in which therapeutic activity takes place; the significance of these should be perceived and fathomed by the psychologist, at least if he is to develop realistic and sound expectations about his role as a therapist, and if he wishes to have a broad and rich understanding of the connections that hold between social processes and the genesis of individual pathologies. The modern psychologist is usually an uneducated person, if by we mean an individual who has some knowledge of philosophy, sociology, political theory, and literature and cultural history. Indeed, a psychologist ought not to be called educated unless he manifests a drive to gain insight into the significant relationships that hold between social and political arrangements, cultural dynamics, and dilemmas that people experience in common. The psychologist of worth should, in addition, seek to appreciate the nature of the historical and intellectual traditions of his society, ones that may inform his guiding assumptions about the categories of health and illness. In short, a therapist is never value-free in his practice of healing psychic derangements, and he, as much as the next person, is shaped in his outlook by the course of social and political history. If this is so, then it follows that meaningful inquiry into the psyche should not be separated from studies of history and culture, and politics and philosophy. Evidently these areas have been separated artificially, with the result that each has developed its own distinctive language, priorities for research, presuppositions about the best methods of inquiry, and high levels of specialization. We have the unfortunate consequence that meaningful dialogue between fields is quite difficult. However, just as it is quite misleading to study a single leaf without having knowledge of the characteristics of the whole tree to which it belongs, so it is ultimately fruitless to examine the psyche apart from the historical, cultural, social, and political conditions in which it is nurtured. In short, a psychologist who truly deserves that title ought to be educated to hold broad and thoughtful interdisciplinary perspectives, and the trend toward value neutrality in the study of man is a misguided fashion that shirks the real task of creating a humanly meaningful form of scientific activity.