Oral Presentation by Konstantinos Kontis¹
¹ University of Ioannina, Greece
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 2
Session: 14
Abstract
This presentation attempts to demystify the imaginary and real figure of the psychologist as an objective subject-supposed-to-know and a bearer of a secure method of psychological ‘truth’. To attempt this demystification I engage with the Husserlian concept of the life-world. The life-world is the prescientific world of everyday experience, of the “naive” life already there, pregiven, before any theory or objectification is attempted. It is the world of dynamic intersubjectivity and experience, of the subjective-relative out of which the objective emerges. The psychologist -and every scientist according to Husserl- is situated within the life-world. I suggest that it is an onto-epistemological necessity for psychology, in order to exist as an independent, “objective” discipline, to deny and/or surpass the life-word and claim that there is a deeper or proper way of studying experience, other than the way is it manifested in a first-person perspective of a subject operating in the life world. This ideological/epistemological move also includes the suppression of folk psychology and its replacement by an objectivist method. It is my suggestion that through this process, whether concealed or open, the psychologist can inhabit the position of a subject-supposed-to-know and exercise a professional-scientific gaze upon the Other’s experience. This mystification of the psychologist is also aided by an objectivist rhetoric and the use of specific methods (statistical, neuroscientific, therapeutic, etc.) that require highly skilled expertise and technical training (e.g. the fact that questionnaires can only be administered and scored by a psychologist). My suggestion is that this image of the psychologist should be dismantled and a way out of it is through theorizing on the relation between the life-world and objective psychological knowledge. Another practical way is through the psychological humanities. This means substituting the imaginary figure of the psychologist (and psychology in general) as an expert-above-the-life-world with the image of the scientist-humanist operating within the life-world and within communities and by using folk psychological insights, not ‘surpassing’ them. This would require of the psychologist to engage in the arts (e.g. literature), philosophy, social theory, history, in an attempt of a hermeneutic understanding of subjectivity rather than seeking final causal explanations and providing a mirror of nature regarding mental life.