What "object" or "entity" does psychology study?

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Mon Jan 10 10:32:17 PST 2000


What object or entity does psychology study? Don't be foolish. That is the wrong question.

Go backward, back before psychology, to psyche. What is psyche?

Now there is something to write about. It is co-extensive with its expressions and these are in toto the cultural-linguistic and symbolic forms of any people, any time or place, period--and, we study those forms all the time, that is to say we live them.

Whether the cultural-symbolic universe of form is co-extensive with any particular discipline or technique, well the obvious answer is certainly not--rather the former subsumes the latter.

Why does Carrol suffer depression? I don't know. Some one asked him and he explained it. But I would rather have him express it as art, poetry, music, drama, literature--or political action--but somewhere in the world where I can see it, and it can take on all the form it desires and dance before me like a magic lantern.

"I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die." (from Swann's Way, p34, Remembrance of Things Past, Proust)

But, as becomes clear later, it isn't just the past, or the evocation of memory, but every aspect of psyche that is engaged in a mutual reciprocity with the perceptions and expressions of body and thereby with cultural and symbolic forms to the extend that, for all practical reason, all of these maybe and are exchanged or expressed as one for the other.

Chuck Grimes



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