> >Religion used to be the opiate of the people, but nowadays it's
> >psychology.
> >
> >Roland Chrisjohn
>
>Psychology and economics (as parasciences) do indeed share the fallacy of
>pure individualism, but they're also fundamentally at odds. Economics boils
>down to the assertion that the individual is sovereign. There are no limits
>to this sovereignty, either from nature or society. In this sense it's
>quite Christian, with the human soul as master of the earth and all its
>treasures, our mastery over markets even constituting a kind of ascension.
>Psychology, on the other hand, posits the negation of individual
>sovereignty. The central myth here is that your sins and your suffering are
>mere symptoms of disease. This holds whether the mind is viewed as a
>thing-in-itself or demoted to the epiphenomenon of a wholly deterministic
>brain. Our capacity for self-determination is dissolved into an ocean of
>either neural or unconscious forces (or some combination). These, in turn,
>are reduced to ancient genetic or mythic material. Economics is the triumph
>of the soul, psychology its extinction.
>
>Ted Dace
Both these spheres are dominated by the fallacy of the sovereign individual. But one of the paradoxes of ego-psychology is that as soon as you start analysing interpersonal interaction, you have to start considering a matrix of interaction and a system. It therefore opens the door again essentially to a systems analysis of human behaviour, which of course is fundamentally social, as is economics.
I agree with the criticisms of the characteristic ideological perversions of these studies, but the social complexity reasserts itself in other ways.
Chris Burford
London