Psychology as a field encompasses scientific study of mind and behaviour, therapeutic practices for mental health, and theoretical frameworks for understanding human experience. This section engages psychology both as practical knowledge and as object of critical analysis.
The relationship between psychology and power proves complex. Psychological knowledge can serve emancipatory purposes by illuminating suffering and providing therapeutic resources. It can also function as technology of domination when deployed to optimise productivity and normalise subjects.
Therapeutic practices
EMDR and other trauma-focused therapies address psychological suffering through specific techniques. These practices aim to alleviate distress and enable healing. Their value depends partly on how they are situated within broader social and political contexts.
Therapy can provide genuine relief from suffering. It can also function as individualising practice that privatises structural problems. The distinction matters politically. When systemic conditions generate widespread distress, therapeutic interventions that locate problems within individuals reproduce those conditions.
Anti-adaptive healing offers alternative frameworks refusing to adjust individuals to unjust conditions. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s work and radical psychiatry traditions, these approaches demand simultaneous attention to psychic wounds and systemic transformation.
Political burnout and exhaustion
Burnout examines the emotional and psychological toll that sustained political engagement exacts on activists and revolutionaries. This encompasses depression following defeat, exhaustion from organising, and the persistent gap between political ideals and human capacity for transformation.
Understanding burnout requires refusing both individualising frameworks that pathologise political commitment and romantic narratives celebrating sacrifice whilst ignoring genuine suffering. The analysis draws on histories of social movements, radical therapy practices, and contemporary activist experiences.
Key concepts within this framework include patient urgency (the temporal paradox where urgent political demands must coexist with slow psychological change), left melancholy (backward attachment to impossible positions), and mournful militancy (grief integrated with political action).
Critical psychology and psychopolitics
Psychopolitics names how contemporary power operates through exploiting psychological and affective capacities. Neoliberal capitalism requires subjects who willingly optimise themselves. Psychological knowledge becomes instrumental to this project.
The wellness industry exemplifies these dynamics. Mindfulness, resilience training and emotional intelligence get incorporated into corporate culture. Practices that originated as contemplative or therapeutic techniques become productivity tools. The same psychological knowledge that could serve liberation gets repurposed for exploitation.
Understanding this dual character proves essential. Psychology is neither purely liberatory nor purely oppressive. Its function depends on institutional contexts and political purposes it serves.
The capitalist unconscious
The capitalist unconscious names the structural convergence between psychoanalytic and economic processes. Both the unconscious and capitalism operate through the autonomy of the signifier. Both generate split subjects and surplus objects as necessary structural effects.
This represents not mere analogy but materialist discovery. Marx and Freud identified identical logic operating across different domains. Language and value both function as closed systems of pure difference producing real effects independently of conscious intention.
Commodity fetishism reveals how exchange-value’s autonomy produces necessary mystification. Social relations between people appear as objective properties of things. This proves structural rather than correctable through education.
Jouissance converges Freudian libido with unconscious labour. It represents surplus-enjoyment paralleling surplus-value in economic production. Capitalism mobilises drive structure, generating paradoxical satisfactions combining pleasure with suffering.
Understanding these structural homologies illuminates how capitalism colonises the unconscious itself. The task becomes recognising shared logic across both domains.
Pathologies of neoliberalism
Depression and burnout emerge as signature conditions under neoliberal capitalism. They indicate systemic contradictions between ideology and reality.
Auto-exploitation requires subjects to treat themselves as inexhaustible resources. When capacities become depleted, subjects blame themselves rather than recognising structural impossibility of unlimited self-optimisation. Depression and burnout mark this breaking point.
Emotional capitalism mobilises affects as productive resources. Total emotional investment in work without adequate boundaries or recovery generates exhaustion. The system then offers more psychological optimisation as solution, reproducing conditions that created problems.
The quantified self and psychological surveillance
Digital technologies enable unprecedented forms of psychological monitoring. Mood tracking apps, productivity software and health platforms generate continuous data streams about subjective states.
This creates what appears as self-knowledge through quantification. The reality proves different. Numbers enumerate without explaining. Accumulating data points does not generate narrative understanding necessary for genuine self-knowledge.
The digital unconscious extends surveillance beneath conscious awareness. Behavioural patterns and psychological profiles get constructed from data subjects generate through ordinary activities. This enables targeting at pre-reflexive levels.
De-psychologisation and practices of freedom
Foucault’s later work suggests possibilities for freedom through what can be termed de-psychologisation. This means refusing therapeutic subjectivation and developing modes of existence outside psychological optimisation.
The concept is not anti-psychological. It challenges specific deployments of psychological knowledge for domination. Practices of self-care distinguished from self-optimisation become possible when freed from neoliberal imperatives.
Ancient philosophical practices of self-examination aimed at cultivating wisdom and virtue. Contemporary self-help culture converts these into productivity enhancement. Retrieving emancipatory possibilities requires conscious work against dominant appropriations.
Connections to philosophy and cultural studies
Psychology intersects with philosophical questions about mind, consciousness and selfhood. Phenomenology examines structures of experience. Psychoanalysis theorises unconscious processes. Cognitive science investigates mental mechanisms.
Cultural studies and critical theory analyse how psychological knowledge functions politically. The history of psychology reveals its entanglement with colonialism, racism and normative violence. Understanding this history enables more critical engagement.
Contemporary work on psychopolitics draws on psychology whilst critiquing its dominant deployments, creating productive tensions. Psychological insights illuminate how power operates through subjectivity. Critical analysis examines how psychology itself serves power.
Future directions
The field continues developing through engagement with neuroscience, digital technologies and social transformations. These developments create both opportunities and dangers.
Neuroscientific research promises better understanding of mental processes. It also enables new forms of biological reductionism that obscure social and political dimensions of suffering. The challenge is integrating neurological knowledge without losing sight of lived experience and structural conditions.
Digital mental health interventions increase access to therapeutic resources. They also extend surveillance and subject psychological distress to algorithmic management. Developing technologies that serve human needs rather than corporate extraction requires political struggle.
Climate crisis, economic precarity and social fragmentation generate widespread psychological distress. Adequate responses require both therapeutic practices and structural transformation. Psychology alone cannot solve problems rooted in political economy. But psychological knowledge remains necessary for understanding human dimensions of systemic crises.