The folly of psychology


I believe that the study of psychology, notwithstanding the assistance that it may give in some cases, has been a cultural, and even a psychological, disaster. Not only have its ideas filtered their way down into the general population, but so has the notion that the study of psychology is the best possible way to understand the human predicament. People now turn to psychology rather than to literature for an explanation of the difficulties in living that mankind eternally has. A technocratic solution is the pot of gold at the end of psychology’s rainbow.

Psychology has the effect of alienating people from themselves. They come to think of themselves as objects rather than subjects, almost as laboratory specimens, or as feathers in the wind of circumstance rather than as contributors to their own lives. I do not wish to deny that featherdom, so to speak, really occurs, but it is not the normal condition of mankind, certainly not in daily life in the modern world. It is both the burden and the glory of being human that our life entails constant and inescapable choice. Psychology supposedly relieves us of that burden, but in the process destroys the glory.

The desire to avoid the realisation that we are often at least the partial author of our own downfall is an old one, and probably inherent in human nature. Edmund refers to this tendency in King Lear as ‘an admirable evasion of whoremaster man to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star’: in other words, to explain his actions by reference to anything except himself. In psychology, himself ceases to be himself; he starts to talk of himself with pseudo-objectivity; and even the most unimaginative person can come up almost instantaneously with ingenious mechanistic explanations of his wrongdoing when it is necessary or advantageous to do so. I should be surprised if any reader had never in his life made use of this powerful faculty of mind. I should add that no one goes to much trouble to explain his good, kind or generous actions, which do not puzzle him.

The habit of thinking psychologically – that is to say, with the concepts, however superficially or mistakenly, of psychology – places a distorting lens of theory between a person’s behaviour and his explanation of that behaviour. He becomes even for himself a mere vector of forces that he is powerless to control: in short, a victim.

Of course, in a sense we all think psychologically, and much more is available to us by way of explanation than we customarily employ. Doctor Johnson said ‘He who attends the motions of his own mind will find…’: our problem is that we will not examine the motions of our own minds, either from laziness or fear of what we might find there. Dryden said of Shakespeare that ‘he was naturally learned; he wanted not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inward, and found it there’.

Imagine Shakespeare with the spectacles of psychology. Falstaff on the couch (reinforced of course, as so much furniture in the NHS nowadays has to be); Richard II on Prozac; Richard III in group therapy; Hamlet having CBT. What progress in human self-understanding that would represent.

Written by
Theodore Dalrymple