the crab turns
To: psysr-disc@yahoogroups.com
From: target@batstar.net
Date: Wed, June 8, 2011 2:16 pm
Subject: Re: [psysr-disc] RE: A corporation is not a person. Psychologists should know.
Eee:
You wrote:
I think the issue of corporate personhood should be placed in a broader context. It is related to what Karl Marx called "fetishism of commodities," that, in capitalist societies human qualities are ascribed to nonhuman things, commodities, such that human relations appear as relations between things and relations between things appear to be human relations.
That is basic as an initial reach to the critique of psychology as a "pre-science" - which leans on the idealism of Kant and doesn't connect with the full humanistic character of existential being. There are many extensions of that critique, such as that of Foucault on the "clinical gaze." What I've applied myself is the work of Phil Cushman (see "Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology," 1990, where he uses hermeneutics to challenge the commodity type social relation). In 2001 Phil served as keynote for me when I coordinated the training of the M.H. managers of the Silicon Valley in "trauma of treatment." Report link
HERE.Parenthetically, in our profession, we have seen this phenomena as professional therapists become mere "providers of services" to "consumers" and teachers no longer engage students but "consumers" [of educational services, AP]
In the rhetoric of the client/survivor movement, that involves being engaged as "behavior objects" rather than as "real people." Which challenges the "fetishism" - but a more thoroughgoinng critique should obtain tha respects the integrity of different parties. I have found that Foucault's critique works as a starter there; I've also found that entertaining the problematic of "community engagement" is needed, if we are to extend the conventional approach to community psychology.
Best
Andrew Phelps