From: Andrew Phelps <phelps@cwnet.com>
To: RadPsyNet-Members@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sat Oct 25 8:34 PM PST
Subject: Re: [RadPsyNet-Members] Re: Helplessness From Financial Meltdown
Jjj:
There is a "paradigm" problem which you are ignoring.
On Sat Oct 26 5:53 PM PST, Jjj sent:
Yet all pragmatic psychology has to work like this. The person who has the problem simply has to deal with it, emotionally and physically. Regarding the possible causes of the current economic crisis, someone wrote that one unfortunate economic fact is that those who most need loans are those who could least afford them, so if we'll care too much about getting loans to those who need them, we'll give too many bad loans. In the same sense, those who most need the sort of free-thought that would let them see all the things that they did right and others did wrong, are those who could least afford to since they have problems that they must solve by correcting what's inside their own skins.
What you are calling "psychology" is what I call "conventional psychology." When Gergen et al. developed social constructionism, they went past this "deal with it emotionally and physically" this response back-and-forth and tried to get to the actual phenomenology. Obviously some people involved in the current economic crisis also are what you call "practical psychologists" and equally superficial.
What Efg described as Foucault's critique is another way to get at this concern. What's important for radical psychology, is to work at a critical distance from conventional psychology, to be "part of the solution" to our "paradigm problem" in social science.
Andrew Phelps
Berkeley, CA