Información del curso

Cultures of the Psyche: Psyche of Cultures

Course Instructor: 

Anup Dhar

Fellow, The Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Center (KKC) for Cultural Psychology and Historical Anthropology
Institute of Social Theory and Social Psychology
Faculty of Social Science
Ruhr-University Bochum

This Course takes up two related questions: one related to the ‘subject’ and the other related to ‘knowledge’ (and ‘know-how’). The first is about the human psyche. The second is about the discipline of Psychology. 

Subject: With respect to the first (i.e., subject and human psyche), the Course asks: do humans have One Universal structure of the psyche? Does this Universal structure of the psyche then get dispersed into diverse forms of culturalized registers? Or do different human cultures engender multiple psyches? The Course shall reflect on two possibilities: (i) we start with One structure of the psyche and then reach the culturalized many; which are kind of displaced versions of the original One and (ii) we begin with an ‘originary multiplicity’ and remain in that multiplicity? Would we then - in tune with possibility two - have multiple Psychologies - each emanating from an ‘emic’ rather than ‘etic’ approach, each fundamentally hermeneutic in orientation rather than nomothetic, each “biotic” in research methods and immersive in therapeutic work? The Course argues for a third possibility: (iii) parts of the human psyche have shared elements across cultures; this then is the shared One; the other parts of the psyche are cultural multiples. The Course shall reflect on the third possibility of a hybrid of or an overdetermined relationship between a limited One and multiples. What however is the ratio of the limited One and the multiple? Is the ratio dynamic? Is universality at the level of immanent heuristic  exegeses (“how do we make sense of loss”, of separation, of conjunction, of synthesis, or of dissociation, for example); or at the level of the nature of questions asked (“what is death”, for example); the difference of the ‘path’ to be taken is the particular (“each culture relates to loss differently”; the way one relates to loss defines one's culture; but then, each one of us relate to loss differently; there are personalized differences within cultures)? Particulars open up another set of questions: especially the question of the comparative perspective: can cultures be compared? Can psyches be compared? This in turn opens up the question of communication. Or of understanding (the Other). Would the ‘incommensurability thesis’ come to haunt us when we think of culture and psyche? Further, what is the relationship between private personal cultures (psychoanalysis tends to attend to this) and public collective cultures (anthropology tends to attend to this). 

Knowledge: With respect to the second (i.e., knowledge and the discipline of Psychology) the Course would like to ask: would we have One discipline of Psychology (with One logic of the psyche) and make cultural adjustments to that logic of the One psyche as and when required? The problem with this position is that much of the knowledge of the human psyche is derived from a small subset of the human population: white-westernized, educated, individualized-industrialized, rich and democratic subjects of Enlightenment modernity. It is this small group of “statistical outliers” that provide Psychology the dataset for theoretical constructions that are then generalized to the rest of humankind. 

Other: The Course hence wishes to value epistemic contributions of non-western spaces and non-modern times to knowledge of cultures of the psyche and psyche of cultures. It argues for and tries to make space for the life world [Lebenswelt] and worldviews [Weltanschauung] of both the ‘non-west’ and the ‘non-modern’. This Course makes a case for genuine encounters between west and non-west, modern and non-modern, encounters that would take us beyond unthinking imitation of western universals and equally reactive particularism. It also takes us beyond the blind adoption of colonial rhetoric and anti-colonial polemic, or the equally problematic devaluation/glorification of everything non-western or non-modern.   

Readings: 

Boesch, E. [1991]. Symbolic Action Theory and Cultural Psychology. Springer-Verlag., 29 

Chakkarath, P. (2017). ‘India – A consideration of European perspectives.’ E. Schenini (Ed.), On the Paths of Enlightenment. The Myth of India in Western Culture 1808-2017. Milan, Italy: Skira., 56–61.

Dhar, A. (2015). “Critical Psychology in Asia: Four Fundamental Concepts” in Handbook of Critical Psychology. Ed. I. Parker. Routledge.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J. & Norenzayan, A. (2010). ‘The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61-83. 

Nandy, A. (2004). ‘Towards an Alternative Politics of Psychology.’ In Bonfire of Creeds: the Essential Ashis Nandy., Oxford University Press., 324-328.

Straub, J. (2021). ‘Action-Theoretical Cultural Psychology and the Decentred Subject’. In: Wagoner, B., Christensen, B.A., Demuth, C. (eds) Culture as Process. Springer, Cham. 

Valsiner, J. (2021). Hyper-Generalization by the Human Mind. Ed. P. Chakkarath. Psychosozial-Verlag, Gießen. 

Valsiner, J. (2007). Cultures in Minds and Societies: Foundations of Cultural Psychology. Sage Publications., 28).

Vygotsky, L. S. (1981). ‘The Genesis of Higher Mental Functions.’ J. V. Wertsch (Ed.) The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe., 144-188.