Pure Psychology and Societal Reproduction

Abstract

We are now ready to reintroduce the three foundations of pure psychology in the context of societal reproduction and ideology. Let me first simply assert my conclusion and then develop the bases for it: the building blocks of positivist empiricism, truncated subjectivism, and abstracted individualism on which psychology’s deep structure is based contribute to societal reproduction and are primarily ideological in their social function. Insofar as the existing socioeconomic and sociocultural system generates the necessary domination of many by a few, psychology’s role is to help foster the very self-understandings that reproduce both the underlying system and its accompanying system of domination and unfreedom.