Keywords

The second wave of feminist activism in the United States gave us the adage, “the personal is political.” It allowed women to insist that the difficulties they were having were not caused by their personal qualities or individual choices, but were the product of a system that positioned them as women, and structured their lives and the horizon of possibilities for their material and emotional experiences accordingly (see Shaw & Lee, 2015). The core lesson was (and is) that a person’s individual experience is not theirs alone. Their sense of self is formed within, in relation to, and by, external forces. Feminism began with the understanding that gender is one apparently personal quality that is in fact formed by social factors, and, under patriarchy, in relations of power and oppression.

Naomi Alderman’s feminist dystopian fiction, The Power (2016), explores the consequences of changing gender dynamics within a system of power. The book shows what happens when women are given superior physical power over men, and seize the reins of control accordingly. What begins as a satisfying ability to finally stand up to sexualized brutality becomes a reinscription of more of the same: patriarchal values, where might conveys right, remain in place, even as gender positions are inverted. Merely changing structural positions does not alter the nature of the structure.

The voice of someone who is most likely god says, at the book’s conclusion (Alderman, 2016, p. 360),

I’m giving you the crib sheet right now. Maybe you’ll understand it and maybe you won’t… Who’s bad and who’s good? Who persuaded the other one to eat the apple? Who has the power and who’s powerless? All of these questions are the wrong questions.

It’s more complicated than that, sugar. However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that… You can’t put anyone in a box. Listen, even a stone isn’t the same as any other stone, so I don’t know where you all think you get off labelling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need. But most people can’t live that way, even some of the time. They say: only exceptional people can cross the borders. The truth is: anyone can cross, everyone has it in them.

Alderman slyly skewers sexism—the kind we have in our present world, where women are treated differently because of the social meanings made of their sexual difference—and also insists that human beings all have the ability to abuse, when the terms of valued personhood are based on who is stronger. The supernatural voice who sums it up in the extract above makes the point that Complicities aims to illustrate and unpack: There is a self/other binary at work in the power dynamics of Western social, interpersonal and intrapersonal dynamics. This binary has a specific material history. It is not inevitable. And it creates realities both psychological and material. In deconstructing binary thinking, and the version of the human that results, and by focusing on the messiness and complexity of human interactions in practice, a new model for human being emerges. This is a way out of the us and them positions that in the end serve to keep the structure in place.

The main argument of this book is that to be human means to be complicit in the systems we inherit, and are structured by. These systems, in a world which relies on binary thinking, are always systems of power. They comprise both symbolic structures like language, apparently natural units like the family, and larger social formations like communities and countries. They also include group and individual experiences which are given narrative shape and thus specific meanings, like history, and like identity. To be complicit means that human being is not an individualized enterprise. Each subject is made through genealogies, histories, inheritances which are by definition communal, and through their linkages and reactions to, and reliances on, other subjects.

To accept this argument is to see a way out of the current dominant binary thinking that continues to structure most ideas of human subjectivity at work in psychotherapy. The modern idea of the self as it is espoused through the psy disciplines (psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis), a Western technology of knowing, is based on a self/other structure. Such a formulation also maps onto an oppressor/oppressed model for subjectivity, which currently informs much of the liberation work of identitypolitics. For a social justice-oriented psychotherapy practice, this can be limiting. Complicities will flesh out these assertions, concentrating in various chapters on aspects of modern identities important to liberation politics and practices. It will also connect modern identification practices to the liberalism that has helped shape the Western subject of psychotherapy, via the discipline of psychology and the work it has done to help construct the modern world. In the final chapter, some practices for social justice-oriented psychotherapy will be considered.

This work takes place under the rubric of the psychological humanities, which recognizes the conceptual limits of traditional psychological approaches to human being. This initial chapter is the most theoretical. Because, as an exploration of the potential of the psychological humanities as an interdiscipline, explored below, I draw on concepts that will be differently familiar to readers depending on their knowledge base, I considered it important to map out the frames of reference that inform my thinking. Some readers find theoretical language alienating, one of the relevant critiques against forms of high theoretical writing that nevertheless claims to be engaged with social justice issues and wants to be relevant to the world. I have done my best to make these ideas both interesting and accessible. If at times they are hard going, I beg your indulgence and assure you they are applied in later chapters.

My starting point, in feminism, locates my work within the group of psychological theories of human being that are concerned with acknowledging and addressing issues of social justice. Feminist therapy followed early feminist insight, born out of consciousness raising groups where women’s experiences were validated. It was a practice that began by refusing the normativegender assumptions of the patriarchal authority that had structured the discipline (Rothblum & Cole, 2018; Williams, 1995). It grew to actively value the wisdom and experiences of all othered voices (Brown, 2018). Other psychologies concerned with political and psychic liberation also insist that knowledge is never neutral, that the standpoint of the observer-commentator shapes what they can understand and that institutions create systems of privilege and oppression that define and affect people along axes of gender, race, class, ablebodiedness, ethnicity, neurodiversity, location, nation and other markers of hierarchy and access. Transnational, postcolonial, indigenous and decolonial perspectives extend the definition of systems and the understanding of how they work to a global scale. Cultural and hermeneutic awareness has long been a part of the discipline and practice of psychology and psychotherapy, as will be discussed in more detail below. The acknowledgment that we are not, in fact, independent liberal subjects, free to choose (our identities, our experiences, our relation to ourselves and our access to resources if we just work hard enough), is not at all new.

And yet, in popular culture and in mainstream American political discourse, the modern subject is still the subject of liberalism, free indeed to choose his fate, at best, or fettered by injustice so that he cannot achieve this rhetorically god-given right. In the twenty-first century, he is neoliberalized into being responsible for ensuring his selfhood is profitable, as I will explain in Chaps. 2 and 5. He is, in the first place, gendered, classed and raced, although he believes these things do not matter to his ability to succeed. The discourses and technologies of psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychotherapy have been central to the creation, authorization, dissemination and popularization of this liberal human subject. What we have today, as a result, is a popular idea of what it means to be a person that is saturated with historical meanings and specific economic processes, presented as natural, and dependent on binary thinking. This is true, despite decades of theoretical work in the academy which seeks to deconstruct, interrogate, problematize and locate the relations of power that comprise our institutions and the meanings we make of the world, ourselves and each other.

The unified self in search of its correct path, free to make the right or healthy choices to achieve knowledge of itself and thus be a better version of itself, is the model of the self that is still necessary in most versions of the psychotherapy session. Throughout this book, I use the term “psychotherapy”to refer to the practice of counseling undertaken by therapists who may or may not be psychologists: They might be licensed professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, or analysts. Such practitioners did not necessarily pass through academic psychology to achieve their licensure. They also did not necessarily encounter in much detail any of the more humanities-inflected ideas about human being of the last half century. In what follows, I am bringing together for a very broad church ideas about the theory and practice of psychology and psychotherapy, informed by feminist, queer, critical race, postcolonial and decolonial, and cultural studies insights developed most extensively in the academic humanities.

Who am I talking about, and for? On the one hand, a disembodied idea called the human subject. The statement that to be human means to be implicated in psychic and material structures is a statement intended to be universal. On the other hand, the subject under discussion here is the subject of psychology, which is to say, the subject of Western modernity. This subject is not, in theory or practice, universal, although the scientific subject of psychology can sometimes forget that it is not a collection of neurons and response times, of evolutionary logic and developmental absolutes. The human being I am invoking is a diverse collective, intended to acknowledge our very real experiential differences, the ways our systems of power and our institutions name and position people very differently based on the meanings made of their histories, communities and embodiments. And in so doing, shape (but not determine) their senses of selves. Through our differences, through our very different investments, profits and losses in the meanings made of our differences, “we” are connected. This is an audacious claim for a middle-class white person to make, and from that standpoint, it is an assertion of privilege. But my voice is also informed by being assigned female at birth and socialized female, by being queer, by being from the global South, by being an immigrant. I am a both-and, which is what I am suggesting the theoretical “we” I invoke should be seen as as well: both universalizing and specific, looking for a universal connection across humans, and acknowledging of inequality: the historical, structural, invested components which deny the connections across different human beings, and the suffering this causes. I say a little more about humanism in Chap. 2, a discussion which also illustrates how an education in the humanities simultaneously enables an awareness of what “we” share, and of how “we” are constructed according to historically invested differences.

Complicities navigates a familiar tension. There are liberation theories that want to name systems of power and oppression, and the injustices they cause, in order to advocate for material change in real people’s lives and in the experience of their communities. And there are deconstructive theories that, in refusing normative and normativizing definitions of personhood, citizenship, morality, wellness, subjectivity and so on, have often been accused of working against material change in their focus on the constructed nature of oppressive phenomena. Such tensions have been evident within feminism and queer theory for decades, as I will discuss in more detail in Chap. 4.

It is important to acknowledge the constructed nature of subject positions, in order to make explicit the politics at play and the investments in presenting as natural what are human systems of meaning, made by people through time and space with something at stake. What it means to be female, or black, or disabled, or Jewish, to name a few examples, is, for the purposes of human systems, entirely located in context. I will continually illustrate this claim throughout this book. On the other hand, strategic essentialisms (Danius & Jonsson, 1993) are often necessary for political work, especially in the context of a rights-based system that needs recognizable groups, endorsed by born-that-way arguments, before rights can be conferred (Bonthuys, 2008; Brown, 1995; Butler, 1993). Essentialism also has psychic value, especially in a Western system based on individualism and individuality. If we understand that subjectivity is made from the systems that structure it, and also feeds back into these systems to continue and to change them, then the “problem” of deconstruction verses essentialism falls away and is revealed as another one of the reductive consequences of binary thinking (Fuss, 1989).

Binary Thinking

Binary thinking sets up a relation, presented as natural, between two ideas (people, concepts, identities) that are constructed as reliant on each other’s apparently obvious and immutable meanings. These meanings are assumed to be opposite and are almost always hierarchical. One half of the binary benefits, materially and-or psychically, in other words, from the relation. Accordingly, that half will work to protect the binary structure. One consequence, explored in more detail in Chap. 4, is the way transgender people are so violently policed for threatening the gender binary (male/female).

Binary thinking has been an important part of systems of Western meaning-making and has helped enable the construction of the neoliberal geopolitical global world order of modernity, which has emerged from nineteenth century colonialism, as will be explored in more detail in Chap. 2. Postcolonial theory, among other lessons, illustrated how binary thinking endorsed colonial thoughts and deeds.

Postcolonial theoreticians pointed out how colonizing discourse, the sense that colonizing cultures made of what they were doing, is constructed around a binary system: self/other; good/bad; white/black; master/slave; male/female; subject/object. The terms of these related binaries rely on each other. They are obviously constructed with a hierarchical logic: It is better to be white, master, male and therefore a subject. It is psychologically better, in that it guarantees a specific sense of self, and it is better in terms of access to privilege, resources, authority and power. The disempowered side of the binary, the side of the other/object/slave, is sometimes called the subaltern: the one without the representational and therefore political power in this system (Spivak, 1988). The subaltern is the necessary other to the colonizing self. The relationship across the two sides of the binary is not only hierarchical; it is constituting. The colonizer cannot be a colonizer without a colonized. If we understand this dynamic, we understand what is at stake for the colonizing self in the act of taking power: his very existence. This is the oppressor/victim binary, already embedded in a complicity more complex than the us and them of current identitypolitics can allow.

Binary thinking is reductive. Cohen (2005) has shown how binary thinking cannot accommodate intersectionality. She argued that queer theory set up a new binary, hetero/queer, which also corresponded to bad/good. She pointed out that, because it relied only on sexuality as the oppression it accounted for, this kind of queer theory overlooked the ways in which someone could be heterosexual and still oppressed, and queer and still hold privilege. She gave the examples of poor women of color on welfare, whose heterosexuality did not fit the required, respectable norm; or enslaved people, whose heterosexuality was denied as part of the denial of their humanity.

Since the beginning of feminist theorizing, from the Combahee River Collective (1983), through the works of Lorde (2007) and into the writings of Hill Collins (2015) and the legal scholarship of Crenshaw (1989), among others (see Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983), the fact of intersectionality has been reiterated by feminists of color (see Nash, 2019). It has been taken up, if inadequately, in some branches of psychology (McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019). But this well-known truth, that people are made up of different parts that impact each other, tells us that you cannot account for someone’s experiences by separating out aspects of their identity, and that context affects how we experience ourselves and others. It also tells us that, because binaries artificially impose and reduce identities as constructs, we better serve lived experience and the complex work of liberation from oppression by focusing on the ways we are made together, by each other, and by the systems in which we come into being and which we reproduce and change by being in them.

What’s the difference between complicity and intersectionality? Intersectionality can sometimes be used to endorse identitypolitics, as it can be read as relying on the reification of identity categories in order to make its point. Complicity wants to move us beyond identitypolitics, in part by challenging the conceptual underpinnings to identity categories. This does most emphatically not mean that I am arguing for an apolitical view of what it means to be person. If I am arguing for a kind of humanist vision, it is a humanism that is first and foremost and always embedded in structural relations of power, since to be human, in this model, is to be complicit in systems. This is one of the ways I am suggesting binary thinking is wholly inadequate to any project of the psychological humanities, of which more below. We have to acknowledge the operations of power and privilege, of history and trauma, of who gets to decide and define who has to be other to the mythical norm (Lorde, 2007). And we have to acknowledge that these operations, as central as they are to the construction of discourses that shape lives and subjectivities and opportunities and violences, are not anywhere near the sum total of what it means to be human. These power dynamics are fundamentally human, and they are also limiting of what it really is to be human. They structure, and in so doing, constrain. We are not, in fact, ineluctably separated from each other by the different ways our lives, experiences and senses of selves are shaped by the structures we inherit, are made by, and go on to perpetuate, challenge or change. As the theories which interrogate the relationship between self and other illustrate, and the insistence these theories enable that we are each dependent on the other, an other, another, we are all complicit in the system (some of these theories are discussed in more detail later in this chapter). We are therefore also all complicit in each other. Not equally, not ahistorically, not to mutual benefit. But nonetheless.

While oppressive systems operate via the construction and violent assertion of artificial binaries (the apartheid regime’s attempt to segregate racial identities is one example, Posel, 2001; heterosexuality’s construction of homosexuality is another, Katz, 2007), human being is, and always has been, nonbinary. Cultural, systemic and personal meanings are intertwined. And, as attachment theory and the neuroscience of early childhood development illustrate, an individual’s sense of self is thoroughly woven into the senses of selves of other humans on a physical level, as well as an emotional one (Bowlby, 1982; Gerhardt, 2004; Mascolo, 2016; Musholt, 2018; Pyne, 2016; Schore, 2003; Siegel, 2003; Stern, 1985). Branches of academic and applied psychology have long been engaging with this reality, as will be explored in more detail below. The image of the fold is also sometimes offered to counter the idea of a self-contained self. The fold, as we will see below, speaks to the ways the idea of an inside is constituted by the outside.

Thus Complicities builds on the by-now-apparent insight that humans are embedded in social contexts, that individual subjectivity is shaped by the structures and forces it inherits, and which it perforce responds to. Structural injustice matters to—and in and on—all of us, because we are all complicit in each other. And injustice makes use of binary thinking to construct realities where some are rendered superior because others are rendered inferior, or dangerous, or both.

Binary thinking limits what is humanly possible. To do our best work as therapists, we benefit from a nonbinary view of what it means to be human. This means esca** the model of the individual created for and presented to us by mainstream scientific psychology, of which more below and in the following chapter.

We ourselves are part of the work of hel** our clients. We are intersubjectively complicit, a notion that I will return to throughout this book. How we understand what our clients suffer from will inform what version of healthy selfhood we are hel** them toward (e.g., Hardy, 2008 and Duran & Duran, 1995 have argued for creating diagnoses that recognize the damage done by racial oppression). A knowledge of the constructed and invested nature of the psychological self, as well as of its real power as a discourse of knowledge creation, is a necessary component of this process. In order to do this, we need a double vision, a both-and: at the same time as we want to resist the binary thinking upon which the Western subject of psychology has been built, we simultaneously have to continue acknowledging that historical forces have created structures which perpetuate systems of inequality.

Part of the work of seeing the systems of meaning at play here is learning about where they come from. The modern subject of psychotherapy, as will be explored in more detail in this chapter and the next, is complicit in the emergence of systems of modernity: liberalism, democracy and the individuality they create and police; capitalism and neoliberalism, and the racism and gender politics they create and profit from, as the chapters which follow will explore.

The self who is the product of the self/other binary is itself an effect of Western history, embedded in culture, economics, politics, gender, race, class, uses of religion, uses and constructions of sexuality, notions of ablebodiedness. This means that both the self and the other on which it depends can be understood not only as starting points for power relations, but also as products of them. Rose (1998, p. 188), following Deleuze, offers the idea of the fold: The self is an effect of the ways in which the forces of the exterior world “form an inside to which it appears an outside must always make reference.” The illusion of depth, the pleats and cavities it causes, “only exist in relation to the… forces… that sustain them.” What this means, Rose (ibid) argues, in relation to the subject created by psychology and its related disciplines, is that the

[S]ubject is assembled… in terms of a problem of “self-mastery”: bringing to bear upon oneself—the inside acting upon itself—the power that one brings to bear upon others… [T]he power that is brought to bear upon others is figured as a power relation between this inside of oneself and this inside of the other.

The self’sexperience of itself is reliant not only on its experience of its other, but on a relation of power with that other. The self/other binary relation is an effect, not only of external, institutional forces providing meanings and allocating resources accordingly, but of the processes of subjectification out of which the modern self emerges. This specific binary relation, which in and out of our systems of power maps on the logic of subject/object, is central to Cartesian modernity; it is the “epistemological hallmark of modern thought” (Coelho & Claudio, 2003, p. 194).

But if the self/other relation emerges out of material, systemic and discursive practices that create the self’s sense of itself as well as its need for its other, this is in fact another level of complicity. The binary is artificial. The processes that create it rely on rhizomatic relations between selves and structures as well as selves and others. And as we will see shortly, the idea of complicity I am develo** relies on the idea that human subjectivity is folded, not split, that we are enfolded by human being into each other.

We are each of us dependent on each other in many ways. The modern human is subjected by language, by interpersonal neurobiology, by gender and race and age and politics and technology as I explore them later in this book. Human being has also been subjected by binary thinking, which some branches of feminism, queer theory, cultural studies and postcolonial theories have all offered ways to challenge. Rose’s (1998) formulation suggests that the binary is not only false because it constructs immutable relations between positions, identities and bodies it sets up as opposite, at worst, or exclusive to each other, at least. It is also false because its very technologies of possibility belie the fact that the self is reliant on another to be itself. Despite the logic the binary seeks to assert, that the self must abjure the other, the Western self is a self because of its other. The imperative to power-mastery that has so far accompanied this truth is what is ensured by the structuring of this relation as binary, which is also a denial of the constitutive complicity of human being.

Rose’s (1998) model has an additional consequence for understanding the impact of binary thinking on the modern subject’s construction. He describes how the psy disciplines have inscribed a modern subject compelled to have interiority, and structured by the psy technologies (theories and schools of thought, research, institutions, practices of counseling, ideas of wellness and mental illness, psychiatric and penalizing incursions into and onto specific notions of the body, the brain, the soul and so on). This subject is told it is free to choose. As part of this process, the subject is to decide on the self it should be: “To be the selfone is one must not be the selfone is not—not that despised, rejected, or abjected soul. Thus becoming oneself is a recurrent copying that both emulates and differs from other selves” (Rose, 1998, p. 192). This suggests that binary thinking can be located in the modern self’s relationship with its self, too. In needing abjected other selves to help us pick the right, healthy, self, Rose’s (1998) process of subjectification articulates an additional role of the binary in hel** to internally structure this self. We also see a way the self becomes other to itself, can become its own other, in believing it must improve itself—one of the imperatives of psychotherapy.

The binary, in other words, goes very deep into the Western subject, as well as making that subject reliant on its others. It is perhaps not surprising that theories which suggest human subjectivity does not operate in practice as it is assumed to by binary thinking have not achieved the status of common sense outside of parts of academia.

Complicities

I develop the idea of the complicit subject from the work of Sanders (2002), who examined apartheid as an exemplary complicity-generating system. He argues, using the figure of the South African intellectual, that when you are a product of a system, you cannot avoid collaboration with that system, even when you oppose it. He explores how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) sought to make the point that complicity makes us responsible, and that, according to the report published by the Commission, “it is only by recognizing the potential for evil in each one of us that we can take full responsibility for ensuring that such evil will never be repeated” (qtd. in Sanders, 2002, p. 3). The TRC report wanted to focus its readers’ attention not only on the large-scale human rights violations that were patently abusive and wrong, but on the daily workings of life under apartheid that helped perpetuate the larger system in countless little ways.

The TRC report, Sanders argues (2002, p. 3), is resisting “the intuition that in order to combat evil one must be, or must proclaim oneself to be, untouched by it.” Neither Sanders nor the TRC report engages with the question of evil from a psychotherapeutic point of view, which would want to ask where such dark energy comes from. Binary thinking suggests it is human nature to project our inner darkness outward, onto our others (McWilliams 2020). Thinking complicitously suggests a more complex involvement with the systems of power which help create and shape, and then make use of, the desire to control and hurt others. Thinking complicitously disallows a stance of pure resistance, as Sanders (2002) explores. It suggests that in order to resist, we have to acknowledge our involvement in the system.

This is relevant to a contemporary identitypolitics that, fed by a divisive political climate, sometimes paints itself into a corner, relying on binary thinking to articulate its objections to oppression. Instead of mobilizing the recognition of structural oppression to enable structural change, it reifies the oppressor/oppressed binary, but flips its moral assignations. Once the othered position becomes saturated with a morally righteous victimhood, it becomes nigh impossible to do anything other than reproduce the binary terms of an oppressive system ad nauseam. One consequence is that human being is reduced to structural markers, where we can never exceed the terms given to us for who we can be (see Brown, 1995; Gamson, 1995). Another is that some subjects are reduced to the status of evil, where privilege and ignorance become, not structural consequences, but markers of individual badness (DiAngelo, 2018). The capacity to engage in structural change is unfortunately and radically foreclosed by this discourse.

McWilliams (2020) offers an analytic point of view on how uncomplicit thinking entrenches the structural positions which perpetuate oppression. Her account helps illuminate some of the dynamics at play in current progressive discourses. She (McWilliams, 2020, p. 184) says the (here naturalized) human tendency to create a self/other binary is at work when someone feels politically enlightened. This is a version of narcissistic entitlement that relies on “a claim of moral authority.” Such a position is not only problematic because reliant on the hierarchical thinking of the binary, and an assertion of power over another. It also renders this putatively morally superior woke self particularly vulnerable to shame: “That position of framing myself as among the enlightened… sets me up to be hurt and humiliated whenever I am caught out in some prejudice or microaggression, at which point I tend to resort to paranoid-schizoid defenses against such feelings,” which results in an inability to own any of one’s own badness, and a need to project it onto the other in the form of an assumption about their destructive intent (McWilliams, 2020, p. 184). This helps explain the white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) of liberal, well-intentioned white people. It also accounts for the one-upmanship of cancel culture (brown, 2020; Ross, 2019); Butler (1993, p. 311) asks, “Is it not a sign of despair over public politics when identity becomes its own policy, bringing with it those who would ‘police’ it from various sides?” brown (2020, p. 12) puts it in more recent parlance as a tendency within current movements toward “gleeful othering, revenge, or punishment of others, particularly when these things deepen our belonging to each other, usually briefly, until we too fuck up.”

Sanders (2002) says that the notion of complicity extends responsibility from one’s relationship to specific unjust systems, or in specific deeds, to one’s responsibility as a human to other humans. Etymologically, complicity indicates “a folded-together-ness… in human-being” (Sanders, 2002, p. 5). Furthermore, suggests Sanders (2002, p. 9), following Derrida, the notion of complicit human being contaminates binary positions, by folding together “oppositional pairs,” creating “an ethico-political discourse on complicity.” Sanders (2002, p. 10) goes on to differentiate between “complicity in the general sense” and “complicities in the narrow sense,” the little, daily, thoroughly enmeshed sense of complicities that I wish to invoke as the notion of human being for which I am advocating. I hope it is clear that this model of complicity is also fundamentally “ethico-political.” It is intended to acknowledge, not overlook, the consequences of structural oppression and the material use of differences in systems of power (the political awareness), while also arguing for a shared human responsibility which is necessary for a better politics (the ethical part).

The idea of the human subject as made by foldedness, the image of “the basic folded-together-ness of being, of human-being” is also the place “of self and other” (Sanders, 2002, p. 11). In being folded with the other as a condition of human being, complicity is established. And the binary on which self and other structures depend is revealed as actually a relationship of complicity and not a relation of exclusion, opposition and hierarchy.

Sanders (2002, p. 15) also charts how asserting “[a] basic human foldedness” at once functions to deny the commitment to apartness that underlies oppressive systems (like apartheid, literally “apart-ness”), and, in necessarily having to be specific in each articulation of resistance to oppression, must needs be limited by, defined by, the details of the oppressive moment against which it is speaking. It is both a general appeal to human being, and a necessarily limited, partial, materially and historically specific one. In this way, the image of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) superimposes onto the metaphor of the fold. If foldedness challenges the artificial binary structuring of self and other, the rhizome bespeaks the connections between subjects and structures, within which selves are folded.

The Science of Psychology and the Psychological Humanities

Complicities brings the work of the humanities to the work of psychotherapy. Like the task of articulating a complicit human subjectivity, this is both not a new undertaking, and one that has recently acquired new impetus. It is worth noting that as late as 2019, Marecek was still tracking an uneven application of interdisciplinarity, and feminist, critical and social justice-related concerns in psychology, particularly in the United States.

Psychology as a discipline emerged from philosophy, in the first instance, and from the medicalization of behaviors, some of which became modern identities, in the second (Adriaens & De Block, 2013; Devonis, 2014; Foucault, 1977; Mascolo, 2016). It has what Rose (1998, p. 41) calls “a long past but a short history.” Philosophical questions about the nature of perception, how we know what we know, how we know what is real, why we make sense of the world the way we do, how and why our senses work, where and what our souls are and how or if they influence what we think, go back to the ancient Greeks. Psychology as a science began in the late nineteenth century, arguably with a lab experiment tracking response times to aural stimuli (Laubscher, 2015). Psychology emerged together with modern medicine and sexology, as the drive to understand, measure, categorize and rank along biological lines became mainstream in a specific set of political, cultural and economic circumstances. These included colonialism, scientific racism, the consolidation of modern democracies and the early global capitalism implicated in all these; and the invention of the hetero/homo binary along with the consolidation of modern gender and sexual norms (Adriaens & De Block, 2013; Katz, 2007; Saini, 2017; Schiebinger, 2004; Severson & Goodman, 2020; Teo, 2005). Psychology has also always had a metapsychological, critical component (Teo, 2005). The brief account I provide here will focus on the twentieth century, largely British and American, developments.

The process of develo** psychology into a scientific field, apparently capable of accounting accurately for human thought and behavior via measurable experiments, was directly implicated in nineteenth century European colonial racism, in Americanracism, in misogyny and in ableism (Devonis, 2014; Guthrie, 2004; Kendi, 2016; Rippon, 2019; Saini, 2017; Showalter, 2007; Silberman, 2015; Teo, 2005). Or, as McWilliams (2020, p. 181) puts it, “[O]ur track record is replete with malignant othering, from our early enchantment with the eugenics movement, through our enthusiasm for IQ testing…, to our more recent collusion with torture.” Psychology has been used to emphasize differences rather than connections, in people and groups, what Devonis (2014, p. 113) calls the, “implicit reinforcement of discrimination via method.” And as a discipline, psychology has been implicated in the construction of modern categories of normalcy and deviance which often operated along the lines of social difference and operations of social power; “psychology in fact did not solve problems but produced problematizations in which neutral issues were turned into highly problematized objects” (Teo, 2005, p. 144).

As a result, science’s apparent objectivity is not only implicated in human cultural and political systems that belie its claims to truth-telling. It is also implicated in the idea that to be a self is something that can be known, tracked and improved upon. I am not suggesting that science is not real, but I am insisting that science cannot offer us unmediated access to the Lacanian real, the place outside of the symbolic realm within which human subjectivity finds itself. Biological facts exist; physics has laws; numbers can be counted; but the meanings we make will always be structured by the cultures in which we make them. When claims to the absolute truth of human being continue to be made in the name of a science of behavior, it is high time to push back.

Modern academic psychology has relied on a certain notion of the self as “the primary reality and unit of study” (Jordan 1997, p. 9), in the context of a scientifically structured discourse. As a result, it has helped develop the modern version of what it means to be human, begun in the Enlightenment. Today, in the West, “to be human is first of all to be rational individuals, with bodies programed by genetics” (Severson & Goodman, 2020, p. 2). These are the consequences: “At the start of the 21st century,… [e]xpressive individualism reigns supreme in various psychological approaches, promoting individuation and autonomy as primary achievements that facilitate health and wellbeing” (Goodman & Freeman, 2015, p. 5). The colonial inheritances of this psychological discourse of normality remain unspoken within the scientific frame that endorses it (Adams et al., 2015; Adams et al., 2017; Bhatia, 2020; Maldonado-Torres, 2017; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). This is despite strands of psychology, developed in the twentieth century, that are, variously, humanistic and/or based in phenomenological awareness of meaning-making, or influenced by cultural, political, linguistic, philosophical or psychoanalytic theories. The humanities offers even self-reflexive psychological theories the chance to get outside of the limits of psychology’s own discursive constraints (Olson, 2012; Papadopoulos, 2008; Teo, 2005; Teo, 2019).

The psychological humanities (Martin, 2017; Teo, 2017; Teo, 2019) seeks to bring psychology back into more direct and, dare I say it, honest relation to the fields of academic study that focus on the mediated nature of human understanding and meaning-making processes. In 2009, the American Psychological Association asserted that psychology is a natural science (the science of behavior), leading almost immediately to calls to consider psychology a human science instead (Laubscher, 2015, p. 7). The APA’s vision of psychology was one of hypotheses, laboratories, equipment, observation, measurements, experiments and the use of scientific method to formulate and test objective facts about human behavior. From a humanities point of view, as I have suggested, science is not a way to access unmediated truth, it is a technology of truth creation. And for practicing psychotherapists, our psychological work’s official claims to scientific status—meaning objective, measurable, standardized, manualizable, controllable—cannot hold. “[M]any everyday psychologists know in their hearts that a major realignment of the profession’s philosophy of science is desperately needed,” Cushman (2019, p. 153) reported, following the audience response to his 2013 address to the APA. As he asserts, “Most of our work as therapists is not the application of universal scientific truths won during long hours of objective research. Therapy, I think, is not scientific… it is a kind of moral discourse, and worse yet, one that has political consequences” (Cushman, 2019, p. 79). Richards (2012, p. 347) insists on the inescapably reflexive nature of psychology as a discipline; it cannot escape being of the situated humanity it wants to talk about: “Psychology’s problem in this respect rests in large part on its desperate aspirations to the status of a natural science in quest of universal laws, and psychologists’ own self-images of themselves as this kind of scientist.”

One method of engagement with the scientification of psychology has been the attempts to assert the scientific nature of the human part of psychology (Brooke, 2015; Freeman, 2019; Sugarman, 2019), to make the claim that while it may not be a STEM science, it should still be taken seriously as a science and can be called upon to account for itself as such (“physics envy,” Held, 2020). This is one way to address the anxieties raised in our culture when we argue for psychology’s status as contingent, as contingent as the human meanings it seeks to understand. What grounds can it stand on, if its findings are inevitably relative? The million dollar question becomes, “Can psychology as a discipline presume to be both truly scientific and genuinely human?” (Gantt & Williams, 2015, p. 32).

Mascolo (2016) argues that this is the wrong question. Psychology’s desire to be considered a science, as it emerged from philosophy, he suggests, has embedded psychology in “methodological fetishism—the privileging of method over theory in the hope that the careful use of scientific methodology would ultimately lead to psychological knowledge” (Mascolo, 2016, p. 544). He suggests that the discipline’s concern to understand human experience by solving the objective/subjective dichotomy, through self-definition and focus on method, is misplaced. Psychological knowledge emerges from encounters between people, who bring their own already established knowledges of the construct under scrutiny. These subjective knowledges also have to have a shared dimension in order to be intelligible to all participants in the psychological enterprise. The process is not either objective or subjective. (Notably, binary thinking is inadequate to and reductive of the task at hand). In other words, he (Mascolo, 2016, p. 544) says, psychology is an intersubjectively produced knowledge, and therefore “a genuine psychological science must itself rest on intersubjective foundations.” We will return to intersubjectivity below, and in future chapters. For now, it is worth noticing that intersubjectivity is offered here as a solution to the false binary of objective/subjective or science/not science that has helped to structure psychology. He concludes (Mascolo, 2016, p. 553):

A debate over whether a given discipline is or is not a science would seem to be more of a battle about status and prestige than about identifying alternative pathways to reliable knowledge. A better question might be, given its subject matter, how can we study psychological processes in systematic, reliable and useful ways? If such conditions can be satisfied, the question of whether or not disciplinary practices are “scientific” would be irrelevant.

Implicit in this formulation is a challenge to the meaning of the “scientific.” Why is scientific method so reified, why is it endorsed as the best way to achieve knowledge? Mascolo’s (2016) exploration of the meaning of the question, “Is psychology a science?” begins by reminding us that psychology emerged from philosophy via the Cartesian separation of mind and body, with the mind being privileged as the seat of rational selfhood. This way of thinking has always been gendered, raced and classed.

Gantt and Williams (2015) reiterate that psychology has emerged out of Enlightenment notions of the individualized and rational self. They also suggest that the humanistic branches of psychology that developed in the 1960s are “Romantic” (p. 42) and a “retreat into subjectivism” (p. 43), in other words, not available to be scientific. They suggest a third option is necessary, where the study of human meaning can be scientific, and can also take seriously the centrality of society and context to human being. They advocate for a model based on a science of understanding, which gives us access to the living complexities of human meaning. They contrast this to the dominant model of scientific explanation, which, in compartmentalizing and seeking authority over, takes the human out of its project altogether. The commitment of all of the contributors to this edited collection (Fischer et al., 2015) is to argue for the scientific validity of an approach to psychology that accommodates social scientific and humanities insights about human meaning and experience.

This project speaks to an ongoing investment in the ability of science to prove things, so that we can rest assured a psychological humanities can still be taken seriously, implicitly by certain people in specific institutions. Such an investment, needless to say, is still operating within a privileged understanding of the realm of “science” as carrying a truth value that no other discourse can be expected to match, and the assumption that such a truth is both necessary and possible. This approach is located on the science side of a science/humanities binary, and limits what the humanities can truly offer in terms of changing the thinking about the responsibility of science in hel** to create the world it goes on to reflect, and changing the subject of psychology.

The question of the humanities’ knowledge of things that are not facts (often understood in psychoanalysis, which is more welcoming to literature and other cultural artifacts as sources of human truth) and therefore cannot be grasped through scientific method is central to the idea that a psychological humanities can expand the boundaries available to psychology:

[T]he main problem from the perspective of the psychological humanities is the degree to which reflexivity is able to escape the borders of a given horizon. Clearly this reflexivity cannot be conducted alone in a monologue but requires engagement with the Other and horizons that are radically different from one’s own… psychologists need to move beyond the natural sciences in order to understand human mental life. (Teo, 2019, pp. 276–7)

Freeman (2019) offers the (from a scientific perspective) radical suggestion that psychology invests more in poetics than in theory. Significantly, he calls for psychology to develop a “poetics of the Other.” In this formulation, not only is the other conceived of as more important than the self in the understanding of experience (which is not, in certain quarters, a new idea, as will be discussed below), but poetics are elevated over what Freeman (2019, p. 1) calls “theoretics.” Freeman’s call is to reimagine psychology away from a “scientific” discursive frame. He advocates for a new kind of psychological thinking, one which takes extremely seriously, even centrally, the wisdom to be gained from “humanizing” (2019, p. 5) the scientific theorizing on which modern psychology as a discipline is built.

Freeman’s project is in part to challenge the definition of scientific theory that informs modern psychology’s sense of itself. He wants to complicate the idea that the humanist, the poetic, the directly meaningful, is somehow other to the abstraction, deduction and generalizing tendencies of a modern notion of the theoretical. Psychology, he argues, has never been the kind of science it has aspired to be. He argues for the importance of narrative and biography to understanding clinical work (and Martin, 2017 argues for the importance of understanding biography to understand the development of the theories that structure and guide clinical work). Poetry, for Freeman (2019, pp. 9–10), is a place where hidden meaning is revealed, where the world is made visible. Psychologists, he suggests, like artists, share the task of restoring attention to the details of life that habitually slip away from us (see Stern, 2014).

In tracking the work of the poetic, Freeman (2019) gestures to the work that language does. This occurs in the difference between the felt experience of life in the body, and what happens when we humans make sense of experience. In finding the world through words, the subject experiences its own reality: “Something has been realized, made real; and in this making, the world without may be re-found” (Freeman, 2019, p. 13). It is the unknown, made known and thereby experienced as familiar or remembered, that constitutes the poetic otherness of what it truly means to be human. This cannot be captured by theory, Freeman (2019) says. It exceeds attempts to pin it down, to weigh, measure, account for and track it. The poetic cannot be captured and still be poetic. (This reminds me of Kristeva’s, 1980 notion of the semiotic). While I appreciate Freeman’s valuing of a nonscientific approach, I prefer a more theorized version of “the poetic,” reactive as I am to the suggestion that science has concrete, material theory and the humanities has an untheorized, universal realm of art. This is simply a misrepresentation of the highly political, philosophically complex, richly theoretical work done within the discipline of the humanities over the past half century.

Stern (1985) has already offered an explanation for how language, in bringing the child along developmentally, splits her from her bodily experience, from what she can know of herself, at the same time as it enters her into the world outside herself. This underscores Freeman’s point that science cannot be a theory of the real because it cannot not leave out the human element of the human experiences it is trying to map; “it is patently unprepared to address the living presence of human reality” (Freeman, 2019, p. 14). Scientific language cannot capture what the poetic (or perhaps the semiotic, which in Kristeva’s, 1980 lexicon is where poetic language comes from) lets us know is there prior to our attempts to impose form on it. “[H]uman reality, understood as presence or phenomenon rather than object, eludes the kind of conceptual—and theoretical—containment science generally seeks… [H]uman reality, as living presence, eludes such entrapment” as the provable experiment or the inventory seeks to impose on what it means to be human (Freeman, 2019, pp. 15–16). If we take seriously that the self is reliant on the other—on an other, on another—to be a self at all, we are in the realm of the poetic, according to Freeman (2019). We are also in the realm of the psychoanalytic unconscious, of attachment theory, of literary psychoanalysis, of interpersonal neurobiology and of a notion of human being as complicitous.

Despite its reliance on scientific method to validate its work, psychology has never been an exclusively academic enterprise. Its authority is formulated on its espoused relationship between practice and theory about that practice (Devonis, 2014; Rose, 1998). This allows its pronouncements on human truths to be apparently evidence-based. This, of course, denies the exercises of power that the normative and normativizing energies of psychology have been responsiblefor (Foucault, 2006; Rose, 1998; Teo, 2005). Authority to know is authority over that which must be known. In the terms of a Western subject that has been shaped by binary logic, what needs to be controlled for is the constituting other.

Self/Other

Disciplines involved with revealing the construction of racial difference, and working in the fields of gender and sexuality, have amply illustrated, both theoretically and materially, the role of the constituting other for the modern self. Whiteness, straightness, maleness, ablebodiedness and Europeanness have all been shown to need their debased binary other halves in order to be themselves (e.g., de Beauvoir, 1997; Dean, 2001; Fanon, 1967; Katz, 2007; Lorde, 2007; McRuer, 2006; Said, 1979).

Some branches of psychological theory and practice, and especially psychoanalytic thought, have long insisted on the importance of the other to the self/other mode of subject constitution (Benjamin, 1988; Churchill, 2015; Coelho & Claudio, 2003; Dean, 2001; Musholt, 2018). And yet in 2015, Goodman and Freeman’s (2015) edited collection on psychology and the other begins with the declaration that “the figure of the Other is an… underutilized […] vehicle for exploring and reconceptualizing classic psychological… issues” (Goodman & Freeman, 2015, p. 5). They (ibid, p. 4) critique modern psychology’s construction of “tools and techniques” that “serve… to objectify experience, contain it, render it more… measurable… But in this very objectification and containment, they also serve to take us away from what is truly Other.” In this critique, we can hear an echo of Freeman’s (2019) objections to scientific theorizing, which by its nature cannot tolerate the unmeasurable, the unknowable, and also considers these things suspicious by virtue of their “Romantic” or, indeed, subjective qualities. The application of the critical theories of otherness of the last half century seems to have affected psychology very unevenly.

Goodman and Freeman (2015, p. 2) define the other as everything that is not the self: “namely, the world itself.” Both the human subject and the subject of psychology, they say, lose the world when we contain the other. And we contain the other because, in its overwhelming otherness, it threatens the boundaries of the self. They characterize the self’s relation to the other as necessary: We need it and we reject it. They further suggest that this “perpetual dance” is “ubiquitous” and “universal.” “But what happens,” they (Goodman & Freeman, 2015, pp. 2–3) ask,

[W]hen these idol-making and experience-rending tendencies are paired with a social order, philosophical heritage, and economic system that reinforce the centripetal force of the ego?… In this context, the self… becomes an idol of its own… It may be that we have told a story of ourselves—as modern subjects—that… requires us to live in constricted life-spaces, unable to truly attend to the abundance of the world around us… This has left us… ethically depleted, deprived of those existential resources that serve to move us beyond the confines of the hungry ego.

I am uncertain about the assertion that a self/other binary is a universal structure for humanity, being leery of claiming the authority to make my culture’s experience true for all. But what is useful about Goodman and Freeman’s (2015) presentation of the work of the (Western, late capitalist, neoliberal) self’s relation to its other, is their location of the consequences of this relation in our very specific present.

If nineteenth century psychology assumed the Victorian, patriarchal and colonial right to make brutal use of its others (Perry, 2018; and see, e.g., the fate of Sarah Baartman, Crais & Scully, 2009; or the scientific racism espoused by pioneering psychologists, Richards, 2012; Teo, 2005), twentieth century psychology, with the help of feminism, queer theory and critical race studies, noticed this dynamic. For example, Jordan’s (2010) feminist approach helped develop the practice of relational-cultural therapy, which challenges the notion and the valorization of the bounded self (see Miller, 1986). James Baldwin wrote about how twentieth century heteronormative masculinity needed to construct the homosexual as other in order to shore up its own, artificially simple desire, a point Katz (2007) used to show how heterosexuality is a back-formation from its homosexual other. McRuer (2006), in turn, showed heterosexuality’s reliance on ablebodiedness, and therefore on the disabled as well as queer other.

McWilliams (2020) details psychoanalytic theory’s recognition of the centrality of the other to the modern self, and discusses the idea that we need others to hold the badness we cannot tolerate in ourselves. She identifies four main affects that feed the tendency toward destructive othering: fear, rage, envy and shame. Shame, she (McWilliams, 2020, p. 189) concludes, is above all “the common denominator of most toxic othering.” Because shame and the other difficult emotions she identifies are part of being human, she says we cannot prevent ourselves from othering, we can only be vigilant about taking responsibility for what is happening when we do. She (McWilliams, 2020, p. 190) calls this, “the project of owning our own darkness, tolerating the shame it causes, and trying not to project it.” This version of the self cannot escape a binary formation with its other, a point I will return to in Chap. 3.

What does a notion of the complicit subject bring to this standard version of the Western self? For one, the arguments made in this book about the relationship between the liberal individual self of current mainstream Anglo-American culture, the traditional project of psychotherapy, and current identitypolitics and the social injustices they seek to address, problematize the assumption that binary thinking is inevitable. To fully embrace the intergenerational, structurally saturated, rhizomatic, enfolded, complicitself is to reject the power dynamics our world currently depends upon and reproduces. These power dynamics have been presented to us in various ways as inevitable: by Freud’s notion of the destructive drives underpinning “the” human psyche, by the “scientific” uses of biology to create gender and racial differences, by capitalism, by colonialism, by neoliberalism, by the assertion that we cannot help but hate and/or fear difference if we are to be human. If we challenge the structuring idea of the binary not as an underlying inevitability of what it means to be human, but as a technology of subjectification for the modern human, we open up different ways of being human. These ways have always existed. And they have been explored in much academic theorizing of the past 50 years or so, if not in mainstream academic (i.e., “scientific”) and popular psychology.

Central to my thinking on this, and to the thinking of many others across disciplines, is the work of Judith Butler. For my purposes here, most directly relevant is The Psychic Life of Power (Butler, 1997), which explores how to become a subject is to become a self within processes of subjection and subordination:

[T]o persist in one’s being means to be given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one’s own. The desire to persist in one’s own being requires submitting to a world of others… Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s “own” being. (1997, p. 28)

Additionally, Butler’s work points out the destructive power of socially inscribed norms to police access to the category of recognizable humanity (see Livingston, 2020). Othered groups are rendered socially unintelligible, their lives unlivable, their suffering ungrievable (Butler, 2003; Butler, 2016). Who gets to define the terms of the system and its performances of proper humanity becomes an important question. As she explores this question, Butler’s work offers a detailed exposition of the fact of human complicity, the interdependence of self and other that systems of inequality violently deny (Butler, 2020).

Butler is most well known for her critiques of gender norms and how their reiterations are forged through repetition into apparent truths, endorsed at the expense of those who cannot or do not offer the correct performances (Butler, 1999). But her work also allows us to be suspicious of thenorms of healthy psychological subjectivity that have been circulated and enacted by the psy disciplines, and the other discourses of modernity that have emerged together with, and complicit in, psychology. What constitutes the performance of a psychologically good enough subject? Who says?

The Subject of Psychology

Theories of the human in psychologyare inevitably metapsychological; they make universal claims about human nature. Atwood and Stolorow (1993, p. 3) were arguing in 1979 that modern psychology had fragmented into different approaches to the question of subjectivity, each approach presenting itself as “the foundation for a science of man.” But, as Atwood and Stolorow (1993, p. 4) point out, the different approaches are embedded in their originators’ “ideological and conceptual orientations to the problem of what it means to be human,” as focalized through their own experiences. The assumptions about and theories of human subjectivity offered by the different psychological schools of thought tell us more about the lives and subjectivities of their proponents than they do about universal humanity, and complicate psychology’s claim to objective scientific status. Indeed, preempting many of the more recent arguments in favor of a psychological humanities, Atwood and Stolorow (1993) assert that the problem of metapsychology arises from psychology’s attempts to be scientific. They (1993, p. 177), in turn, offer “a theory of subjectivity itself… a depth psychology of human experience, purified of the mechanistic reifications of classical metapsychology.” Their solution to the problem of subjectivity in trying to understand subjectivity was, of course, intersubjectivity:

[A] field theory or systems theory… that… seeks to comprehend psychological phenomena not as products of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms, but as forming at the interface of reciprocally interacting subjectivities… From this perspective, the very concept of an individual mind or psyche is itself a psychological product crystallizing from within a nexus of intersubjective relatedness. (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993, p. 178)

Intersubjectivity speaks to one element of the complicities of human being. It is a useful way to help theorize complicity in the therapeutic relationship. Intersubjectivity has a philosophical as well as a psychological tradition (Coelho & Claudio, 2003; Glaveanu, 2019). These tend to be divorced from the scientific branch of psychology, and the idea of intersubjectivity has been most extensively developed in the psy fields by psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic intersubjective field is defined by the notion of the third, although this third space has been variously characterized as clinicians have sought to name the consequences of cultural and psychic complicities. As I will illustrate in Chap. 6, there are a number of therapeutic modalities that offer ways to apply these ideas in practice.

The notion of the intersubjective third seeks to name what is psychically created between therapist and client when two subjectivities successfully see each other’s personhood. The idea of the intersubjective third aims to theorize what is created between the therapist and each client in a way that acknowledges the unique quality of the relationship. The third is excessive to the people involved, because it literally exceeds them. It can be thought of as an unconscious creation between them (Gerson, 2004). Jessica Benjamin (2004, p. 7) has defined the intersubjective third, most broadly, as “anything one holds in mind that creates another point of reference outside the dyad.” The third is necessary for each member to get outside of herself, to enable what Benjamin calls mutual recognition between two subjects to happen. Benjamin (2004) describes the third as a fundamental relational principle, which, if surrendered to by the therapist, will enable both therapist and client to move “beyond doer and done to,” into a place of reciprocity which undoes the oppressive subject/object dynamic of traditional psychoanalysis, and of a Western world built on binary thinking.

The third, as an external point of reference outside of the dyad, can encompass a range of forces or ideas, such as the cultural third (Gerson, 2004). Alternatively, the idea of the social third names the imbrications of interpsychic and intrapsychic and cultural forces (Benjamin, 2011; Sehrbrock, 2020), what Sehrbrock (2020, p. 291) calls the presence of “ghosts of collective and systemic agents” in the therapeutic encounter:

[S]ocial thirdness presents a lens that illuminates the socio-political strata of experiences. It crystallizes social meaning that preserves distinctness without collapsing into polarities, extremes, binaries, concretizations of complexity, control, omnipotence, “us versus them,” power struggles, splitting, and the phobic hatreds like transphobia, cisgenderism, and lookism, for example. In the context of a therapeutic encounter, social thirdness is both a lens through which clinicians view and understand the therapeutic process and a position from which clinicians engage with their patients. Social thirdness goes beyond the bounds of dyadic intersubjectivity, focusing on the felt experience of the moment in relation to society and the social unconscious… [T]he social third is like the epigenetic influence of the environment’s insignia on the expression of the gene. (Sehrbrock, 2020, pp. 291–292)

The field of intersubjectivity recognizes that the self needs its other in relations of intimacy, not domination (Benjamin, 1988; Glaveanu, 2019).

Benjamin’s (2004) notion of recognition articulates the necessity of having a space beyond the binary. In her formulation, it is the collapse into complementarity (that binary energy) that causes dependency to become coercive: When two subjects, relating in a binary way, lose sight of the independent subjectivity of the other, and someone is reduced to a relational object. The binary relation is a relation of power, based on a lack of recognition which causes objectification and contempt (McWilliams, 2020).

In addition to an intersubjective approach, other branches of psychology have also been critical of the mainstream model of human subjectivity as properly independent, intrapsychically constituted, teleologically directed and self-controlled. In the twentieth century, the field paid ever more attention to social context, and to the imbrication of context with the individual (Gough, 2017; Laubscher, 2015; Teo, 2005). Since the second half of the twentieth century, some academic psychologists and psychotherapists have been concerned with hermeneutics, with the ideas of linguistic and social construction, and with the centrality of relationality to human being and to therapy. This is sometimes called the postmodern turn (Anderson, 1997; Anderson, 2007; Teo, 2005). Critical psychology has long been engaged with debates about the nature of selfhood, and aware of the embodied and material constitutive practices in which the psy disciplines have been implicated (Hook, 2007; Papadopoulos, 2008; Rose, 1998).

Here are a few more examples that are by no means exhaustive of the work done in this area: From a hermeneutic perspective, Cushman (2019, p. 9), citing himself from 1990, argues for the historically specific, culturally influenced and political content of any model of the self, in opposition to mainstream psychology’s ahistorical individualistic self: “there is no universal, transhistorical self, only local selves; no universal theory about the self, only local theories.” Cushman (2019) insists that psychology is a cultural artifact, its version of the self contingent on its own history and place. Furthermore, he argues that the modern self is empty, a result of the policies and politics of the twentieth century, and, crucially, of the liberal individualism that has shaped them. The twenty-first century self, he goes on to suggest, is neoliberally fractured and performative. These ideas are taken up in Chaps. 2 and 5.

Brooke (2015, p. 23), from a human science approach, advocates for a vision of the psychological subject as social: “a human science psychology cannot begin with a notion of the self that is taken for granted and self-originating.” Instead, he offers a model of the human subject as embedded in and formed from language, community, history and an embodied identity.

Slaney (2019) suggests theoretical psychology borrows the idea of intersectionality from critical race and feminist theories in order to articulate its plurality. She wants a framework that emphasizes critical inquiry and critical praxis, that is aware of power relations, privilege and oppression, and the imperatives for social justice. Such a discipline would by definition be pluralistic, collaborative and interdisciplinary. McCormick-Huhn et al. (2019) provide an example of what a feminist, intersectional, mainstream psychological practice might look like.

In its turn, cultural psychology has been defined as “an interdisciplinary human science” which recognizes the co-constituted relationship between people and between people and their contexts (Shweder, 1990). However, cultural psychology, like certain branches of feminist psychology, and like multicultural or cross-cultural psychologies, has been criticized for not challenging the Western methodological, empiricist foundations of psychology, which do not acknowledge the material relations of power out of which they emerge and which they perpetuate (Richards, 2012; Teo, 2005). Both transnational and postcolonial and now decolonial psychologies are aware of psychology’s responsibility in perpetuating raced relations of power that are also geographical and economic (Boonzaier & van Niekerk, 2019; Collins et al., 2019; Duran & Duran, 1995; Held, 2020; Melluish, 2014; Miller & Miller, 2020; Richards, 2012; Teo, 2005).

Narrative Therapy and other postmodern modalities (Anderson, 1997; Freedman & Combs, 1996; Papadopoulos, 2008; Teo, 2005) have taught psychotherapists to think about the meanings made of and by clients, and have enabled us to learn about the harm done by oppressive systems and the discourses they perpetuate. But almost by definition, we still work with the ideas about the client-as-subject which Rose (1998) points out the psy disciplines have helped create: that they are in search of more authentic personhood, more accurate meanings, greater authenticity. And that they are free to do so, indeed, compelled to do so: it is a sign of their healthy leanings, their personal responsibility and their move toward being better.

So while a critical eye on psychology’s meanings and practices has been a part of the discipline, this has not tended to substantially impact the common-sense authority of the psychologized subject, the modern liberal subject of the therapy room and of popular discourses of choice. Fine’s (2014) critique of social psychology’s engagement with genderdifference, including how these often problematic experiments are disseminated in the popular press, gives one example of this. As psychology became disciplinized in the nineteenth century, it participated in alliances with other scientific regimes to establish ways of measuring, knowing, validating, testing and normalizing. What emerges from Rose’s (1998, p. 60, 62–65) account of this process is just how woven into modern everyday thought, common sense reality, the subject of psychology is, as a result of this historical process:

To educate a child, to reform a delinquent, to cure a hysteric, to raise a baby, to administer an army, to run a factory—it is not so much that these activities entail the utilization of psychological theories and techniques than that there is a constitutive relation between the character of what will count as an adequate psychological theory or argument and the processes by which a kind of psychological visibility may be accorded to these domains…. [R]eality becomes ordered according to a psychological taxonomy…

Rose (1998) denotes this a “techne” that uses a way of thinking about political power, the creation of authority and authorities, and an ethical requirement to self-knowledge and self-improvement that shapes who we think we are and what we think we should be doing with our lives.

And in 2020, Severson and Goodman were still asserting that Western psychology is failing to locate the human being in context, because of a philosophical focus on the individual and an attempt to mimic the natural sciences (as though these disciplines were not, themselves, saturated with human culture, see Rippon, 2019; Schiebinger, 2004). Severson & Goodman (2020, p. 2) decry the “catastrophic failure to think about human beings as fundamentally social, relational, ethical, historical creatures.” They critique the development of a scientific rationalism, a belief in the constructs of objective truth, rationality, individualism, as wholly inadequate to account for the intergenerational transmission of trauma, suffering and injustice. They insist, “to be human is first to be embedded in society, to exist in porous and complex social and ethical relationships” (ibid). What is remarkable about this statement is not its refusal of traditional psychology’s “scientific” stance, and its concomitant focus on the individual, the histories of which we have been exploring at length. What is remarkable is that it is asserted in 2020 as a revolutionary statement, as part of a project of leveraging psychology for social justice. Despite decades of theory, in other words, the liberal subject of objective experience and scientific inquiry is still very much the center of psychological meaning.

Thus psychology can be said to be a technique of subjectification still. It is a way of thinking about what it means to be human that creates systems of power, through defining normalcy and deviance (Hook, 2007; Rose, 1998; Sugarman, 2019). It has helped to create an idea of human subjectivity that is self-enclosed and individualized, with the freedom of choice to decide who to be and how to be better. This subject is by definition liberal, and a democratic citizen of the West. The implications of these positionalities will be explored in more detail in Chap. 2, and linked to processes of racialization and gendering in Chaps. 3 and 4, respectively. The latest iteration, post-internet, is the topic of Chap. 5.

Psychology has enormous constitutive power to underwrite a version of reality that entrenches binary thinking, a subject who is based on its other in a culture where institutions shape access to both resources and meanings, and to who can be considered a viable subject or correctly human. What is at stake when we ask psychology to change, to put into practice—in the psychotherapy room, in the pages of newspapers and magazines, as well as in the classroom and academy—the insights that critical psychology has taken from the humanities, is the enablement of new ways of understanding how we might be subjects in relation to each other. In such a world, there is no need to account for a gay gene or the etiology of transness in in-utero hormone exposure. There is no need to invest in the artificial construction of different human races. The logic that underpins structural inequality is revealed as a regime of truth, a construct to enable material gain for the “normal” or normative. And, equally important to my argument, it also means that those who have been constructed as the constitutive other, those whose lives and psyches have been used to enable dominant alliances of the norm, are also obliged to find additional forms of activism. It is not enough to demand or even achieve access to the master’s tools. And advocating for revolution, for a complete change, a wi** clean of the slate, is impossible, as the idea of the complicit subject suggests—we are never free to escape where we came from, the terms of how we were made. Social justice change has to be able to hold the complexity of the human, which is not and has never been, binary.

Conclusion

Over two decades ago, as we have seen, Rose (1998) argued that the concept and the ethics of the idea of the modern individual, free to choose his fate, was a discursive construction linked both to the emergence of liberal democracies and to the psy disciplines. He traced the genealogy of this regime of the self, using, as this language suggests, Foucaultian ideas and other theories concerned with deconstruction, discourse and destabilization of the apparently natural and common-sensical. His project was taken up by Hook (2007, p. 8), who also uses Foucault’s (1977) idea of disciplinarity to argue that what he calls “a psychological individuality” is central to the emergence of modern ideas, including political systems. This work emerged from the feminist-informed, queering turn in the humanities of the 1980s and 1990s, as is evident in Rose’s (1998, pp. 3–10) account of the academic trajectory underpinning his essays. Despite the intervening decades, psychotherapeutic practice (and many of the institutions that teach and accredit it) has not significantly metabolized the interdisciplinary ideas articulated in 1998 for the discipline of psychology by Rose. Indeed, in 2017, Teo was arguing for the need to include the thinking developed in humanities-based subjects into psychology, and again, in 2019. If Rose’s (1998, pp. 1–2) objective was to “question some of our contemporary certainties about the kinds of people we take ourselves to be, to help develop ways in which we might begin to think ourselves otherwise,” then my purpose in this book is to argue that this work, so old school by now in the humanities, still needs to be applied to psychotherapeutic practice.

The modern version of the self has been invented through a historical process. It is a macrostructural process, not an individual one. This historical process has everything to do with systems of power and exploitation. These include the economic changes of the industrial revolution and the neoliberal structures that have emerged from the globalization enabled by colonialism, to access to political power and the institutions that enable this access. The map** of this process is the topic of Chap. 2. And at the same time, all this actual work in the world would not be possible without symbolic structures, without language and the stories it tells us about who is human, who is deserving, who is deviant and so on.

Being human means being complicit. In the systems that shape us all, and that privilege some of us over others. In the language that speaks us into being, the ways we learn to say “I” and “you” and “us” and “them.” In the histories that predate us and that set the terms for the world we inherit. In the culture that tells us who we each should be according to the bodies we each have, how we should behave, what we should value and how we should express those values, that behavior, our selves. In the families into which we are born, which hone and focalize the systems, the language, the history and the culture that authorize and shape what it means to be a family, and how a family should function. To be human is to be both-and, not either/or. We can never escape the specifics between us, or the impact of embodiment, and the only way we can be better is to nevertheless allow for a disembodied shared humanness that makes us all possible, and that makes us all responsible for each other. Whether we like it or not.