Well-Intentioned White People and Other Problems with Liberalism

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter focuses on liberalism and neoliberalism as both constituents and consequences of the emergence of the psy disciplines through specific processes of modernity in the West. It explores the unified Cartesian subject on which psychology initially depended. It addresses American and South African versions of liberalism and their relationship to race. It also addresses the notion of universal humanity and its relation to the idea of complicity, and begins to apply the idea to intersubjective psychology. The chapter also summarizes the place of Freud’s Oedipus complex in this matrix of ideas and history, and the idea of the Western subject that has emerged accordingly, through and for psychology.